Less is more

What does a future with less stuff look like?

Fewer Labs is a collaborative project to develop ideas, visions and stories that build a culture and economy that values and gives meaning to low consumption living.

If you feel that the current system is both unsustainable, and that it doesn’t even make us happy, then join us in asking the question - what is the alternative and how can we create it?

Zero is not enough

  • Zero is the word of our times - net zero, zero waste. It is not very inspiring. We want to create a world with less stuff - but more joy.

Two categories of consumption we wish to re-design:

Fewer clothes

We need clothes for a range of reasons, from warmth to self-expression. Just not quite so many of them.

Fewer garments need not mean less joy.

Fewer cars

A car can be an unparalleled luxury combining privacy, convenience and freedom. It is also an angel of death.

Fewer cars means a lot more life. 

Using a systems lens

  • Materials

    Plan and prepare for a reduction in material stocks and flows. Use less stuff.

  • Processes

    Implement processes that enable the extended life of products. Do more with less.

  • Design

    Re-designing the parameters we operate within to enable different decisions. A new rule set.

  • Intent

    Collectively imagining a new prosperity. Re-defining the good life.

At Fewer Labs the focus of our design is not replacing things with lower impact alternatives but to do away with the need for the things in the first place. Not replace petrol cars with electric cars but design a world with fewer cars.

Our challenge is what replaces the thing we are reducing. We need to have something compelling to move towards as well as something to move away from. What is our new idea of prosperity?

Less is more

  • Businesses

    Many businesses are stuck in models that are polluting and destructive. Stuck between shareholder value and ecological reality. They face inevitable regulation or shortages or both.

    Businesses who produce things that we need fewer of - flights, SUVs, steaks - need to rethink or shrink. We say “be prepared”.

  • Sectors

    Sectors are rigid systems that maintain over consumption. Individual businesses are limited in how different they can be. Step out of line and you are in trouble.

    Institutions in high-impact sectors (fashion, mobility, food etc) must develop collective imagination and action towards alternatives to overproduction.

  • Places

    Towns, cities and countries are sites of consumption that need to transform. The upside is cleaner, greener and healthier places. This image is tantalisingly touch-able but legacy systems and infrastructure are a drag.

    Over consuming communities (hello the global north) must come together to design healthier happier places that use fewer things.

More or less

  • “we have slack. We are so fat in terms of material consumption. There is room to cut back.”

    Distinguished Professor Emeritus, Vaclav Smil

  • "Our ability to recognise and unpick ‘mental infrastructures’ - the worldview that influences all of our actions - will be key to throwing off the shackles of growth and unlocking a culture of sufficiency, whereby we recognise when we have ‘enough’ in a material sense and from then on meet our “nonmaterial needs nonmaterially”, increasing our sense of wellbeing and contentment."

    Erin Remblance, Illuminem

  • “The entitlements of modernity are not compatible with the realities of life on a finite planet and they do not even make us happy”

    Dougald Hine, At Work in the Ruins

  • "The whole idea of restraint is repugnant to a certain kind of modernity. Most of all to a certain kind of liberalism. Because liberalism celebrates the idea that everyone should be able to do what they want to do. As we can see, the whole issue of climate change posits exactly the opposite: that we all have to voluntarily accept certain restraints or rationing."

    Amitav Ghosh