Response: You are what you carry

Jan Chipchase’s chapter You are what you carry is a follow-up of his speech 10 years ago.  Since his book Hidden in plane sights was published 6 years later in 2013, he mentioned more detailed approaches how people carry their belongings in the future. During his research over decades he found out, that there is a global commonality of how people live and what they value.
The most essential items are keys, money and the mobile phone.  Those items help people surviving and satisfy the most primal needs.

In this Chapter he described several factors of how we care about our belongings depending on different places. One of this factors is for example the range of distribution which depends on the presence of familiar people, density of strangers, familiarity and cleaniness.
But due to the technical progress more and more possessions became digitized which leads to a reexamination of carrying behavior.

The cloud service revolutionized the transport of digital belongings. No matter where we are, we have access to our data from anywhere in the world.
But I think this is not only an advantage. Companies get a deep insight into our lives. Algorithms can help us organizing our things but also analyzes our behaviors. Jan Chipchase said with change comes opportunity. I completely agree with this statement. There are many opportunities to facilitate our lives and make it more efficient. With the digitalization we can reduce the things we carry thus reducing the loss of things, the costs of replacing and recovering things. And the temporary use and rental services get more and more popular.

To summarize you can say that the way of interaction with the goods changes. Mobile technology has changed dramatically from carrying less, to remembering less, to own less. I agree that there are many opportunities with the technological progress. But the more information we disclose the more we lose control of ourselves.

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