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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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Figure 2. The phases
of a product’s career in
the market
In general, domestication studies belong to the broader field of adoption
studies. Pedersen & Ling offer an outline of strategies that focus on the adoption
of products (Pedersen & Ling 2003) (Figure 1). Other strategies that focus
on adoption are actor-network-theory (Latour 2005), research on the social
construction of technologies (MacKenzie & Wajcman 1985), and, for example,
studies on the adoption of fashions (Vejlgaard 2008). Each of these would be
on the left side in Figure 2 because, like diffusion studies (Rogers 1962), they
are interested in how innovations and, for example, fashions spread within culture
or within a particular community. It seems that domestication research is
a rare strategy in that it studies the consequences of adoption.
The field of domestication studies is a rather small area within the social
sciences. The principal literature in the field so far consists of four collections
of articles (Silverstone & Hirsch 1992; Lie & Sørensen 1996; Silverstone 2005;
Berker et al. 2006) and several monographs (Silverstone 1994; Pantzar 1996;
Silverstone 1999; Morley 2000; Lally 2002; Haddon 2004; Peteri 2006; Rantavuo
2008). Overall, the research strategy has received the most attention in the
UK and Nordic countries.
The notion that products, especially the various technologies and media, can
be domesticated in a similar way as animals and plants is an analogy developed
by British social scientists in the 1980s. Researchers at that time were especially
interested in how ordinary people cope with an increasingly digitalised and
technological environment and what kinds of consequences such digitalisation
will have on everyday life. Central to the idea of domestication are the
notions that objects cross over the theoretical boundaries between the public
market and private household and that the meanings of objects change when
they transcend those boundaries. The careers of objects occur in cycles that link
consumption and production. Not only are material products domesticated, but
also, and maybe more importantly, the immaterial products, such as symbols,
ideas, ideologies and beliefs, become domesticated.
APPROPRIATION
DOMESTICATION
Conversion
Product design Manufacturing Commodification
Objectification
Incorporation
Conversion