Jon @ WoodMarvels.com

1. The virtue of voluntarily directing one’s buying power to companies or charities which practice one’s personal values. This reminds me of the interesting new organization called “Carrotmob” (http://carrotmob.org/)–a REVERSE boycott, where consumers organize and flood a store with their business, because the business is practicing what those consumers believe in.

2. The pleasure of really understanding the products you buy. To me, this recalls the topics which Matt Crawford discussed in his recently published paean to manual work, a book titled “Shop Class as Soulcraft.” It’s an excellent book, and I put a boat load of great quotes from it up on my website: http://justinketterer.com/2009/08/09/a-book-review/

However, I think the “division of labor” applies equally to knowledge, particularly with inordinately complex products (such as, say, a gas turbine providing the consumer with electricity, which a consumer never even sees, but still provides him with electricity). I think there will inevitably be some level of lack of knowledge about the “whole product,” due to the limits of our cognitive capacity, and especially–the limits of our interest. Specialization in profession is a powerfully productive thing with respect to enhancing human well-being, because it does fit right in with these two things: we can’t possibly know every detail about all human endeavors, nor would we want to. We would prefer to work in (and consume products) which increase our own well-being and which we find enjoyable.

It seems that design has slowly been incorporating the notion that it must serve the vaguely defined ethical duty to render every product purchase into a Social Crusade for Societal or Environmental Justice (as defined by the designer). I think this is getting off the track of what design is all about. It’s about increasing the well-being of the individual consumer, not pestering him of some sort of tithe which he owes to the reified concepts of “society” or “the environment.”