In her Sight Unseen Anne Marie Willis, from Team Des, refers to the rise of the sign-driven economy with its creation of desire through the look, the image, style, brand identity; here too is the dominance of the televisual, of spectacle, of the hyper-real.

economy of appearances , originally uploaded by poodly.

This economy of appearances she says:

is vast and diverse, ranging from the mass appeal of techno-realism (such as computer games and cinema special effects) through to the more subtle imagery and precious objects that capture the appreciative gaze of the art critic or connoisseur. ....the economy of appearances is not limited to visual representations of things, it also includes manufanuctured products, materials, buildings and whole environments as they are designed to appeal to the eye.

In a certain way, she says, we live within the televisual and the computer screen as they are designed (and as they design)according to ever-changing and ever-more nuanced genres of style:

It is more and more possible to think it possible to dwell entirely within the domain of appearances, in which things of the world (clothing, food, furnishings, apartments, cars, appliances, holiday destinations, etc) come to presence primarily as image and style, with their materiality and the relations that constitute that materiality, rendered obscure. The recent evolution of car design (technically and as imaged), exemplifies this well ... as their various functions have increasingly become powered by electronic control systems, the possibility of the car owner ‘tinkering about’ to learn how the car works, is less viable. At the same time cars are increasingly marketed as pure image and ambience, with style and comfort foregrounded....