Attfield, Judy. "Introduction: The Material Culture of Everyday Life.
" Wild Things: The Material
Culture of Everyday Life. Oxford: Berg, 2000. 1–8. Materializing Culture. Bloomsbury Design
Library~Bloomsbury Design Library 2019 Collection~. Web. 16 Apr. 2020.
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Introduction: The Material Culture of Everyday Life
DOI: 10.5040/9781350036048.0006
Page Range: 1–8
This is a contradictory project, because although its main focus is on the material object it is not
really about things in themselves, but about how people make sense of the world through
physical objects, what psychoanalytic theory calls ‘object relations' in the explanation of identity
formation, what sociology invokes as the physical manifestation of culture, and anthropology
refers to as the objectification of social relations.[1] Thus this study is situated at the dynamic
point of interplay between animate and inanimate worlds in order to look beyond the material
world of mere things in themselves and reconsider their complex role in the relationship
between objects and subjects.
This is also an unashamedly hybrid book. In academic terms it uses a post-disciplinary approach
to the study of design and its history as an aspect of material culture in order to extend it
beyond the framework which has largely confined design studies to the work of professional
designers. The project here is to discuss the interactive role of physical manufactured objects in
the making of the modern world into a human place. It is post-disciplinary, in as much as that
although it deliberately starts from the sub-disciplinary base of studies in the history of design,
it then goes on to breach the conventional borders of the specialism to draw from a range of
fields; from social history, anthropology and archaeology to sociology, geography,
psychoanalysis and general cultural studies. There was the time when such eclecticism would
have been frowned upon as diluting and undisciplined, when to borrow was seen as a form of
stealing, and the purity of the subject area was something to be defended. When, too,
apologies would have had to be made to justify looking at objects, making sure to expunge any
discussion that might be accused of fetishism, and (in more senses than one) that assumed such
an association to be negative. However times have changed and in looking retrospectively at
the progress of design history it is possible to explain both the narrowness and the
unboundedness from which it has both suffered and from which it has developed and continues
to grow. It is already apparent that what started as a small offshoot is developing into a healthy
growth from which new lines of research will hopefully develop and flourish.
The definition of design history has also changed over time. It can now generally be agreed that
the discipline came into being by default because the limitations of art history methods could
not deal adequately with products of industrial mass manufacture. Therefore any project which
sets out to use design history as a base line for the study of the material culture of everyday
things needs to take its historiography into account in order to understand its conventional
parameters and how they have expanded to encompass a more diffuse range of goods and a
broader time band[2] to those with which it initially started out. Then, neither ‘crafts' nor
anything which might be mistaken for ‘art' would have been considered a legitimate area of
study under the aegis of design history. But what is of greater interest than attempting an exact
definition which is bound to be partial, is to suggest an explanation for the changes it has
undergone and what direction its impending shift might take in the light of new thinking on the
subject. As the title suggests – design is just one aspect of the material culture of everyday life.
The object of the exercise is to push the boundaries and explore the context to which design
belongs. Having broadened the accepted range of artefacts that can be addressed by design
however, what now needs serious attention is how to theorise such an endeavour to encompass
a wider band of ‘things'. And in spite of the more comprehensive parameters or maybe because
of their tendency to blur the nature of the object, design critics and historians have become
aware of the pressing need to challenge the constraints imposed by the discipline. To thus
problematise the issue of interpretation, which is what I mean by ‘theory' in this context, is not
to favour any particular formulaic methodology, but rather to insist on the prioritisation of the
importance of the questions that motivate research and enquiry into the cultural significance of
things.
Though young, material culture is already a well established field of study[3] that has continued
to talk across the boundaries between cognate disciplines within the humanities and social
sciences. In association with design history it offers a more obvious place for the type of analysis
that follows design products beyond the point of sale to examine how modern artefacts are
appropriated by consumers and transformed from manufactured products to become the stuff
of everyday life that have a direct involvement with matters, both literally and figuratively, of
identity. So what I have called here ‘the material culture of everyday life', acknowledges the
physical object in all its materiality and encompasses the work of design, making, distributing,
consuming, using, discarding, recycling and so on. But above all it focuses on how things have
gone through all those stages as part of the mediation process between people and the
physical world at different stages in their biographies.
