Word: notionalism
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...around the 1920s, for instance, that automakers hit upon the profitable notion of yearly style "advances" for new cars, the aesthetic equivalent of planned obsolescence. Change for its own sake also helped generate the annual couture collection, which led in turn to style crazes and recreational shopping, which led in turn to fashion victims, but that's another story...
...smart. An industrial designer for (Eleven), the Boston-based firm he co-founded, Beck uses design to make products simpler. They may not be quite as racy looking as an iMac or a Beetle, but his sometimes colorful, mostly plastic and almost always sleek creations revive the notion that form should follow function. "Just by looking at something, you should know how it works," he says. "We're stating the obvious all the time." His birdcage, for instance, has a clear plastic front and back and a light, and a wavy perch that, he insists, prevents bird carpal-tunnel syndrome...
...hits so many of us set in, and I convinced myself that the students in those brochures were really saying, "Look how happy we are to be away from our miserable campus!" Harvard wasn't a miserable place for me--in fact, it was perfectly comfortable--so clearly the notion of study abroad was unnecessary at best and a fatal blow to my happiness and well-being at worst...
...will probably wreck his marriage eventually. "My wife, she doesn't like that she's married a killer," he says. "There are very few things I hide from, but I hide from that." Cain tries to make the system work as best he can, but he hates the notion of life without parole. "We're keeping dying old men in here," he says, for acts they committed decades ago. It's a drain on the prison system and a waste of life. "The public is what has to change. The will of the people has to change, not the legislature...
...anti-cell phone crowd, I almost felt guilty asking Motorola to let me test its newest model, the Digital V phone, coming out this week. Sure, it was a marvel of miniaturization and techno-chic, weighing in at just 3 oz. And I was intrigued by the notion of browsing the Web and sending e-mail on something smaller than a Twinkie. But I've always thought carrying a cell phone everywhere you went was silly--just another must-have gadget designed to keep boredom at bay. Factor in the $400 list price from Sprint PCS (or $500 from Verizon...