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I recently read Jennifer van der Meer’s thought-provoking piece, The Crowd Will Save Us: How the green movement taps participatory networks to drive innovation at Core77.

TCWSU is an appeal to marry up two significant and recent cultural developments which have affected nearly everyone in the design profession, namely, the "green movement" and design strategies employing social networking. The first really compelling bit of her argument is this:

Over 50% of consumers want greener, more natural [e.g.] housing cleaners, but only 5% actually purchase this category of product: consumers do not want tradeoffs. …green-leaning consumers are looking for proven efficacy, broad availability, comparable price, and a brand they know and trust. They’re not willing to settle for a product that performs less than a more eco-unfriendly alternative.

This statistic offers up something deep for us to think about: The (relatively) recent groundswell of interest in environmentally friendly product design is, while certainly "real," nevertheless only marginally capable of altering whatever practical or psychological norms motivate individuals to actually buy things.

The rest of TCWSU deals with some practical strategies about how social innovations in design might help us solve this complicated psychological problem afflicting products and brands, and rightly so. In addition to her practical conclusions, though, this strange statistic should certainly tell us something theoretical or psychological.

Namely, I wonder why, exactly, the psychological dependence on extant brands as the guarantor of quality isn’t overcome by people’s self-professed desire for greener products?

It’s not you, it’s me (via).

Several possible reasons occurred to me:

1. People are lying about or exaggerating their desire for green products. At this point, we all know we should want greener products, we should care about the future of the planet after we’re dead. It is possible that actually caring, though, is beyond the pale, psychologically-speaking, for most people. Personally, I doubt this.
2. People do want green products, but legitimately can’t afford or find them. I think that this is probably true for a very small portion of people, but I severely doubt that it accounts for any kind of significant numbers. After all, the green movement, in all its most culturally salient forms, is squarely targeted at the urban haute bourgeois.
3. People want green products, but they can’t break their psychological dependence on brands as a guarantor of quality. I think this, unfortunately, is probably the most likely culprit.

If (3) is the case, the sort of populist-utopian view that "we need to envision a new way to work, play, and live — a new way to create our own future," may require a much deeper deprogramming than we want to admit. In other words, I think it’s reasonable to ask if the promise of collaborative innovation as such could possibly overcome our cultural brand dependencies, if each collaborator is the genetic inheritor of that mindset.

My agenda here is not to be overly pessimistic about the future of product design, but rather to suggest that perhaps the ecological movement for design could act as a catalyst to solve a deeper design problem, one that (perhaps) might even underwrite the mentality which allowed us to generate the "green problem" in the first place.

In short, is it possible that solving the "green design" problem is itself not enough, and that before we attempt to solve that important and real problem from inside our current cultural-psychological matrix (our Sittlichkeit), we could use this moment — in which we’ve recognized of our previous failures as product designers and consumers — to catalyze a serious and self-critical look at some other deep and problematic assumptions we’ve been making about what constitutes ethical product design?