Searching for the futures of consumption

On the 6th of May, 2017, Lancaster University in the northwest of England, where I have been working as a lecturer in the Department of Marketing since September 2016, held a Community Day for the city of Lancaster community. The premise behind this event was to showcase to the public in an interactive way what the University is doing in research, teaching and community engagement. There were several dozen activities, such as making of custard rockets, 3D printing, theatre plays, and robo-car racing.

Some high chemistry during Lancaster Community Day (By Lancaster University)

I, Ronika Chakrabarti, Stefanos Mouzas, Anuja Pradhan, and Mohammed Chaded from the Department of Marketing designed and led our concept of Marketing Pavilion to showcase to the public what Marketing is and what the Department has been doing in research, teaching and public engagement. To be honest, this whole effort helped me understand Marketing better as an academic discipline and see Marketing's close connections with social science and human science disciplines such as Sociology and Psychology.

Marketing Pavilion Flyer (By Emre Tarim)

One of the activities at the Pavilion was what I called a "search" - namely, a group of people coming together in a total horizontal way (no hierarchies or status distinctions- e.g., researcher, student, member of public) and discussing a topic and searching its future with a view to taking action for that future.

I learned this method when I was working as a consultant at Arama Search Company, Istanbul, Turkey in 2012 and 2013. This company is founded by Oguz Baburoglu who is an internationally renowned action researcher. Having learned some aspects of the craft under Oguz's wings, I thought it would be interesting to apply this method during the Community Day.

At the end, we had an hour-long search for the futures of consumption, and we concluded with the necessity of universal design principles for best practices in production and consumption. Below is a step by step account of how we searched for the futures of consumption and came up with this conclusion.

Our search session aimed at exploring what we understand from consumption, and how we see its future and how we would like to see its futures. Our aim was therefore two-fold- namely, elaborating the consumption related trends that we see and experience, and articulating the futures of consumption that we as a community would like to see

Our search method consisted of simply asking questions and writing down answers on whiteboards and flip charts with a view to collectively identifying commonalities in our answers, and collectively moving on to the next question and theme on the basis of those commonalities.

Emre and Stefanos recording the ideas on whiteboards (by Anuja Pradhan)

We started with the question – What is consumption? This surely created a good number of answers in the form of key words that came to our minds. In the process, we also realized that we were dwelling more on the negative aspects of consumption, and some of us reminded the positives of consumption, such as the scientific advances, that made our lives safer, healthier and longer. As we were reaching saturation in our definitions - key words, we turned our attention to changing forms of ownership in consumption in digital age, and the often overlooked materiality of consumption (e.g., production, transport etc.), including the waste it generates

Discussing the definitions of consumption (by Anuja Pradhan) 

Consumption: Definitions – Key words 

Buying 

Need for something, satisfying needs
Convenience
Desire
Entertainment
Resources
Supply and demand
Fashion (in trends, modes of consumption)
Ethics
Advertising
Tiredness (caused by information/product overload, never ending “needs”)
Scientific advances and positive outcomes generated with consumption
Senses of consumption (simplicity vs sophistication)
Ownership (consumption access and sharing)
Addiction
Finite resources - End of consumption?
Materiality of consumption – Waste

Some of the definitions recorded on whiteboards and flipcharts (by Emre Tarim) 

Commonalities : Towards Themes

Themes emerging (by Anuja Pradhan) 

Having listed all the key words, we then searched for commonalities among these definitions and came up with the following four themes:

• Materiality
• Information
• Consumer needs vs. Consumer wants
• Consumption, Wealth and Prosperity

Futures of Consumption?

Continuing with the positive outcomes of consumption and how to sustain them in the future, we decided to focus on the last theme- namely, Consumption, Wealth and Prosperity. Our question was how consumption, despite all the negatives (e.g., waste, addiction, inequality, etc.) it generates can generate wealth and prosperity for all , not the few (no political slogan intended here!). After this decision on our collective focus, we searched for ways in which consumption can achieve this.

