Morning. We’re on to go see 100% Design today, but first a thought post.
We were recently in San Francisco and it was certainly something to see the innovative moments on many a corner, a Zipcar station in most districts on our walking days, an immense co-op The Rainbow Co-op in that last minute rush to locate Dr Bronners on the last day, absolutely everything Google Mapped.
And today our Facebook page tells us to ‘Like‘ the Collaborative Consumption page – and so I seem to. Following the links lead us to a home on the internet championing simply ‘what’s mine is yours’. There’s a collection of companies like Zipcar there showing a perhaps better way of consumption – “traditional sharing, bartering, lending, trading, renting, gifting, and swapping reinvented through network technologies on a scale and in ways never possible before.”
Was reminded of yet another wondrous infographic from GOOD illustrating the trends of collaborative consumption – ‘Sharing is Contagious‘. Enlightening and interesting to see the things that are in effect and on the rise in terms of this sharing economy. Household products already greatly of shared usage, personal services on the steady rise.
Often, coming across so many of these innovative thoughts and actions that exist on a successful commercial scale all the way across oceans from China leaves me a feeling a little desirous. But it’s always interesting to note for me on how these general ideas exist here on quieter scales, and often not out of conscious thought on creating a better life but out of need and survival.
The daily multi-tiered use of objects (i.e. when discarded anything sits on the side of the road it rarely lasts more than a minute with many happy to assess it’s value of reuse/resell) is a strong reminder of the ‘collaborative consumption’ at work on these levels of survival. But then you’ve got the rapidly rising class of money experiencing the taste of excess and often exploiting it – as the story seems to go.
It’ll be an interesting and wasteful process to see if and how this economy in these parts decides to partake in conscious ‘collaborative consumption’ on greater levels, and if and whether it will ever be more about bettering the state of the global standard of society and less about bettering/ensuring the state of the individual or national identity.
But for now I shall continue on the reading journey of the GOOD‘s and Fast Company‘s and see where it takes us in pockets of realization and understanding. And visit the Eco Design Fair Shanghai that at this point mostly expats seem to take to. And have more thoughts to come!
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Just ran through the Reader and found these guys, since we’re on the sharing topic I’m going to tack guys on. About creating a new social based currency Flattr and GiftFlow – more on them in a bit.
Now, off to that 100%.
