Popular Culture
The Niagara Companion
We Have Impact explores how much design influences our everyday lives. Divided into a series of short essays, We Have Impact speculates on the origin of established social conventions like the weekend, common object like a tube of toothpaste, and natural phenomena like snow. What all of these essays have in common is the question: do our lives shape design or does design shape our lives? Do we have impact? Or, are we only designed to believe we do? Design as a proto-functional way of life in an artificial construct. It has been ushered into our daily routines by postwar advertising and meaningless twenty-first century lifestyle branding brought to us by companies like Ford, Apple and McDonalds, fictional heroes like Lara Croft, Bruce Wayne and Harry Potter, and groups of game console architects like Red vs Blue at Bungie. Given the armada of influences now surrounding our decisions, We Have Impact proposes that every move we make is, in essence, designed.
