For my final project, I wanted to make a subtle commentary on overconsumption. With this, I specifically wanted to tackle online shopping on websites such as Temu, Shein, and AliExpress. When people think about consumerism, the most common one is that people buy too many clothes and that we should be buying more things second hand. While I completely agree with this, I think we should also be cognisant of our shopping habits for other products. Recently, it has become very obvious to me, especially through watching TikTok videos about people buying things that they don’t need. As a society. We seem to have a desire for making things easier for us. Big corporations that use cheap labor have taken advantage of our desire for convenience. I have seen useless new products put out on the market that solve problems that don’t even exist. For example, there are products like the strawberry huller or the quesadilla maker that seem like they’re useful but in reality, you can do those things yourself with a knife or a frying pan. Items like these are usually not durable and will likely be thrown away. For my project, I created a fake online shopping website as a parody to the real ones that millions of people shop on. I came up with 6 ridiculous products that are slightly exaggerated for the effect. I used an AI image generator to create the product photos and I think it gives that uncanny feeling you get sometimes when you’re on those websites. All of my products have aspects that are similar to AliExpress, such as the titles being long and confusing and the prices being questionably cheap for what it is. In my product listings, I added their features while also slipping in my own commentary on how useless the items are.