find your creative voice :: day 9 :: what change would you like to see in the world?

This is the ninth installment in a series, Find Your Creative Voice, based on the article 10 Questions that Will Help You Find Your Voice over at Accidental Creative, because it’s so important to find your voice when building a comfortable nest, be it a one room apartment or a sprawling mansion. I will be answering the questions that author Todd Henry has posed, and I hope that you will answer them too.

In case you missed the first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, or eighth installment…

Question 9 :: What change would you like to see in the world?

I’m sure that there’s plenty of change that each of us would like to see in the world. I don’t know that I can reasonably narrow it down to one single change.

But there is something that irritates me in the design world that I would like to see change. The attitude of “let’s change out everything and get everything new.”

I see it a lot on house & home shows, especially those where people are looking to buy a new home. They will walk into a perfectly fine home, look at the bathroom or kitchen and say, “Oh, this is a complete renovation,” when in fact the room was just fine.

It’s part of the reason that I prefer to do home styling rather than work as a full-service designer. I can’t bear to see all of the waste, just because styles have changed a little.

The change that I would like to see in the world is for first world inhabitants to learn to live smaller. Just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should. Just because you have the money to renovate your entire kitchen, doesn’t mean that everything needs to go and be replaced with new.

This is not to say that I will never renovate anything, because I’m sure that I will. But I will strive for a timeless look that can survive fads and won’t need to be renovated every decade.

It’s painful to see so much waste in the world, so much that goes to the landfill. Let’s all move toward a world in which we reuse that which can be reused or give it to someone who will reuse it. I’m sure there are plenty of people who would love your old out-of-date kitchen cabinets. So while I’m sure you think it’s cool to smash them for the TV cameras, it would be so much cooler to casually unscrew them and let someone reuse them.

That is the change that I would like to see in the world.

What change would you like to see in the world?

Feel free to start a dialogue on the subject of creativity and what change you would like to see in the world in the comments and on the Homage Style Facebook page.

Up next in the series…If you had one day left, how would you spend it?