Commodity Fetishism and Commodity Narcissism.
Commodity Narcissism is the concept in which people that are fully aware of the current situation of labour and human resources that go into a product, and act as if they are culturally concerned about what goes on, yet continue to shop and purchase products that they know are exploiting human resources. In today's society with factories and sweat shops that are exploiting human labour of all kinds of people, to create products with such well known brand labels, you could assume that we all fall under this category. We know the situation, yet only a few people are willing to change their roles as consumers.
I was thinking I could maybe look into this as area and use the connection of critical design to push the question of how commodities are seen by consumers and how the use value of objects comes from the labor out into the creation, but as soon as it leaves the factory the connection with the factory and its workers are no longer attached to the product.
On this topic I could possibly design a product or redesign something and the way in which we purchase the product and how the value of the object would change if the purchaser had to construct the product themselves, taking out the slave labor aspect, and creating a higher level of value for the owner of the product,
or,
another idea could be having these commodities 'wearing' scars, like how they have been produced, where, by who, how long it took, so that there becomes a new form of connection with the object as we know how much effort went into building and designing a product to suit its audience.
My main aim will be to make sure that there is a connection between the product, labourers and purchasers.
