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D W E L L I N G W I T H D E S I G N
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products domesticate, because that is what designers think design does: that
design is important. A null hypothesis would have been that design has no role
and that products become domesticated in the way that they do, irrespective of
their designed properties.
After initially analysing the household interviews and photographs, I could
say that design does have a role — most people would not be pleased to live
with a random selection of products and they would not want a market where
there is only one type of design of a certain product. That design matters
became clear. It also became clear that design’s role in the moral economy is
closely linked with how a household conceptualises design. In that sense, I
could say that the quality and style of the domestication of a product do not
depend on design but on people.
Then, Roger Silverstone’s last article on domestication (Silverstone 2006)
outlined the domestication process with a new twist: what had been previously
been called domestication was now being called appropriation, whereas
domestication was being formulated as a cycle that covers product’s entire
lifespan from the designer’s table through manufacturing and marketing to the
end user, who then, by conversion, acts as a feedback giver for designers who
monitor the environment to inform and inspire design work.
At that point, based on my analysis of the data, I had already outlined two
themes that could be discussed as my research findings. I called the first of the
themes “dwelling work” based on the notion that people do huge amounts of
design-intensive work to facilitate the way in which they dwell. On the one
hand, households renovate, redecorate, craft and tune apartments and products.
On the other hand, dwelling itself consists of and is facilitated by the presence
of distinguishable practices. From my data, I could recognise three separate
practices of running a home as a hotel, as a museum and as a gallery. These
practices cover the major points on managing the appropriation of products,
which are, to put it simply, about selecting the product and then storing and
using the product. Consequently, the “dwelling work” theme was mostly about
the type of physical home that people create by appropriating physical design.
The physical home has got its spiritual counterpart – the moral economy of
the household. I decided to call that aspect in my data “pleasure work”, because
“feeling good” appeared to be a desirable way of dwelling, which design facilitates
at least occasionally. The “pleasure work” theme was about the spiritual
moral economy a household creates by conceptualising design in a certain
manner.