We live in a time of inundation – of images, options, information and products. Endless choices stream before our eyes, vying for our attention and our money, see Figure 13.1. Such over-stimulation can engender numbness, passivity and perhaps disillusionment or cynicism; it certainly raises questions about purpose and values. In a culture where anything and everything is possible, and where each successive novelty eventually commits the same ‘crime’ of familiarity, then the search for the next thing becomes the raison d’être. The stimulant for this is, of course, the economic aspiration. However, the process has reached a point where the fundamental objective seems to have been lost. The creation of functional objects has become so subsumed by the market system and the urge to profit that product permutations have become transparently

pointless. We can maintain this status quo and continue to play the game, but the moves are infinite – it has become a game without meaning, a perpetual endgame.