The primary issue I am interested in is the quality of life for blue-collar workers and their families in suburban areas. These workers often go directly into the work force after high school because they cant afford expensive higher education and they need to make money. They end up working mediocre jobs they don’t enjoy making less money than they deserve
The secondary issue, although just as important as the first, is the way suburbanites are living. The suburbs are littered with Wal-Marts and unsightly strip malls, and people rely on fast food and cheap products because they don’t have much of a choice. There is a lack of quality and culture everywhere you look.
My goal is to create an alternative. I want to design a business structure that not only produces high quality furniture, products, and services, but one that creates better jobs and a better quality of life for a community too. Locals working together to solve a local problem.
There are many experts I will have to work with to fully understand the problem and create a comprehensive solution. First are the community members, the experts of the area who live in the community I plan to serve and who understand what needs to be done. Second, small business owners who can offer insight about the problems they faced and the successes they had in order to help me achieve my goals.
1 comment:
Dave,
I admire the ethic that you are trying to capture in your Utopian vision. I also have an idea for a commune-like arrangement that I think will be popular in the future, given current trends and demographics. I also sympathize with your lament about the suburbs.
I'm still unclear about what you plan to design, but I am ready to suspend disbelief. But you may need to do a lot of fancy footwork to successfully make the argument that your product design project is actually a utopian community. I would love to see what that would look like, maybe the Shakers, but with a more realistic long term outlook. Of course, in the case of the Shakers, the thing that we most remember them for is the furniture that they made, which was a direct expression of their communitarian ethos, world view and ideas about god. so, maybe your project should focus on developing a series of objects that a fictitious future community like the one you imagine would design, manufacture and sell, as their central focus and livelihood. This is sort of a science fiction project I am proposing to you, but it could lead to a very interesting result. Their is no rule that products can't be purely speculative.
steven
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