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to, show off to. As against actual observers it is an interiorized image of the
other that can actually be worked on and fed into the aspirations and labour
of the occupants. (Clarke 2001 42)
When read literally, these accounts about home imply that the evolution of
home takes place through the conscious and careful adoption and rejection
of material and immaterial objects – after all, it is the home’s identity that is
at stake. Especially in the early writings, the seriousness of domestication is
emphasised:
4 S T O R I N G D E S I G N
At stake is the capacity of the household or the family to create and sustain its
autonomy and identity […] as an economic, social and cultural unit. […]
The household engages in a process of value creation in its various daily
practices: practices that are firmly grounded in, but also constitutive of, its
position in space and time and which provide the bases for the achievement
of what Anthony Giddens defines as ‘ontological security’ […] At stake too
[…] is the family/household’s ability to display, both to itself and to others,
through the objectification of those practices, its competence and its status as a
participant in a complex public economy. (Silverstone et al. 1992 19)
159
I do not have a quarrel with the idea that households have distinct identities –
the households in this study all had their own styles and thought about design
in their own ways – but I think it would be misleading to maintain that their
identities were constructions that could be read from their possessions. If we
allow that not everything in a home is part of a household’s identity, it becomes
a lot easier to explain the very common situation that people store, use and
display designed products that they do not like or care about. It seems to me
that, rather than being fragile, household identities are so robust that they can
withstand inconsistencies and randomness in the home’s “moral, emotional,
evaluative and aesthetic environment” far more readily than what the existing
literature easily leads one to believe. At least, it is seldom the wrong design that
puts a household’s identity at stake.
In this chapter, I will describe the designs stored in the households by making
use of just three broad categories: great designs, to-do designs and distant
designs. The categorisation is based on the notion that designs have a real role
in the daily life of a household, but that, at the same time, the designs are not
necessarily parts of a household’s identity, its sense of self.