Anti-Trend

The overall purpose of Anti-trend is to encourage designers and consumers to take responsibility for overproduction and overconsumption, and to alter unsustainable production and behavioral patterns. Through a study of anti-trend as opposed to volatile trends the importance of pursuing resilience in life in general and in relation to the creation of sustainable design-objects and living solutions is underlined. Hence, the anti-trend investigations navigate through two main focal points: anti-trendy living and the anti-trendy design practice. Establishing a sustainable lifestyle and designing durable products have one very important thing in common: they revolve around the formation of an enduring core that can function as a stable, yet flexible foundation for actions and usage.

One of the most important and vital ways of overcoming and turning around the immense environmental problems we are currently facing worldwide is radical reduction of consumption. However, despite the fact that altering our habitual consumer ways might sound straightforward, it appears to be unbelievably hard. Even though we are bombarded with horrific and very tangible scenarios involving starving polar bears, whales with plastic-filled stomachs, and burning rivers, and even though these images are presented as interlinked with overconsumption, we continue to shop, and we continue to discard the majority of our belongings way before they don't work anymore or are worn out, and hence we continue to add to the mountains and islands of trash that are building up in landfills and in oceans. Why? Because we are evil? No, of course not. Rather, the reason could be partly interlinked with an increasing detachment from our physical, natural environment and partly with the fact that habits are hard to change, particularly when engulfed in a busy daily routine.

Our lack of sustainable action is likely connected to the fact that status symbols are to an extent associated with new, flashy things, and to the constant craving for more that seems to govern our late-modern minds and societies, as well as to the despair that this entails. Therefore, a significant part of Anti-trend is dedicated to an investigation of despair as well as authentic, sustainable living. Other parts of the book are committed to solutions: to an investigation of how objects and living solutions can encourage fulfilled, sustainable, resilient living with less as well as to a concretization hereof in the shape of three legitimations for creating new products in a world that is already overflowing with things and product waste.
Kristine H. Harper is a freelance writer and researcher. Her main research areas are sustainable object-design and living, aesthetics, permaculture, and preservation of endangered crafts traditions. She worked as a lecturer in Copenhagen for a decade and is the author of Aesthetic Sustainability and has written a wide range of articles on sustainability.