Grand Boutique and Experience

Trendwatching.com’s newest trends are out, and the featured item is “Grand Boutique“.

“Grand Boutique” describes how today a specifically-designed product is beyond a perk–it has become the standard. It’s a good trend for designers like myself, and echoes the sentiments of an author I heard speak recently, Virginia Postrel. Her new book argues that design is “a vital component of a healthy, forward-looking society”.

All this seems to contradict the economic downturn, when pocketbooks should be constricted enough to squeeze out all differentiation. However, this economic downturn is a mere drop in the ocean of economic progress, chronicled by books such as The Experience Economy. That book argues that our economy is in the midst of a paradigm shift, from a service economy into an “experience” economy (just as the service economy emerged from its predecessor, the “product” economy).

And just as aesthetic design first became a factor when the product economy emerged from the “commodity” economy (since commodities cannot be designed), and it became more important in the transition to services, design is destined to be of paramount importance in the “experience” economy. Even this is microscopic compared to the importance of design in the fifth and final phase of a free-market economy, the “transformation economy”, in which design is the only product. Think of “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy“, “Monster House, and talk-show makeovers–the only product in these transformations is the changed designs of the person and their surroundings.

It’s a good time to be a designer. The tough part is figuring what the hell to design…

p.s. Dustin, my roomate just noted a McDonalds commercial that advertised “a lifestyle, not even the food”. Yep.