Consumer Aesthetics Research Institute

The Consumer Aesthetics Research Institute (CARI) is an online community which is “dedicated to developing a visual lexicon of consumer ephemera from the 1970s until now”

History
In the early 2010s, Evan Collins participated in the online vaporwave scene largely through r/vaporwave and in some groups on Facebook. He found that the vaporwave scene didn’t explore the late 1990s and early 2000s as much as the 1980s to mid 1990s. In August 2014, he watched the music video for Out of Your Mind by Victoria Beckham and realized the prevelance of futuristic looks during that era. Inspired by the video, he made a collage on photoshop to get a define the millennium/y2k aesthetic and posted it to the vaporwave subreddit. The post received interest with people asking for more examples. This resulted in him finding around 900 examples and putting them in an album on imgur in October 2014. He continued to collect examples in all fields including art, music, fashion, architecture, and industrial design, striving for a complete documented understanding of the era.

In 2019, Collins delivered the first presentation on CARI at the Seattle Design Festival.

Design aesthetics identified

 * Gen-X Soft Club, coined by CARI member Sloane Angel Hilton.
 * Frutiger Aero, which spans from around 2004 to 2013, was coined by CARI member Sofi Lee.
 * Whimsigothic
 * Frasurbane
 * Global Village Coffeehouse