Info 202 Fall 2011

In a recent furniture shopping trip to West Elm, an advertising campaign in their wall decor section reminded me of 202 and our discussion of organizing systems. West Elm describes three activities to consumerism: collecting, curating, and creating. Home stores like West Elm focus on personalization, and encourage customers to imagine themselves within their own home through a number of physical manifestations (often organizing similar objects together, to create a room-like environment). The collecting curating, and creating description that West Elm uses frames the activities that individuals go when purchasing products, deciding which ones look good together, and then putting them in a room together.

West Elm products; specifically those in the wall decor section, although this could apply to all of the products in their stores.

Organizing in this case would be described as a combination of curating and creating, where a sub-set of products are put in the same room to create a certain experience or “look.”

The only limit on this would be based upon the number of products in West Elm's store, or the amount of space in your house to store their products.

Collecting could be described as the process involved while browsing and purchasing products in the store, while curating and collecting occur in a customer’s home.