Project Overview

What is Consider Quality?

We are two Master of Industrial Design alumni of the University of the Arts and we recently wrapped up our thesis project, titled Quality of Purchase Connection. This project, which was inspired by the book Cheap by Ellen Ruppell Shell, looked at the effects of discounting within the consumer goods landscape. Consider Quality was our portal to share with the outside world the roadblocks and epiphanies we encountered throughout the semester. Although the project is now complete, we invite any and all feedback that you may have!

What is Quality of Purchase Connection all about?

Americans love shopping at mass-retailers, scoring items on sale and hunting down the best knock-offs. The premise of big box retailers and discount stores – to provide products to the masses at affordable prices – seems to be for the greater good. But what do we sacrifice to save that extra dollar? Consuming cheap goods also eliminates choice from the marketplace, increases personal long-term spending, contributes to the divide between social classes, and ultimately lowers the quality of life for the people that low prices are intended to help. After extensive research into all the contributing components of the Discount Culture, we proposed a plan to reverse the harmful trends that have resulted from people buying based on price. Our approach blended the disciplines of systems design and design thinking to look at the big picture of consumption and to begin to address the problems the discount culture has caused.

“A system is a set of things—people, cells, molecules, or whatever—interconnected in such a way that they produce their own pattern of behavior over time. ” Although we ultimately intended to work with consumers, to understand the full scope of consumption of cheap goods, we also had to look at the production of such goods, how these goods are marketed and sold, the psychology of how consumers interpret their surroundings, and how the things we buy and sell impact the economy. Understanding the historical and cultural context showed that before the bombardment of media, people examined the physical attributes of a product and looked for long-term value in purchases. However, as advancements in production occurred and companies rather than individual craftsman came to produce goods, retail shifted from the bazaar, to mom and pop stores, and eventually to chains. The tacit understanding of merchants not to drastically undercut going prices was broken with the opening of one such chain—E.J. Korvette. Retailers became desperate to compete and learned to use marketing to appeal to consumer psychology. Because information became obscure, and consumers had less investment in goods, the process of inspecting product attributes, as in the bazaar, was no longer efficient. Thus, consumers learned to trust price to make decisions, and a new, short-term mindset emerged. The plethora of trivial information and the prevalence of decisions based on price characterize the modern American consumer goods landscape, or the “Discount Culture” as Shell refers to it.

In a quest to get the most value out of purchases, consumers have unwillingly succumbed to the devices of retailers. “…One of the most frustrating aspects of systems is that the purposes of subunits may add up to an overall behavior that no one wants.”  This could not be more true when it comes to consumption. By buying low-priced goods, consumers enable retailers to mask continual cost cuts, lower quality of goods, lower wages and lower standards. While all of these factors ultimately affect the consumer, they pan out over a long period of time, so the consumer is too far removed from them to realize the harm they cause. Because products need to be replaced more often and people unknowingly treat products less carefully when they spend less, better quality goods can actually save consumers money over time. However, since consumers do not see this, there is little support for more durable, well-crafted products. Additionally, when people think about low wages associated with production, they neglect to include American retail workers in the equation. Low retail wages at discount giants have the potential to lower earnings of other working class positions, and therefore can affect the overall health of our local and national economies. Cheap prices trick the majority of people into thinking they are benefiting, but as prices of consumer goods decrease, more significant costs of living are on the rise. The only way, then, to improve the personal spending power of the masses, the quality of life for these people, and the health of the economy is to reinstate a system that supports long-term considerations.

Our goal was to do just that by providing consumers with an alternative to the current emphasis on low prices. “Although Design is most often used to describe an object or end result, Design in its most effective form is a process, an action, a verb not a noun.” Design as a process is referred to as design thinking. With this approach, we as designers believe that every problem is unique, and therefore, the project outcome should also be unique. Rather than beginning a project with a structured plan, a trajectory is built on some early research. In the case of this thesis, our trajectory was that we would work with consumers to help them distinguish between meaningful and superfluous information, so they could improve their purchase decisions. Additional information gained through our methods guided our final deliverables. Since we did not know all the complexities of the discount culture at the start of this project, we worked with specialists from related disciplines and actual consumers to expand our knowledge base and make more informed decisions for the future of consumer goods, people and the economy. This means that as our project progressed, the way in which we assisted consumers and the medium for the solution we ultimately proposed was tailored by the insight we gained.

To prove that peoples’ abilities to judge the physical attributes of products have become overshadowed by media, we performed product testing with consumers. Our methods also included interviewing several avid discount shoppers to identify commonalities in why they prefer discounters, how they choose what to buy, and their opinions on how price relates to quality. Preparations for our user studies included interviewing experts in retail operations, consumer behavior studies, certification and labeling systems, and construction processes. We used data gathered from our product testing, as well as feedback from our interviews with both experts and users, to direct our focus for changing consumption.

We also reviewed existing certification, labeling and rating systems, retail networks, marketplaces, and management approaches. By arranging these systems and organizations in a way that showed what part of the supply chain they address and how they each measure quality, we built a framework of quality that connects the components from each of these operations that are important to purchase decisions. In contrast to buying based on price, our purchase evaluation system promotes consumers to examine product characteristics, to learn about supply chain practices and to make well-informed decisions.

After brainstorming avenues through which we could make our system available to consumers, we determined that a digital interface that draws on the capabilities of social networking and mobile phone barcode scanning would reach the largest number of people and cause the greatest change. The Quality of Purchase Connection system that we designed empowers the consumer with information needed to make decisions based on long-term factors and allows a community of consumers, retailers, and manufacturers to benefit from the sharing of meaningful information. By reinstating quality into our culture of consumption, personal spending habits, economic conditions, and environmental issues can all improve.