I’ll begin my fourth and final installment of my long essay addressing the debate on “design imperialism” by admitting that it doesn’t take much effort to find something about globalization to be incensed about. Starbucks is pricing your favorite coffee shop out of the neighborhood; riots in Indonesia were triggered by the Asian financial crisis. Apple imposes its corporate values to the worldwide availability of adult content on their application platform**; Coke and Pepsi logos have been painted onto remote pristine mountain ranges.
Or perhaps you prefer to take the profit-at-any-cost argument to the next level. You can cite Nestle’s aggressive sale of milk-powder in markets where doing so is likely to inhibit the lactation of mothers; Facebook and Google endlessly exploring and re-defining privacy in their race to monetize you through new services; Monsanto’s development and apparent halting of sterile seeds to force farmers to make repeat purchases every year; the very visible suicide rate of Foxconn factory workers in China (most likely some of you will be reading this on a Foxconn assembled device); companies that are benefitting from the sale of monitoring equipment in countries like Syria or Egypt; and accusations of racism in the advertising of Unilever’s Fair & Lovely Skin Whitening creams. (For a good background on the latter read this paper.) Make no mistake—governments***, BigCorps, organisations, agencies need watching, need to be held to account, and in many markets there are players that hold a disproportionate amount of power.
But as consumers, employers and employees, I, you, we, they are complicit in this relationship in the products we make and consume, as well as in the lifestyles we aspire to and the moment-to-moment decisions we make in how the products we buy are used. Sure, we demand privacy, but we are willing to let personal ethics slide when a photo worthy situation presents itself. We have grown used to free e-mail, but (momentarily) rally against our e-mail being read by an algorithm so that Google can serve us more contextualized advertising. We roll up to a remote mountain village and mutter expletives at being woken by a ringtone—but get the jitters at the mere thought of giving up our own connectivity. We complain of global warming and then jet-off to another conference that espouses amongst other things sustainable living. We are highly vocal about the price of new electronics but vote with our wallets when it comes to disposing of them in an slightly-more-costly but environmentally less impactful manner. Or we fly half-way around the world to conduct business but not track every source of income that enables that business to occur, the many different players in global network that allows us to get there, stay there, communicate with collaborators and loved ones while we are there.
I conduct a fair amount of community facing activities—from spending time in universities to doing talks around the world, and I am grateful for the opportunity to share and learn from the intellect in the room. But on occasion the assumptions behind the questions miss the mark to the point where a step back is necessary. There are a number of misconceptions about consumers in highly income/resource constrained (or “poor”) communities that seem to repeat themselves with a depressing regularity and is often directed from passionate minds with a particular, accusatory venom:
- Consumers on low levels of income are incapable of making rational or “right” choices for themselves
- These same consumers are duty bound only to make rational choices (“rational” as in on things that have an immediate benefit to their current socio-economic situation, as defined by the person making the argument)
- Any time a consumer makes an “irrational” choice the “fault” lies with the company providing the products
- Companies that target consumers in countries with very low levels of income are inherently evil
Let’s go through each in turn:
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