Dan Pink, author of A Whole New Mind, keeper of the fantastic Orange is the New Pink blog, and a fellow reader of Oprah magazine, has a really cool article in this month's Wired called Rise of the Neo-Greens. In it he describes the rise of the green aesthetic, whose adherents "...are charting a third way, triangulating between the hippies and the hip." Of course, it's more about the stories people tell themselves than it is about the actual eco-impact of the offerings they consume. As he notes:
But regardless of age or income, consumers buy cars with gas-electric engines primarily because of what the vehicles say about them - to themselves and to everyone else.
If all marketers are liars, then all consumers are believers. That's not a value judgment so much as it is a insight to guide design work. We live in an age where marketing -- the process of deciding what to make -- is overlapping with the design process. If you're only designing the object and not paying attention to the story surrounding it, you're abdicating your opportunity to craft something that's truly infectious.
