Anti-Trend: Resilient Design and the Art of Sustainable Living

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.