Objects in Flux - RMIT Research Repository - RMIT University

pert’ advice to support their claims, manufacturers cast alternative
modes of uses as both socially inappropriate and damaging to the
automobile. 3
• Contractual control: The Ford Motor Company used its contractual
relationship with Ford distributors to limit the availability of
conversion kits. In addition to this, by identifying specific uses as
violations of the warranty and service agreement, Ford effectively
confined users to its prescribed modes of use.
4 • Restricted product ecology: Through control of the automobile’s
distribution and sale, the Ford Motor Company could establish
a restricted ecology of products around the automobile and limit
consumer exposure to competing technologies and divergent uses.
• State regulation: By lobbying government regulators, manufacturers
and their representatives (specifically the American Tractor
Association), attempted to introduce laws that favored their
interpretation of object use and prohibited or stifled alternative
developments.
• Control through design: The physical qualities of the automobile
directly affected the affordances offered the user, and hence played a
major role in determining the uses to which the automobile was put.
The highly adaptable nature of the Ford Model-T design encouraged
diverse practices of use. Greater complexity of parts, use of propriety
components, and restricted access to internal workings may all
be deployed as design mechanisms to limit interpretative flexibility.
Control through design may also be achieved by introducing new
products to the market that compete with the functionality offered by
divergent use. The introduction of the Ford one-ton truck and Fordson
tractor are examples of this form of control through design.
Adopting the terminology of de Certeau, we may describe these control
mechanisms as ‘strategies’ that seek to create places in conformity
with ‘abstract models’ (de Certeau, 1984, p. 29). Operating from a
position of power, the Ford Motor Company and other manufacturers
were able to claim authority over the space that constituted automobile
use and dictate the ‘natural’ conditions of this space. This authority
far exceeds any form of ownership granted the consumer through the
act of purchase, for while the consumer may gain possession of the
object, the manufacturer continues to author the object even as it sits
Stategies of Control and Tactics of Use
4/ I use the term ‘product ecology’
here to describe the collection of
products, systems and people that
shape a consumer’s experience of a
specific product. This understanding
follows from Jodi Forlizzi’s use of the
term within the field of human-com-
puter interaction (HCI) (Forlizzi, 2007,
2008; Forlizzi and Battarbee, 2004).
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