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with the worlds of work and neighbourhood, extended and extendable family
and friends. (Silverstone 1993 286)
I acknowledge the difficulties in identifying a moral economy: the problems
are similar to those encountered in the actor-network theory, namely that it is
difficult to decide where the moral economy actually ends, what its boundaries
are and who its members are (Lehtonen 2008 147). Originally, the framework
that focused on the moral economy of the household emphasised family and
the sense of having a home. The idea was that moral economy is an instrument
with which family members achieve a shared sense of having a home (Silverstone
et al. 1992 19). While this may be true with the households in my sample,
the interviewees did not link the notion of dwelling with design to feelings of
having a home. Rather, the interviewees talked about having or achieving a
cosy or comfortable place within which to dwell.
In my research, I do not question or discuss whether the interviewees feel
that they have a home or who they consider to part of the moral economy. I
should say that the people I am talking about are first and foremost social
individuals who interpret the objects present in their lives through the process
of social interaction. And, so as not to make people overly “social”, I am
also assuming that an individual can engage in an interpretative dialogue with
him- or herself alone (Blumer 1969b 12–14). This understanding of people and
social sense-making has been formalised through the notion of symbolic interactionism
(Blumer 1969b). According to this framework, “human beings act
toward [physical, social or abstract] things on the basis of the meanings that
the things have for them”. Second, “the meaning of such things is derived from,
or arises out of, the social interaction that one has with one’s fellows”. Third,
“these meanings are handled in, and modified through, an interpretative process
used by the person in dealing with the things he [sic] encounters” (ibid. 2). As I
see it, symbolic interactionism deals with agencies, namely, who gets to decide
the meaning of a particular thing; it highlights the fact that it is not so much a
question of who (the thing or the human) but how the meanings of things are
created and maintained by humans through interpretative processes in a social
interaction (ibid. 3–4; 8–9).
Though the analysis is grounded in the moral economy of the household and
symbolic interactionism frameworks, I did not observe an ongoing living with
design (which could have been done, e.g., by videotaping each household for
several weeks), but, instead, I visited households and documented what took
place during the interview. During an interview, people, even if they would
want to, cannot draw a coherent and illustrative picture of the interviewer’s top-