Grant McCracken admits that being Canadian (he was born in Vancouver) affords greater perspective on North American culture than having been brought up stateside. Through his numerous books, which include Culture and Consumption and Plentitude: The Culture of Commotion, he has sliced through society to find meaning within a world saturated with messages. Currently, McCracken is a consulting researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's alliteration-friendly Convergence Culture Consortium program, where he applies a critical eye to mainstream brands. Passing through Toronto last week for the Design Thinkers Conference, he put his popular blog on hold (http://www.cultureby.com) to posit that we are all content producers now.
How do you think our approach to brands has changed?
It feels like there has been a shift in power. People would have once been pleased to think of themselves as being Prada people or Ralph Lauren people. Now, we're charged with the ability to invent or at least choose to build our own brands and source our own cultural meanings. The idea that we need a big brand to help orient us in the world is starting to go away.
Some people are actively anti-brand and some people are much more aggressive about the way they use their brands' meanings - and they mix and match them and assemble them for their own purposes. They're in the driver's seat now, whereas before they were supplicants, and the brands oriented them.
Do you think that's why Louis Vuitton, as an example, makes its brand fresh by rebelling against tradition? At the spring/summer 2008 show in Paris, for instance, there were Richard Prince illustrations on Technicolor logo bags.
Indeed, that's the big challenge for these brands. It used to be that good brands kept everything defined in a very narrow and precise way and they repeated themselves often and loudly. And now they're understanding that if you wish to vibrate with anything that seems like vitality in this culture, you have to loosen some of that control, you have to let the consumer in. You have to allow them to be co-creators of the brand and for a while. ... That's a painful moment of reckoning for the brand, but it is happening, and the advantage goes to the brand that allows it happen.
In Plenitude: Culture by Commotion, you observed different types of teens - punks, Goths and skaters, etc. In the design world, we refer to trendsetters, design gurus and early adapters among others. Do these labels - which are less visually identifiable - have cultural relevancy?
I think that's one of things that might be changing. We used to have a mainstream that was relatively conservative and didn't change very much and it changed reluctantly - especially from a design, cultural and aesthetic point of view. Then there was the far margin filled with kooky people, artists and risk takers. ... And that's starting to break down as the centre has now become as innovation-producing as the margin.
So the whole model of, 'Let's pick up innovations early and track them as they come into the mainstream,' has kind of broken down. It used to be that corporations would hire cool hunters who would watch what the hip kids do, and that's still useful for some purposes. There's so much noise out there that it's difficult to spot a single trend coming in. And so many trends just never come ashore.
Do you think we're witnessing a commotion of material goods?
There's a sense now that everyone is in a position to produce, and so inevitably our world is noisy with innovation, and it's much more difficult for power to form and for elites to exert their elite pressure. Which is not to say that they've fallen quiet by any means. Anna Wintour is still a force to be reckoned with, as is every editor. But they have less power and so there's been a decentralizing of our culture.
When you wrote Plenitude in 1997, you made it available online at no cost. Wasn't that a rather revolutionary concept 10 years ago?
The hard copy was an afterthought; people almost didn't believe in its existence. It was just too virtual. So I was then obliged to turn it into hard copy and then it became a design project and then it took on a life of its own as a hard-copy exercise.
Do you think that distinctive book design has become so necessary to keep the medium exciting?
Certainly that's one of the great institutions that's now in peril and we'll see which way it goes. ... But clearly, to fully seize on opportunity, the form of the book becomes an important part of the content ... and it will inevitably be drawn to the digital and electronic realm. I think what we're waiting for someone to do for the book what the iPod did for music.
Must design change to remain current?
Design is an exciting topic for an anthropologist because anthropology as a field has long believed that material culture makes culture material - material culture being the term that they use for everything from house design to clothing design.
There has been a long-standing anthropological assumption that things like clothing and art and built form will be a medium for both the expression and the construction of the ideas in culture. But to make it more interesting, the question today is: How does design capture and reflect and construct a culture that is so dynamic and changeable and unpredictable?
I think we now understand that the notion of design being frilly and frothy or that it's merely aesthetic was always wrong. Design is helping us think about who we are and what's really happening to us.
