Dan Pink, author of A Whole New Mind, keeper of the fantastic Orange is the New Pink blog, and a fellow reader of Oprah magazine, has a really cool article in this month’s Wired called Rise of the Neo-Greens.  In it he describes the rise of the green aesthetic, whose adherents "…are charting a third way, triangulating between the hippies and the hip."  Of course, it’s more about the stories people tell themselves than it is about the actual eco-impact of the offerings they consume.  As he notes:

But regardless of age or income, consumers buy cars with gas-electric
engines primarily because of what the vehicles say about them – to
themselves and to everyone else.

If all marketers are liars, then all consumers are believers.  That’s not a value judgment so much as it is a insight to guide design work.  We live in an age where marketing — the process of deciding what to make — is overlapping with the design process.  If you’re only designing the object and not paying attention to the story surrounding it, you’re abdicating your opportunity to craft something that’s truly infectious.