Lataa ilmaiseksi

D W E L L I N G W I T H D E S I G N
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stems from the long careers of many of the products in the homes. Most of
the households in the study used and stored vintage Finnish designs. Since
the items have long history, it is easy to talk about them and defining them as
designed takes less effort than seeing couple of years old computer as designed.
Some households were also explicitly connected to history by collecting vintage
pieces and taking the history of the local environment into account. In
addition, recent retrospective fashion probably plays a part in this nostalgic
flavour. The fashion reflects collective taste, which finds vintage and reproduced
designs from around the 1960s to be fashionable, or least not out of place in
contemporary interiors (Blumer 1969a).
The sense of nostalgia probably relates to the feeling of having too much
stuff that many of the interviewees mentioned. It is interesting to contrast my
findings with those of Kirsten Marie Raahauge, who visited Danish middle
class homes (Raahauge 2007). Her key finding about the households was that
they generally aspired to and had already accomplished transparency and spaciousness
in their apartments. She writes that,
This strive towards openness concerning space and towards closeness concerning
objects are in a roundabout way part of the same complex: a wish to
have a house that is manageable, easy to clean, emanating affluence of space,
freedom to choose and a way to show who you are through your house and its
objects. There are no secret cupboards, no dark corners and no ambiguities in
the interior decorations. (Raahauge 2007 282)
When studying the Danish household practices of object management more
closely, she found that nearly all of the households in her study were following
two guiding principles:
The first rule, something into the house means something else out of the
house, shows how things are keenly selected and avoided. The second rule,
use your things or get rid of them, converts the value of the objects from a
relational (hau) to a functional (practicality) aspect. (Raahauge 2007 288)
The Danish households had found a way of dealing with the products that their
Finnish counterparts often found to be the most challenging: the unwanted
gifts and heirlooms. According to Raahauge, heirlooms and gifts have become
“dirt” in the anthropological sense, matters out of place in contemporary consumer
society. This is because gifts and inherited items are difficult to classify
since, most often, the items have no current use, and therefore, no meaning in