My thoughts on The consumption of design (but have probably missed the point entirely)

We were asked to read chapter four of The Culture of Design by Guy Julier and then express our thoughts on the subject. I found the reading of this chapter very intense and not particularly enjoyable, i struggled to follow what was being said but after rereading i was able to draw some conclusions.

We appear to live in a world were consumption is inescapable it surrounds us. Nothing these days is free, you can't have a good time without consuming something somewhere along the line. Even a night in consists of possibly dvds and a few drinks all of which have to be consumed, just sitting browsing the internet or watching tv also costs as you've had to pay for the license and the internet connection.

As graphic designers our role in the consumer line would be to advertise and encourage consumerism by visually communicating "amazing" products that everybody "needs" and "must" have, so i suppose graphic designers could be classed as the reason people are so addicted to consume, as they are being manipulated into thinking they have to. Despite this graphic design can't be held solely responsible as consumption doesn't just involve one aspect, as it "involves the interconnection of a range of actions through a chain of sites and times." Thus meaning there are lots of things which contribute to why and what makes us consume.
Consumption also seems to be contradictory as it can be two things at the same time "both active and passive, meaningful and meaningless" meaning it has the power to shape and change into what it needs to be at that specific time to make it more effective.

We haven't always been so obsessed with consumerism so it makes you wonder what happened which altered this world in to being so consumer driven, i suppose its the fact that people are more privileged these days than they use to be, so they have the opportunity to participate in having the new trends to appear "cool" but why? because if nobody consumed it in the first place then nobody would be any different and in doing so everybody would be "cool".