The Design of Scarcity

We need to reject the idea that human desire is tied simply to unlimited needs, and instead use desire as an active force for change.

The creation of lack becomes an art of capitalist society, restricting access to commodities in order to create endless want. Desire is thus artificially manipulated by the market: it is reduced to the lack of commodity, extinguishing the multiple facets of what desire can mean to life

It is also a call to action that asks us to reconsider the relation of lack and desire.

is a call to action that asks us to reject the inevitability of scarcity, because accepting scarcity as a persistent natural law justifies inequity in advance.

Design in its original meaning of disegno relates to the idea of drawing forth.34 To design is to project into the future, to plan for future conditions. Design imagines future scenarios that differ from the present conditions, not unlike the most progressive aspects of the project of modernity.

ll these tactics – optimisation, restarting, adaptation and redistribution – deploy design intelligence in a manner that redefines the ends of design. Designers generally define themselves by exercising their creativity through creation – of freshness, of innovation as expressed through new objects. Optimising, restarting, adapting and redistributing do not produce these images of progress on which design has drawn on as default.

Scarcity is thus exaggerated. Design thus needs to adapt the existing, so one category becomes another, an office a house. A second approach is to design for future adaptation and against the single category, so the objects and spaces can assume multiple and hybrid uses, thereby avoiding future redundancy.

As we argued before, obsolescence is too often intentionally designed into systems in order to keep the market in a permanent state of demand.

The most poignant symbol of the linear model of production is obsolescence, in which design objects are deemed to have reached the end of their life.

They argue that ecological design is not about efficiency or reducing the use of resources but rather demands an expanded ecological conception of the entire life-cycle and metabolism of matter