Lataa ilmaiseksi

little in the interviewees’ comments suggested that the object in question had
been adopted in order to impress others; often the interviewees did not have a
clear motivation at all for adopting a particular design. Janne’s account in the
2004 interview of what had happened to one of his favourite items provides a
nice example of what I find problematic with the current research on products.
In 2004, Janne talked about the Wirkkala plate that he owned with apparent
pleasure and admiration. On the one hand, he liked its minimalist design, but
he also was explicitly pleased that the item is rare and sought by collectors.
That comment is one of the few in the data that made me think that one
source of pleasure could be the rarity of an item, thus implying that status
was one of the reasons that the item was appropriated for the home. However,
neither his admiration of minimalism nor the rarity of the item prevented
Janne from forgetting about the item once it had been put away. My point
is that such forgetfulness is more of a rule than an exception: it is integral to
our dealings with products and design that we most often do not even think
about them.
Ossi Naukkarinen, in his writings about the aesthetics of everyday life, provides
a good but also rare example of a discussion about how people do not
actively think about products. His discussion concerns appearance (Naukkarinen
1998, 2000), and he outlines how it is characteristic of everyday aesthetics
(as opposed to the aesthetics of the rare and exceptional, of which art is the
most traditional topic) that we do not pay much attention to an item’s appearance
and that often the aesthetics of personal appearance has become more a
matter of routine, without people paying much attention to it at all. Billy Ehn
and Orvar Löfgren (Ehn & Löfgren 2010) provide an illustrative example of
this in their discussion about doing one’s make-up:
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One woman said that being asked to describe her morning makeup routine,
which she said usually took ten to fifteen minutes, made her realise how little
she usually reflects about it and its complexity. There are many details
that have to be organised into order and rhythm: cleaning the face, putting
on foundation, adding shadow to the eyelids, brushing the eyelashes, using
a mascara pen for the eyebrows, and finally applying lipstick and rouge, to
name a few of the basic details. The hands move fast and confidently among
the heap of tools, containers, and other props in the cosmetic bag, searching
for the right ingredients, colours, and mixes. “Even if I have done this a
thousand times,” she said, “it still calls for concentration and a steady hand.”
But this does not prevent her mind from wandering. Putting on makeup is
for her a moment of daydreaming and planning.(Ehn & Löfgren 2010 96)