1 Understanding the Economic World
1.1. A consumer society pushed to its limits
1.1.1. A faltering economic system
While “consumers” are the most important economic group, the economic system does not look after its most essential part: the consumer/user and the environment. It will be necessary to learn a better way to study real users and to not simply have faith in the benefits of industrialization and the “new technologies”.
What is needed is the reinvention of a new economy, based on real requirements: not just on money, market value, the act of purchasing or “technology”, but on qualities of use, and ultimately, quality of life.
All of this is made more complicated by the absence of a real definition of progress. Users are on the fringe of what is not decisive and not considered as important; they are only “consumers” in the economic sense. This means that everything that happens leads to them being marginalized or marginalizing themselves. The only thing left for them to do is to protest the lack of relevant information and advice for making their choices and purchases.
The “product/user/environment” interface has more to do with the technology of daily life than it does with the cutting-edge technology for which almost all of the world’s engineering talents have been mobilized for many years. This has more to do with the concept of the quality of products, and not simply the criteria of price, durability or suitability for service. The search for ways to take better ...