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D W E L L I N G W I T H D E S I G N
226
The analogy is based on my analysis of the data as I tried to understand
how design is used in the home. Apparently, design facilitates a huge array of
domestic activities. The idea that “home is a machine for dwelling” is an analogy
that often hovered over my computer, but I was not entirely satisfied with
it because there were so many ruptures and halts in the stories that the interviewees
told me. I dismissed the machine analogy, but questions still remained:
Why is dwelling with design not accomplished more smoothly? Why is there
never enough storage space for unwanted gifts that cannot be thrown away?
Why are there annoying piles of stuff and how come favourite items get forgotten?
But then a pattern started to emerge from the interviews, or rather,
from the mapping of activities: dwelling is not simply a background context
for design; instead, dwelling materialises through the often design-intensive
actions people do on a daily basis. Dwelling does not happen elegantly and
without ruptures because it consists of often contradictory lines of action, of
practices, which people rarely are motivated to iron out.
On the other hand, dwelling is not entirely random. In fact, much of what
is done in a home to make it fit for dwelling seems to make use of the same
kinds of curating skills that it takes to run a professional museum, a gallery or a
hotel. Indeed, it seems to me that the home is often seen through these distinct
frames of mind: it is defined, metaphorically speaking, as “a gallery”, “a museum”
or “a hotel”, depending on the practice one is involved with, and the appropriation
of products is curated from that specific point of view. The ideal design
facilitates all three practices. In reality, though, ideal products may be rarer
than what designers would like to think; rather than aiming for an ideal type
of design, households often settle on making the best possible or least irritating
compromises. But one should not stretch the analogy too far. When professional
curators are running hotels, museums and galleries, they can be seen as
striving to fulfil some sort of branded vision of perfection. Homes rarely reach
an easily discernible level of perfection precisely because the home is not a professionally
run branded hotel, museum or gallery; instead, dwelling is managed
through combining kindred practices that are often incompatible. A home may
be perfect, but the perfection is usually reached through a kaleidoscopic, even
conflicting, vision and therefore, it is incoherent and unpredictable in a way
that a branded institution’s “front stage” rarely is (Goffman 1959).
In hindsight, during the interviews it was comparatively difficult to get comments
about design relating to the home as a hotel because the design was often
anonymous and the practices mundane and routine; therefore, they were not
easy to talk about. Design relating to the kitchen, to cooking and eating, is an
exception. The analogy of the home as a museum was easier to discuss, because