Even though material culture does provide a most appropriate arena for the discussion of the
social characteristics of design, nevertheless the starting point for this account commences
within the field of design history; because it is from there that the project of this journey can
best fulfil its purpose – to challenge visuality and aesthetics (good design) as a prime factor in
the study of designed objects. Design history made a definite move away from its parent
discipline – art history -some time ago. For in spite of the all-embracing attempts to integrate
‘commercial art' and industrially mass-produced products in the ‘new art history' of the eighties,
[4] its subsequent re-categorisation as visual culture failed to consider its materiality and the
most distinctive qualities which make design different from art in its relationship to the
everyday, the ordinary and the banal. And significantly it is this relationship with the generic that
has been the focus of exhibitions such as ‘Material Culture'[5] at the Hayward Gallery in London
in 1997 in which the curators sought to bring together the work of artists with a common
interest in ‘the object in itself, as raw material, found or functional thing and in relation to wider
scuptural and artistic concerns'.[6]Similarly the increasing standing of the crafts in the expressive
arts can in part be explained by the way they call attention to the skill and beauty of handmade
processes. While at the same time we find design practioners, critics and historians currently
showing an interest in ugliness and ‘undesign' as seen in the recent ‘Stealing Beauty' exhibition
held at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London in 1999.[7]
Strictly speaking design is both the product and the process that conceptualises an aesthetic
and functional solution to industrially produced goods – from garments to potato peelers and
from cars to buildings. But that is not the end of the story. If it were, there would be little point
in clearing a space to discuss design as producing a different type of object to that of art. In
some contexts it could even be said to serve the same kind of expressive functions. It is more a
matter of context. For engineers design has nothing to do with aesthetics, it is strictly
operational. Design has tried, unsuccessfully to straddle aesthetics and engineering, resulting in
an equivalent to two cultures, analogous to the art/science divide, with two very different
definitions of design and a division of labour between the stylist who is in charge of the
envelope for the works supplied by the engineer. This was made apparent in the Design History
Society conference[8] held at the School of Design at Huddersfield University where the aim was
to stimulate more contact between different types of practitioners, historians and theoreticians.
In order to further that dialogue here, design is posited as the counterpart to art in order to
challenge that divide. Whereas art enchants the ordinary object and makes it special, design
disenchants it. Making design a ‘thing' returns it from the display shelf, the collection, the
museum or art gallery to the factory floor, the warehouse shelf or the forgotten corner at the
back of a cupboard where it forms part of the physical effects belonging to an individual, a
household, a nation, a culture, the world of goods. In the same way the once highly valued
paintings by a painter who has gone out of fashion can be deposed from a position of honour in
the academy to become a thing hidden away in the museum store room. The spotlight of
academic or critical interest appears mainly to focus on the object as celebrity and spectacle,
when it is ‘new', popular, highly acclaimed, sensational and above all – visible; or at the moment
of its downfall from grace when, for example, it is exposed as inauthentic. But what doesn't
seem to attract much attention is that larger part of the designed object's biography when it is
no longer sacred, when it forms part of the disordered everyday clutter of the mundane, and
joined the disarray of wild things that don't quite fit anywhere – the undisciplined.
While the ‘new' art and design histories, represented by journals such as Block, [9] have revised
and problematised ‘historical facts' by subjecting them to critical scrutiny allowing a
contemporary gloss to be added so that it was no longer possible for historians to assert the
authority of a heroic account of modern classics, the problem of continuing to see design as a
visual medium remained unchallenged. Thus the tendency to study design as if it were the same
as fine art, requiring an educated eye to appreciate its formal qualities, remained and remains
embedded within the discipline. That is not to say that representation, and all that the practice
of interpreting meaning from visual images entails, is discounted as a method of valuing design
either functionally, aesthetic-ally or purely as a conduit of meaning. The impact of
foregrounding the language-like characteristics of the visual have contributed so greatly to its
understanding that this study could not have been envisaged without the platform that those
studies have provided.
At the crudest level the model of design history rooted in Ruskinian principles of the arts and
crafts movement which has insisted that its duty lay mainly in considering ‘good design', has not
just omitted vast swathes of artefacts, increasing incrementally with the rising prosperity and
economic ambitions of nation states, but disregards the social life of things that unfolds beyond
the initial commodity stage. Recently sociology has taken on the investigation of consumption
as a social activity using the study of products such as the Sony Walkman[10] to provide concrete
examples of the physical embodiment of culture in the form of manufactured goods. But there
are still relatively few examples that reveal the impact of economic and educational institutions
in the creation of products for the market that chart the complete biography of the object,
following it as it passes through the retail check-out into everyday life.
The aim of this study is to present some critical perspectives and suggest some ways of
theorising design to include the less well-ordered things that inhabit the material world, beyond
interpretations that confine it to a catalogue of pristine aesthetic objects. To locate design
within a social context as a meaningful part of peoples' lives means integrating objects and
practices within a culture of everyday life where things don't always do as they are told nor go
according to plan. Although the historical dimension is an important aspect of the project, this
work does not purport to provide ‘a history' nor a fully formulated theory. Its main intention is
to offer a tool box with some tentative definitions (Part I), themes (Part II) and contexts (Part III)
with which to get started in thinking about how to make sense of the clutter of things that
humans make, exchange and surround themselves with on this crowded planet at the beginning
of the third millennium.
