Designing Meaningful & Lasting User Experiences

If you were to mine a landfill site, you would see thick, choked geological strata of style descend before you, punctuated by zeitgeist objects whose archaeological discovery would serve to punctuate a design era more poignantly than any carbon-dating methodology ever could. As the biosphere chokes, why do we snigger at the fake 1970s walnut veneered TV-set lying face down in a ditch, or the recently ejected avocado bathroom suite from the 1980s, still standing earnestly to attention? Is it triumph perhaps? Affirmation of our transcendence beyond those aesthetic faux pas that we as consumers, sitting frigidly poised on the style-islands, have fought so hard to assemble, but which now sink beneath the smoggy swath of ecological decay we brewed in the making? This chapter exposes alternative understandings of the immaterial culture underpinning our stuff, and the manifold dialogues we are continually engaged in with the plethora of designed objects that touch our lives; arguing for an emotionally durable design approach that reduces the consumption and waste of natural resourcesby increasing the resilience of relationships established between people, and things.