About high-end eco-products — sometimes in this economy an improvement starts at the high end, and gradually works its way down, by a combination of factors, including providers having saturated the early-adopter market. But as the Desmond article you so usefully refer us to says, providers of basic services to poor people, services like housing or banking, may be doing fine with their exploitative mode, and may have no desire at all to broaden or revise what they offer. And their poor customers having nothing left over for changing their consumption patterns, so the downward spread of the originally high end stuff won’t feel any call. Desmond is devastating on this point.
Interesting points here, particularly drawn to this comment on cheap goods perpetuating poverty.
"While it may seem as though these cheap goods are helping those in lesser income brackets, the continual production and consumption of cheap goods just perpetuate the problem. The recent feature in the New York Times by Matthew Desmond, Why poverty persists in America, outlines the role of cheap goods as part of the larger systemic issues keeping the poor, poor."
About high-end eco-products — sometimes in this economy an improvement starts at the high end, and gradually works its way down, by a combination of factors, including providers having saturated the early-adopter market. But as the Desmond article you so usefully refer us to says, providers of basic services to poor people, services like housing or banking, may be doing fine with their exploitative mode, and may have no desire at all to broaden or revise what they offer. And their poor customers having nothing left over for changing their consumption patterns, so the downward spread of the originally high end stuff won’t feel any call. Desmond is devastating on this point.
Interesting points here, particularly drawn to this comment on cheap goods perpetuating poverty.
"While it may seem as though these cheap goods are helping those in lesser income brackets, the continual production and consumption of cheap goods just perpetuate the problem. The recent feature in the New York Times by Matthew Desmond, Why poverty persists in America, outlines the role of cheap goods as part of the larger systemic issues keeping the poor, poor."
Design schools need to equip future designers to ask them address those systemic questions