All taste is subjective. Each person has different tastes as well as their respective lifestyles. Conventional, eccentric, simple, high style, classic, all the words are characters that are covered in a lifestyle. Now what is the relevance of design to lifestyle? How to design, designers, and lifestyle can complement each other?
We must understand that the lifestyle will create a need for a new design that could be a trend setter. And that the creation of new designs strongly influenced by the target market segments. So, a designer must understand the role of design in the placement of the lifestyle of the target.
Most people judge the book by it's cover! Rarely do they apply the words of "Do not judge the book by it's cover". Well, let's first talk about capitalism and lifestyle. People judge the book by it's cover, "cover"means visually, which can be viewed. Visual style can blend with your lifestyle, because each human life can not be separated from the visual language of two and three dimensions. Style is a system of form with a quality and meaningful expressions that reveal the artist's personality or general view of a group. Even that is a factor in artistic production. Style is also a vehicle for expression in the group that mixing certain values of religious, social and moral life through the forms that reflect the feelings. All human beings are the subject of style so that the tendency of one society can be analyzed through styles spectrum.
The word "style" comes from the Greek, ("stylus"), which means writing or handwriting device. Meyer Schapiro defines style as "a constant and sometimes the elements, qualities and constant expression of an individual or group." This definition also includes lifestyle and style of civilization. But the definition of style is quite clear is that, as proposed by Alvin Toffler: "a tool used by individuals to show their identification with particular subcultures. Every lifestyle mosaic composed of several items, namely super-product that provides a way of organizing products and ideas. "
Style can be learned because it is artificial and self-aware. The style was not separated from 42masa life (birth, youth, adult, death) and the styles that have been worn usually called decadent. Meanwhile, when the characteristics of the style deliberately exaggerated, it began to enter talks about the styling. Understanding styling is to give a particular shape in accordance with a style that never existed in the past. This view is born because (according to Harley J. Earl) community is very vulnerable to extreme changes in style, so that changes made are an evolutionary force.
At this time, the system (globalization) has removed the boundaries of local culture, nationally and regionally, so that current wave of global lifestyle can easily move around the place through the mass media intermediaries. However, lifestyle is growing more diverse this time, floating and not only owned by one particular community, even the consumer can choose and buy their own life style. Even according to Alvin Toffler current turmoil caused by the collapse of traditional value systems are established so that there is only limited value as the value boxes. Lifestyle does offer a sense of identity and simultaneously a means to avoid confusion because there are so many options.
The existence of an assessment of a product is determined by the mindset and values that developed and accepted in society, where it can spread from one community to another community through communications media. This includes one of the factors that influenced the development of lifestyle and design sense in this context is more of an attitude, which is favor of the prevailing values. For that, now the designers have consciously or not deploy the images as a reflection of 'self' and the mirrors commodity is influenced by the ideology of capitalism. Advanced capitalist ideology has been distributing commodities and take advantage of its exchange rate, which requires the flow of production and consumption are constant and also the speed of change that compete. The design is generally divided into two major groups, namely camps with a very optimistic look at design as it can be a mine producing a lot of money, and a group who see that the design has made people become "decadent" by the consumerism that has reached an extreme point.
It is interesting that some cultural anthropologists even stated that the artifact (design) is in the anthropological sense that humans have created is the media, where cultural identity be preserved and communicated to the next generation. Some other anthropologists even went so far as to equate between culture and artifacts used by a society. Johan Rheinfrank, for example, considers that the product design means designing the language, so that each product has its own visual language. Even the shape of an object must show purpose. The intended meaning here is not how something is used or how someone can look at something that works. However, more than that, meaning always be an interpretation of the object in the context of socio-cultural. Even at some level, the appearance of a product the end result will reflect the personal attitudes of a designer in culture.