Restart Radio: Unpacking Marie Kondo, reflecting on decluttering

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We started by paying our respects to climate scientist Sir David MacKay, who died last week at the age of 48. He was very articulate on the climate impacts of our consumption.

This episode focused on the Japanese “decluttering” guru Marie Kondo. Ugo and Restart volunteer Ten both started to read Kondo’s global best-seller, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organising. They explained what they took away from her approach.

While Kondo’s brand of decluttering could provoke people to value and love the things the own more, it also could simply work in service of a throw-away economy. We unpacked Kondo’s take on reuse, recycling and sharing, trying to take the positive points but not saving any critique.

To close, we talked about a conversation between Kenyan and British repair professionals that took place at the V&A Museum in an event called “Dreaming Zero Waste”. Their workshops again had us questioning the notion of clutter, stuff, and how we live and work.

Links we mentioned

• Telegraph piece quoting Sir David MacKay ‘Stop buying new appliances and cars and repair them instead’
• Video: Airbnb Open: Tidying Consultant, Marie Kondo
• Marie Kondo tells us to ditch joyless items but where are we sending them?
• Our post Tiny houses, decluttering and late consumerist disorders
• Wikipedia entry on Japanese feeling of “mottainai”
• “Dreaming Zero Waste”

[Feature image “Web Summit 2015 – Dublin, Ireland” by Flickr user Websummit is licensed under CC BY 2.0]