Ideas flowing on futures of consumption (by Anuja Pradhan) 

Here are the points and questions raised:

• Inclusion, Inclusive consumption 
• Is consumption becoming more inclusive or exclusive ? (e.g., How can we make sense of foodbanks, something as an inclusion or exclusion move? Is it something positive – “allowing people to continue consuming”, or negative- “justifying and/or concealing policies and inequalities that condemn people to food banks?”) 
• Which unit and level of consumption should we focus on when we think of inclusion and exclusion? (E.g., individual, family, citywide, nationwide) 
• What is the purpose of the consumption item? (Our consumption needs, are they active or latent? ) 

As we continued with the inclusion and inclusive consumption search, we came up with the following question: How can we make products and consumption more inclusive?

We also realized that this also touched on the materiality of consumption- namely, design, production, and so on. We therefore focussed on what kind of products (designs) we need to bring about the futures that we would like to see consumption generate. 

Products (Designs)

Product design principles ? (By Anuja Pradhan) 

• Multifaceted in purpose (e.g., Meeting individual consumption and societal needs at the same time)
• Built to last, given the finite environmental resources? What about wealth and prosperity from continuous production? A need for balance between sustainable production and sustained prosperity 

We then decided to write down some design principles for future products:

• Add-ons (Making products multifaceted in purpose) 
• Sustainable (Durability, ecology, transparency [e.g., plastic microbeads in personal hygiene products and campaigns to ban them ], intergenerational responsibility) 

The Future of Consumer Activism

Having discussed these, we realized that we as consumers have a great role to play in shaping product designs and  in morphing products, producers and markets towards the inclusive futures that we desire. This brought us to the matter of consumer activism. Here are some of the themes that arose from our discussion on the future of consumer activism

• What does a durable/sustainable product look like? (E.g., a cleaning mop lasting 10 years?) 
• How can we communicate our product design desires to producers? 
• Digital democracy [enabling us to work with producers?] 

Futures of consumption (By Anuja Pradhan) 

We then discussed aspects that are closer to us consumers in consumption and consumer activism such as vulnerabilities, emotions, traditions, and how we can come up with best practices among ourselves and producers.

• Minimizing vulnerability (as consumers)? 
• Best practices in ? (Cost and affordability and price, waste and sustainability, institutions [existing practices vs how to institutionalize rare but best practices]) 
• Guilt [associated with consumption, production, waste] 
• Consumer protection- What should be its scope? 
• Mobilizing emotions [associated with consumption/issues] 
• Family traditions [in consumption] vs Change (What is the unit of change in behaviour [individual vs. family?]) 

Future Actions and Challenges

Points about future actions 

and challenges (By Anuja Pradhan)

We then considered necessary steps in bringing about changes for the futures we desired. In doing so, we also acknowledged the contradictory nature of issues in consumer activism, e.g., Lack of information vs. Information overload; Yes, mobilization but how?; Have information but what is next?; Institutions vs. How to institutionalize the new design needs for a different future. Here are the points we recorded on flipcharts

• Seeking information to inform people (but information overload too, is this necessarily a bad thing?) 
• Mobilization [of consumers and other stakeholders but how?] 
• Crowdsourcing [information and other resources necessary for mobilization in a digital age?] 
• Institutions (redesigning e.g., family, corporations, market, the state] But can all expectations be included? 

Universal Design Principles

Result of an hour-long search? (By Emre Tarim) 

Having discussed for an hour the meanings and futures of consumption, we wrapped up the search brainstorm with two practical outcomes or challenges that we consumers can pursue for a future of consumption that generates inclusive and sustainable wealth and prosperity:

1. Universal (consumption and product) design principles for best practices [towards inclusive and sustainable wealth and prosperity]
2. [Answering the following questions] 
1. How will [these principles] look like ?
2. Who will do [formulate] [these principles]?

We felt that these questions should be answered by searches like the one we had during the Community Day at the Marketing Pavilion. The issue of consumption is too important to be left only to producers.

Many thanks to all participants at the Marketing Pavilion