During these hard economic times I wonder how we have gotten to this point. How did we leave our infrastructure to fall in such disrepair? Our cities in ruins. Small town America is boarded up and 2 to 5 miles away is big giant box store with fast foods joints surrounding it along the highways. The Mom and Pop stores were the heart beat of small towns and now they are relics of the America that used to be. We are left contemplating a past that is oddly skewed by reruns of Leave it to Beaver and other Nick at Nite programing.
As a society we assumed that we would always have a work force filling our factories and office buildings driving this country forward. We thought we would always be the consumers buying the newest shinny object out there. As many are pointing fingers at one class or the other or one political party or the other, I think everyone is at fault for what this country has become because the decline has been happening for a long time now.
As a designer I can see that capitalism is still strong. We still buy shiny objects. Companies still hire us to persuade people to buy them. I really don't need an iPad, but it was pretty shiny and I wanted it. I have been working in a gallery and I find it interesting that people don't buy art too much anymore. I here this a lot from people. People don't want to spend their money on something tangible that could give them pleasure for a very long time. What they will buy is dinner. Dining out is the new shiny object. And just as we willing followed the shiny object pulling us away from our own communities and making us willing participants in destroying our own economy we continue to march along to the next and newest trend.
The future will come, but it is unknown what the next shiny object is..