The third way of consumption

Case 1

Shopping: Lifestyle library

Storm in Copenhagen is one of the leading Danish clothing stores. But it is not just clothes that are for sale, but whole lifestyle clothes matched by art, literature, music, the right aesthetic signals and the perfect codes. Storm is, in fact, a life-style business. Owner Rasmus Storm says “Whereas before it was about presenting new designers, now we are very conscious to set fashion in relation to culture. We do that, among other ways, by displaying art, and selling books, music, and interior design together with the clothes. One can say we present a ‘mood board' of the times, and in that way we explain the trends.”

Storm is, in other words, not just a place where you buy props for the stage-managing of your self. It is also a place where you, through fashion, are introduced to new currents in the urban environment. According to Rasmus Storm, this can help break down social boundaries and thereby affect the consumer's own life. He uses fashion shows as an example: “When you are at a fashion show, you rapidly decode the codes with which others have wrapped themselves. In that way, you find out who you want to meet. The clothes are in that way your calling card, and they allow situations where you can meet new people and get new ideas.”

Rasmus Storm believes we have only seen the tip of the iceberg in connection with the spread of lifestyle stores. Prominent stores, such as Corso Como in Milan, and Colette in Paris, have existed for many years, but everything points to the trend continuing. That is because a visit to a lifestyle shop can be just as challenging and entertaining as a visit to a museum or seeing a film. In lifestyle shops, shopping becomes more than just buying. You visit what is almost a lifestyle library that can push you and your life in unexpected directions. The products cannot be borrowed, of course. You still have to buy them.

• Visit Storm at Store Regnegade 1, central Copenhagen, and shop more at www.colette.fr and www.10corsocomo.com.

Case 2

Product development: responsible design

Consumption is more than just a way to realize ones “self,” believes Mads Hagstrøm. He leads the FLOWinstitute, a consulting firm that shares space with the Danish Design Center in Copenhagen. Like anthropologist Daniel Miller, Hagstrøm sees the products as a by-product of the reality we experience and live in. He believes designers product developers and companies therefore have a responsibility to think through the consequences of a product's actual use.

Hagstrøm offers an example:
“In 2002, the American breakfast foods company, General Mills, carried out a survey in which they, together with social scientists, tried to uncover the needs of an American family in the morning. As one could expect, they found out that time was a scarcity. So they developed the product GoGurt: yogurt in a tube, that be can eaten on the go, thus reducing the time one used on breakfast.”

In just a year, GoGurt captured 7% of the more than $300 million American yogurt market. GoGurt was, therefore, a stellar financial success, but Hagstrøm does not think GoGurt should set the fashion, quite the opposite:

“If you look at the use of GoGurt, such a product normalizes the stress level in society. If you can eat breakfast in the car, you don't need to spend time with your family. Several studies show, moreover, that it is important for people's well being to have adequate time in the morning, including time to eat a decent breakfast.”

In its race for financial success, General Mills forgot to orient itself to the users well being in society. FLOWInstitute believes that the users well being should have a central place in corporate product development. Stress, along with pollution and depression, is one of the most prominent negative consequences of our current production and consumption patters. Hagstrøm's goal is that Denmark begins to take these negative consequences seriously and over time mark itself as a design-nation that takes responsibility for people and environment. With three “FLOWparameters,” which Danish companies can use in their product development, the FLOWinstitute gives its view on how this can happen:

The three FLOWparameters:

Individual Flow:

Physical, mental, and spiritual growth

Collective Flow:

Cultural, social, economic, and technological growth

Environmental Flow:

Environmental Growth

• Read more about the FLOWinstitute at www.theflowinstitute.com.

Case 3

Architecture: Communicate with users

Within architecture, it is increasingly part of the architect's job to draw on knowledge of the concrete consumer practices the architectural work will be a part of.

Rikke Kirstine Larsen, architect and MAA, and member of the creative collective Femmes Regionales, says,

“You can roughly say that there are two directions within architecture. One where architecture is understood as an artistic work the user must adjust to. That direction has dominated the modern period. But, today we are shifting to the other direction, which one can call sociological architecture. The interplay between the architecture, user and society comes into focus. We see this as user-involvement becomes something more and more architects use”

She cites “Havnen på spil,” a project to revitalize Aarhus harbor, as an example. Here a project group, which included architects among others, worked to develop ways in which the needs, wishes, and dreams of users, decision-makers and the average citizen can all come into play in the development of the harbor's architectural future.

Larsen notes that user-involvement can result in fruitless discussions about a building's color or the placement of some trees when the conditions for communication between the architect and user are poor. If user-involvement is to benefit both the architect's creativity and the user's welfare, it demands that architects and users find new ways to communicatie, she believes.

“It can be hard for users to understand architects' vocabulary and drawings. If user-involvement is to work, architects must find new ways to communicate with users. That could be, for example, through film, which I work with myself. My films are an attempt to communicate architecture in a way users can understand and relate to. At the same time, when I make the films, I gain a better understanding of the users and their actual use of the architecture.”

Here, Larsen echoes one of Daniel Miller's key points: if you would understand the consumption of today, you must take time to follow and describe the often surprising practices in which consumption happens.

• More about Rikke Kirstine Larsen, her work, and Femmes Regionales: www.femmesregionales.com. More about Havnen på Spil: www.havnespil.dk. More about user-involvement: one of the architecture firm's that has made active user-involvement one of its trademarks is the London firm muf. See www.muf.co.uk/index.htm.

Case 4

Things: meaningful and effective

The cell phone is always within reach, clothes are hard to do without, and the most of us live in a home filled to bursting with the consumer goods we use every day. People consume and surround themselves with things - and yet, for years, the social sciences have been far more interested in social relations. That is about to change. Marie Riegels Melchior (M.A., European Ethnology, Ph.D, student at the Danish Design Center and the Danish Museum of Art and Design) is one of the Danish researchers who, inspired by Daniel Miller, among others, works with relations between things and people.

“We cannot separate people and things and say ‘The things are irrelevant, they mean nothing in our everyday' because we can see that they do. It is in our being around things that we constitute ourselves as people,” says Melchior. In other words, material objects are not only things we give significance to, independent of the objects. The material things also have an effect on us.

Melchior's Ph.D project is about the Danish fashion phenomenon. In recent years, media has paid Danish fashion a great deal of attention, and Danish commercial policy makers have pointed to fashion as a potential goldmine.

“But what on earth is Danish fashion?” asks Melchior. Based on that question, she researches the history of Danish fashion, how fashion in actual practice comes to be. She has, for example, followed a collection's birth from start to finish, and the material is here involved in the form of earlier collections, color cards, fabric samples, and design magazines.

“It is about being aware of the material. If you are, then it's clear fashion is not something some designer or another sits and creates, and everyone then lines up to wear. Fashion is created through an interplay of relationships between practices within fashion's production, distribution, and consumption, and these practices involve both things and people,” says Melchior.

If Danish fashion is to be a goldmine for Denmark, a step forward might be, as Melchior's research indicates, to understand Danish fashion as a phenomenon that is anchored in a special tradition, and created in a heterogeneous relationship between things and people.

• More about Marie Rigels Melchior and her Ph.D project: www.dkds.dk. More about research about the relationship between the material and the social is found at www.dpu.dk/site.asp?p=7199 and in Kragelund & Otto (eds.) 2006: Materialitet og Dannelse: En studiebog, Danmarks Pædagogiske Universitets Forlag, Copenhagen. More on research in design can be found at the Center for Designforsknings website: www.designforskning.dk.