Lataa ilmaiseksi

D W E L L I N G W I T H D E S I G N
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on the relations between Finnish taste and social class that, in general, Finnish
society is comparatively homogeneous and mainstream choices are appreciated
(Liikkanen 2009). There are more similarities than differences between
the social classes and, in any case, most Finns identify with the middle class.
Nevertheless, Pertti Alasuutari, in his study on Finnish taste, finds that there
are some grounds for arguing that the well-educated people living in big cities
have different taste than the educated people living elsewhere, because there
are more possibilities to have a more selective taste in the larger cities (Alasuutari
2009).
As a result, my research sample is ashamedly elitist: the households are surrounded
by a comparatively diverse design market, they are often well educated,
have professional expertise and, in general, can be seen to have lots of what
Pierre Bourdieu calls symbolic capital (Bourdieu 1979). Some of the households
even have an abundance of all three types of symbolic capital – they have
got the social networks, financial means and cultural know-how to engage with,
among other things, design. The question I wanted to study was that, given
their resources and possibilities, how does design appear to the interviewees
and how do they conceive of design in their speech and make use of it in their
households as part of everyday, ordinary life.
Throughout the study, I do not use the interviewees’ real names for the sake
of privacy. In addition, I made a conscious decision to not ask the interviewees
about their age, yearly income or marital status because I thought that those
kinds of personal details are not necessary when the research is not about
the persons in question, and I wanted the interviewees to really feel that the
research was not about their personal ways of living. Instead, with their help I
am trying to describe something more general about design in domestic settings.
Therefore, I refer to their marital status if that was mentioned and “partner”
if it was not. In addition, I forgot to ask at least about education from
some of our interviewees and a couple of early interviews were documented
only in notes. All of this makes the reporting a bit inconsistent, but it does not,
I hope, make the reading too difficult.
Since I was doing basic research on ordinary, business-as-usual living with
design, there was very little I could use as a means of locating who to interview.
I tried to recruit interviewees through snowball sampling, but it only resulted
in a couple of additional interviewees. It is not that I would not have gotten
suggestions about possible recruits, but the people that were recommended
to me were mostly notorious design collectors. I did not contact collectors
because I wanted the focus to be on the ordinary, everyday appropriation and
use of design. Therefore, to recruit interviewees, I made use of the personal