Lataa ilmaiseksi

to call the latter designs “distant” because often I got the impression – and, for
instance, Ilmari stated it explicitly – that the interviewee wanted to create a
distance between the design and the household. These were the products that
had “nothing to do with me”.
Yet, the designs were in the apartment and the people continued to live with
them. Based on this, it started to seem that living with products and appropriating
them must be more relaxed and random than what the literature would
make one assume.
From the home’s point of view, design appears quite different as opposed
to how professional design discourse and design exhibitions typically define
designs. The most obvious difference is that it seems not to matter whether
the product is beneficial, broken or branded when it comes to its integration
within the household. Broken televisions and valueless candle holders can be
much appreciated, while branded faucets and vases can be despised. Second,
even the designs that are held in great esteem are rarely the centre of attention.
To paraphrase John Lennon, design is what happens while we are busy doing
other things. This is, of course, very different from the professional attention
focused on design, in the drawing table, at design exhibition or in the media.
Third, based on my data, it seems that much of what takes place in the home
is a consequence of passivity and indifference rather than activity and interest.
The to-do designs remain in the to-do list and distant designs are kept at bay.
The households in the sample cared about and thought about their surroundings
a lot, but it would be misleading to assume that not caring and not minding
would not play important roles in the ways in which the interviewees dwell
with products. Probably the most common phrase that kept recurring during
the interviews was “it just came from somewhere”, which nicely reflects how
the home is to a great extent the result of random events that most people are
not particularly interested in controlling, preventing or taking note of.
Another common phrase was, “it is looking for its place”. On the one hand,
this could be taken as an implication that there is often something in the
designed product that makes it a bit difficult to fit into the existing spatial
and temporal organisation of the household. But on the other hand, such a
phrase also reflects the potential seen in the product. Designed products can
wait, sometimes for years, to find their best place within the home without
turning into trash and being disposed of.
The fourth notion is more theoretical. The domestication framework holds
that domesticated objects become invisible and mostly go unnoticed. From
that point of view, some designs become completely domesticated: these are
the intuitive interfaces and systems or ecologies of products running in the
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