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This year Unit 18 will explore the future of consumerism and its\u2019 impact on the built environment. As consumers we are becoming ever more reliant on unreliable products, and dependant on superfluous gadgets with an ever decreasing shelf-life. Buying the latest smartphone is the elixir of our 21st century virtual selves. As Gertrude Stein put it almost a century ago:\u00a0\u2018Whoever said money can’t buy happiness simply didn’t know where to go shopping.\u2019\u00a0But it doesn\u2019t always come easy\u2026<\/p>\n
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Whilst most of us no longer need to go to the trenches, we now have Black Fridays where we must don our uniforms, trample on people and punch aimlessly at the person in front of the queue in order to come home with the latest 55\u201d television set.\u00a0Last year on the 24th of November, the infamous Black Friday, customers spent over \u00a35 billion on online shopping. No wonder, according to research, over 12% of Black Friday shoppers are supposedly under the influence.\u00a0This is the age of extreme consumerism, where Americans have\u00a0over 300,000 items in the average home. An average child will accumulate 238 toys by the time they are 10 years old but they will only play with about 12 of them.<\/p>\n
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To feed our insatiable appetite for shrink-wrapped burgers and fizzy drinks we produce about\u00a0300 million tons of plastic each year with a mere 10% of that being recycled. 7 million tonnes of this ends up in the sea,\u00a0killing a million seabirds every year.\u00a0Whilst consumer society has been stunningly effective in harming the environment,\u00a0has it failed to provide us with a sense of fulfilment? Are we being hoodwinked into gorging on material things because we suffer from social, psychological, and spiritual hungers?\u00a0We are targeted by 2000 commercial messages every day to ensure we\u00a0spend more than eight years of our lives shopping, alongside spending, on average, about 8 years watching TV. Combined that makes up a quarter of our waking lives, unless we succumbed to all those tobacco adverts, in which in case it\u2019s probably half. The question is, is it worth it?<\/p>\n
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Architecture is no saint here either;\u00a0like casinos, shopping malls are intentionally designed to make people lose track of time, removing clocks and windows to prevent views to the outside world, genius, we are such advanced creatures!\u00a0Just obscure the windows and fill the shelves with utterly useless stuff, although, it\u2019s scientifically proven that we are more likely to buy a product from an emptier looking shelf.\u00a0This is known as \u2018social proofing\u2019, where we are reassured by the fact that others have bought into the offer before us, likewise, we are reluctant to purchase from an untouched display.\u00a0Shopping is in our DNA. The oldest customer service complaint was written on a clay cuneiform tablet in Mesopotamia 4000 years ago. A customer named Nanni complained that he was sold inferior copper ingots. We may no longer need those ingots but what would we do without those customer reviews, God forbid we bought the wrong hair dryer!<\/p>\n
Shopping is a skill that we learn. It is a cognitive process requiring us to acquire, interpret and act on information from the store environment. As with all learnt skills our ability to shop efficiently improves with practice.\u00a0\u00a0At Boston University, students can sign up for \u2018The Modern American Consumer\u2019, which is a course on the history of shopping. At the University of Greenwich, Students can sign up for \u2018Extreme Consumerism\u2019, which is a course on the future of shopping and its\u2019 impact on the built environment.<\/p>\n
Sign up now!<\/p>\n
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