Part I explores questions around the definitions of ‘design' and ‘things' in order to distinguish
them from each other as different kinds of things, while also considering how they both form
part of the same material world. Chapter 1 defines design as ‘things with attitude' where the
designer's intention is made apparent through a strong visual statement. The institutional
conventions that have defined the principles of good design within the modern movement have
tended to domi-nate the discourse of design drowning out the more ‘everyday' type of things
which form the greater part of the material world. Current changes that include a more ‘material
culture' approach can accommo-date the type of things defined in Chapter 2 – ‘design in the
lower case'. Ordinary things do not depend quite so much on meaning thrust upon them for
marketing purposes. Once they enter the realm of the ordinary they evade notice and become
absorbed into peoples' lives where they are no longer ‘a taste thing', but become part of an
individual's personal possessions that go towards forming a sense of individuality within a group
that share the same values. The rediscovery of ‘things' by design theoreticians confirms the turn
away from the immateriality encouraged by theories of representation that reduce all meaning
to language. The last Chapter 3 in Part I discusses the dynamic character of artefacts used to
negotiate change at a social and individual level positing design as a dynamic process.
Authenticity, the subject of Chapter 4 is discussed through a case study of reproduction
furniture, a type of artefact well suited to demonstrate the way in which it only becomes an
issue with modern design theory that insists on originality, a concept entirely foreign to trade
practices where the design process was integral to the production process and depended on
repetition. The importance given to historical specificity as a means of referring to authenticity
and maintaining a link with the past, embedded in certain types of material artefacts like
furniture, becomes particularly pertinent in a period characterised by rapid change. In contrast
to the sense of continuity objectified in reproduction furniture, one of the types of artefact best
suited to embody ephemerality providing a material means of keeping in touch with the
present, is textiles and fashion – the subject of Chapter 5. ‘Containment', the theme addressed
in Chapter 6, looks at the way personal possessions form a conglomerate arrangement
sometimes referred to as ‘clutter'. It allows the study of things gone wild into an unruly
accumulation as well as an orderly arrangements of things as a form of ecology of personal
possessions, using as a case study the role of domestic things in materialising the construction
of self-identity.
Moving from the particular case studies of the middle section of the book, Part III opens up
three fundamental contexts, exploring the materiality of the everyday in terms of space, time
and the body. Context is abstract insofar as it is used to locate or position a subject,
nevertheless it is discussed here as a physical entity. Although each is treated in a separate
chapter there is a close interrelationship between them. Chapter 7 on space takes on a number
of popular phenomena such as ‘spec builders' vernacular' in order to apply various different
perspectives in the investigation of space as a social artefact. Chapter 8 concerns ‘time' and the
way in which people use things to establish a relationship to it to form their subjectivity. The
book ends with a consideration of the changing relationship between things and the body,
suggesting a transition with the passing of time from embodiment to disembodiment.
[1] These
disciplines however, although helpful, in the main still fall short when it comes to
dealing with physical things. For an exception see Miller,, D. Material Culture and Mass
Consumption , Oxford, Blackwell, 1987 , Chapter 6: ‘The Humility of Objects’, pp. 85-108.
[2]
Clifford,, H. 1999. ‘Introduction’ to Special Issue: Eighteenth-Century Markets and
Manufacturers in England and France, pp. 185–6. In journal of Design History , Vol. 12, No. 3.
[3] Some have argued that it is more than a field, but a discipline. See Prown,, J.D. 1982. ‘Mind
in Matter: An Introduction to Material Culture Theory and Method’. Winterthur Portfolio , Vol.
17 No. 1 . For a recent review see Attfield,, J. 1999. ‘Beyond the Pale: Reviewing the
relationship between Material Culture and Design History’ in Journal of Design History , Vol 12,
No. 4, pp. 373–80 .
[4] Pointon,, M. 1986. History of Art: A Students’ Handbook . London: Unwin Hyman, pp. 14–32 .
[5]
[5]
‘Material Culture: The Object in British Art of the 1980s and 90s’ was shown in the Hayward
Gallery, London from 3 April to 18 May 1997.
[6]
‘Material Culture: The Object in British Art of the 1980s and 90s’, Hayward Gallery leaflet,
1997 (unpaginated).
[7]
‘Stealing Beauty: British Design Now’ (exhibition catalogue) London: ICA.
[8]
The Design History of Society, founded in 1977, is based in Britain, has an international
membership, publishes a quarterly newsletter and refereed Journal of Design History. It holds
an annual conference in one of the many UK educational institutions that offer degree courses
on design practice, history and theory. See [Link]
[9]
Block was a journal published between 1979 and 1989 by a group of academics in what was
then the Department of Art History and Related Studies at Middlesex Polytechnic (now
University of Middlesex), concerned with the strategies of cultural practice commited to a
socialist agenda.
[10] du, P., Hall,, S. et al. 1997. Doing Cultural Studies: The Story of the Sony Walkman . London:
Sage .
