Consider this: for 30 years between 1974 and 2004 I personally made a living out of probably less than a hundred pieces of furniture or homeware. My work was made with care using all the best woods and time-proven craft processes. So just by its very nature it should last for centuries, unlike much that is made in Asian factories today that might look beguiling but will not last long. When I began my career, if you loved making things and were creative you had to be an autodidact (that brutal sounding word which belies the love behind it). I taught myself my craft and onto that base knowledge of materials and processes I built my own design skills and vocabulary.

Over the centuries, most of the things that were needed used to be made by such small-scale craft processes. Every village had its wheelwright, its potter and its baker. The number of things made was limited by what each person could actually make themselves, maybe with the help of a few apprentices. So there were many more makers then in relation to the amount of goods produced. Their materials were local and therefore their processes — how they worked those materials — also reflected their locality, generating a natural variety across the lands.

Today it is quite different. Creativity — the internal imperative to make things that is so hard to deny — is a wonderful gift and innate in all human races. But where is it directed to now? Most tertiary education craft courses have been closed down, partly because we are told that they are too expensive to run, but also I believe because they do not suit the consumerist system. The future is in Design! So all around the world Design Schools spew out thousands of naive young graduates, expectant that their finely honed creative thinking (but rarely making) skills will be in demand. Such designers need someone to make for them. They sell their designs to manufacturers, either on commission or as an employee. But their percentage of the retail price is so minuscule that they have to create many designs, of which thousands of each have to be sold to give them a living. That represents an exponential increase in products per designer, which perforce have to be sold not just locally but globally.

It really saddens me when I visit design schools and listen to young designers talking about their ideals and hopes. I feel their love of creating, but what is their future? Where is there a place for them in a world that is so saturated in stuff? On the one hand, they have to dumb down their ideas, in order to fit into a pricing model that leaves precious little for them. The final retail price of a production piece is between 5 and 10 times the cost of making and everyone makes more out of it than they do. This means that everything has to be pared back to a bare minimum — there is no room for those little details that make it interesting, let alone a more innovative and exciting concept. This cold tight grip of ‘reality’ severely limits a designer’s creativity. In comparison the artisan furniture maker will probably sell direct to the customer so there are no added percentages to take the price way out of the bounds of possibility. This allows him or her to be far more creative and to take risks.

On the other hand, there are too many of them all competing for the same consumers. This puts inordinate pressure on them to be noticed, resulting in the proliferation of what I call gimmick design. The gimmick is not good, authentic design that works well while also being beautiful. It is just a clever idea, the product of linear, intellectual left hemisphere thinking, that tries to beguile you into buying it. But it is here today, gone tomorrow and reduces designers into acting like performing monkeys, jumping through hoops to attract attention from ‘design connoisseurs’ and the style tribe. Where we once had a simple toothbrush, designed maybe by an anonymous member of staff in the factory, today we have the “designer toothbrush” delivered in excessive packaging, promoted by slick persuasive advertising and written about in design blogs. It is hard to blame the poor designers for being sucked into this — how else can they make a living out of their ‘passion’?

To increase demand, some creatives go into what I call the “manufacturing need” business, turning their art into persuading us that we really NEED a new product, and that there is something wrong with us if we don’t have it. In fact the need is not with us to buy — it is all on their side to sell. And by “their” I don’t just mean the designers, but the whole consumer/capitalist system of factories, mines, shipping companies, insurance companies, banks, shops and so on. This makes designers culpably complicit in the whole over-production, over-consumption that is wrecking the environment, and ultimately probably human society, as we have known it.

Those with a conscience try to make what is called “sustainable design”. This laudable effort is sadly too often fiddling with details when it is the fundamental system that is the issue. At the root of the problem is TOO MUCH STUFF however it is made. Sustainable products are still shipped around the world, and are still responsible for cumulatively excessive amounts of power, water, oil etc, (ours included!). Globalisation cannot survive without such trade of goods of all sorts, and it will happily swallow up so-called sustainability just like everything else for its holy grail, that maddest of all oxymorons ‘sustainable growth’. This is the dilemma that I live with, along with every other designer with a conscience.

So where is the poor creative supposed to direct his or her energy? I am not a reactionary who “sees the debris of paradise drifting past his eyes” as Mark Lilla described so evocatively in his book ‘The Shipwrecked Mind’. Nor do I subscribe to the “militancy of nostalgia” (ibid), but we cannot deny that the past model of local artisans lasted an awful lot longer than our current mass manufacturing one will. It seems that the greatest militant act we can make against globalisation, and the super powerful multinational companies that dominate our world, is to buy what we need locally, and apply some of the better aspects of the past, such as craft making, to building a future. In this way an awful lot more designer/makers can find a good meaningful living in creating an awful lot less products. Sustainability does not lie in a product, but in a lifestyle. You can’t hope to achieve it within mass consumerism, however persuasive it may be that you can —sustainabilty comes from a state of mind, one that accepts living with much less stuff.