Word: utilitarian
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Flip-flops have been the universal summer footwear for years--cheap and utilitarian, if not particularly fashionable. But the humble rubber thong is this summer's stylish shoe. Havaianas, colorful flip-flops from Brazil, are selling out at high-end boutiques and cropping up in style magazines like Vogue, Elle and Cosmopolitan; they were recently seen on the Paris catwalk of designer Jean-Paul Gaultier. Selling for just $3 in Brazil, the shoes are fetching from $12 to $80 in the U.S. For fashionistas seeking a more formal summer look, Sigerson Morrison has created a new silhouette for the flip...
...utilitarian more concerned with the satisfaction of “preferences” than with happiness, he argued that for beings with preferences, it is best if their preferences are satisfied...
...traffic light theme. If you were taken you wore red; if you were up for being “pulled,” you wore orange; and if you were up for being pulled by any stray farm animal, you wore green. For me, it was really a utilitarian calculus—would wearing green ultimately make me less pullable? I went orange...
...book One World, utilitarian philosopher Peter Singer presents an interesting analogy for America’s current position: imagine you are walking by a shallow pond and you see child fall through the ice. She is sure to drown if you don’t save her, but if you do it will mean dirtying your pants, ruining your shoes, and being late to an important meeting. Most readers will agree that it would be very wrong to ignore the drowning child...
...perhaps the most salient example of designer permeation of the most utilitarian products is the O-CEL-O hourglass-shaped sponge by 3M. Sales tripled in 1999, after the company eschewed square for curvaceous and added brightly colored patterns. Now 3M is putting concept-driven designs on its sponges. "Washing dishes is not something that's pleasurable, so putting a little bit of design into it is good," says Zaki Kamandy, a second-year student at New York City's Parsons School of Design, whose stylized spoons-knives-forks-and-bubbles print--inspired by the gaggle that always gets washed...