Design for Collaborative Minds: A Visual Designers Contribution to the Collaborative Consumption Model

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Volume Title
School of Arts, Design and Architecture | Master's thesis
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Date
2013
Major/Subject
Mcode
Degree programme
Degree Programme in Graphic Design
Graafisen suunnittelun koulutusohjelma
Language
en
Pages
295
Series
Abstract
Environmental, consumption, and capital economic crises. These calamities have been circulating in my mind since my BA Final project on climate change in 2007. The more I learn the more I realize that we designers, con-sciously or not, actually play a pivotally responsible role in them. Many of the design school models today are for the most part still based on the Ulm School of Design. Ulm approached design with questions of usability, identity and marketing, putting every design decision to test against measurable, objective criteria. Design has to work. But for whom? For the client, for the industry, we were taught. This made perfect sense in the mid 50’s when there were real problems, real needs to produce commodities and to boost economies after World War II. Designers were trained to be loyal servants to industry, and industry to society, and this has re-mained true since. But things gradually changed. Gone is the age of society-serving industry; emerged is the marketing-led industry of endless capitalist cravings to generate indefinite, unsustainable economic growth in a hyper-consumption so-ciety, while making people miserable and killing the planet along the way. And we designers were serving this system, believing we were still ‘helping’ the industry and the society. Taking this as my starting point, I questioned that if designers could play a part in driving this unsustainable system, would it not be possible that we can also contribute to a reverse? What if we desert this old system and help steer a newer, better, more sustainable system? I came across the term collaborative consumption from a remarkable book. ‘What’s Mine is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption’ by Rachel Botsman and Roo Rogers. Collaborative consumption is a healthier con-sumption model for nature, humans and economics. In their words, it “describes the rapid explosion in tradition-al sharing, bartering, lending, trading, renting, gifting, and swapping reinvented through network technologies on a scale and in ways never possible before.” After reading the book, I became confident this is the new system I had been searching for. As collaborative consumption is something rather new I found that there has not yet been much writing or research on it, especially from a designers’ perspective. I saw this as an opportunity to contribute my time and energy to study this new system through my own MA Graphic Design thesis. The research question sprang from my interst to explore: ‘How can visual designers contribute to collaborative consumption services?’ In order to find answers to the research question, I formulated a methodology. First, I analyzed existing successful collaborative consumption case studies to identify how they visually communicate and operate. The framework used was ‘6-point analysis’, based on Kevin Keller’s ‘essential brand building blocks.’ Secondly, I exhibited the experience and process from two commissioned collaborative consumption projects I had been involved with as a visual designer. Finally, the findings from these two methods formulated an outcome which answered the research question. The outcome takes the form of a guideline booklet entitled, ‘A Visual Designer’s Guideline to Collabora-tive Consumption Services.’
Description
Supervisor
Seliger, Marja
Thesis advisor
Carlese, Jeroen
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Keywords
collaborative, collaboration, consumption, visual, graphic, design, service, model
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