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D W E L L I N G W I T H D E S I G N
Summary
246
Some of the households in the sample were on occasions living in what
really could be called a purgatory – not feeling good about not being able
to act or make the types of decisions that they apparently would have wanted
to make. More often, though, the term limbo is more to the point: the whole
household or some designs in the apartment were on a waiting plane, waiting
for someone to make a decision, for someone’s taste to change or, for example,
for the children to grow up. The limbo needs not be painful; it can just
be a calm and slow way of dwelling (Kopomaa 2009). That it is taken here
to be a topic in its own stems from my realisation that passivity should also
receive attention. Paying attention to not doing and to indifference in general,
would probably require method development because people more easily can
talk about what they have done rather than what they have not done; the list
of actions is always of course finite, whereas the list of what has not been done
is potentially indefinite. Nevertheless, even in my sample there were notions of
passivity, indifference, forgetting and neglect connected with design. In many
instances, this did not bother the interviewees at all. Not doing and not minding
seems to be a part of the ordinary course of everyday life, and perhaps has
to do with the complexity of how ordinary people typically dwell. To take an
example, one of the interviewees (Anniina) could be seen as controlling her
dwelling through design to an extent that there was very little design that she
did not care about. She was exceptional, however, since the other interviewees
could point to more examples of design that they did not like. Nevertheless,
even Anniina found her laptop to be “ugly and thick”, but said that she was not
interested enough to do anything about it.
It seems to me that it is exceptional to live only with the types of designs
that one is actually connected to. And, to invoke David Halle’s critique of
acquisition being motivated by seeking a sense of status (Halle 1993), very