study task 3 - reading and understanding a text - 20/10/15

Consumerism as a way of life - Miles. S (1998)

Tone-of-voice - 

Miles has a very questionable tone of voice about the topics he picks up on within this piece of text, he at points sounds cynical when he writes 'Compulsory Obsolescence is the foundation stone of the modern design industry and involves the intentional design of products for short term use. In other words designs ensure a constant demand for new products by intentionally designing products with limited life san' Miles suggests that design now a days is mainly done for profit and that designers are taking advantage of the consumer lifestyle and controlling it in a way with the way they dictate the product design so that there will always be a need for such products. 

5 Key points the text makes - 

• Miles writes that the second half of the 19th century was a boom period in the history of consumption and design became a legitimate means of sustaining markets. 
• The 1920's, most notably in the USA, represented a turning point in the emergence of design. It was at this point which the industrial stratergy of aiming for gradual and constant improvement towards technical perfection gave way to a more thorough going and arguably cynical policy aimed at continuos stylistic change in order to stimulate sales and profits.
• While early developments in industrial production were more concerned with utility than design, during the 20th century design gradually came to play a more fundamental role in the desirability and saleability of a product.
• Miles believes that the success of Design is fundamental to the success of the product, which is crucial to the reproduction of consumerism as a way of life. 
• Miles believes that the values in well designed goods and products can be socially divisive, and that design its self is symbolic of the socially divisive nature of consumption. The promotion of the consumerism and desire divides the society through the 'haves' and 'have-nots'. Consumerism creates desires that individuals cannot without finding themselves in some dire economic circumstance.

5 Key Quotes Within the text - 

• 'Jeans are no longer, if they ever were, a generic denim garment. Like all commodities, they are given brand names that compete among each other for specific segments of the market. Manufactures try to identify social differences and then try to construct equivalent differences in the product so that social differentiation and product differentiation become mapped onto each other' (Fiske 1989: 6)
• 'Design can offer something beyond the chink of coins in the till or the rising curve of a sales graph. As well as promoting turn over, good design can be a progressive force, creating a momentum of confidence and a 'feel good' factor, which bolsters a societies, or companies, image of itself.' (Conran - 1996: 21)
• 'Every product, to be successful, must incorporate the ideas that make it marketable, and the particular task of design is to bring about the conjunction between such ideas and the available means of production. The result of this process is that manufactured goods embody innumerable myths about the world, myths which in time come to seem as real as the products in which they are embedded.' (Forty 1986: 9)
• 'In modern societies cultural domination has been affected through the already emptied out abstract ideologies of liberalism, equality, progress, science and so on. Domination in post-modern capitalism is effected through a symbolic violence that has been even further emptied out, even further Deterritorialization, whose minimal foundations have been swept aside.' (Lash and Urry 1994: 15-16)
• 'Just as uncontrolled economic expansion can lead to a loss of equilibrium, in our ecological system, so an incessant supply of graphics, cinematic, televisual and musical images, unanswered by an equivalent response on the part of the consumer, may lead to sterilisation of the imaginative quality of the individual ... Even the most prestigious object of 'good design' may become unsatisfactory if it does not permit the user to develop his own imagination.' (Dorfles 1979: 12)