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ic, which in this case was their relationship with design. Rather, I got glimpses,
fragments, exaggerations, lapses, mistakes and downplaying, which is common
to all human communication, and the interview, though a special situation, is
no exception. Therefore, I want to emphasise that, though the data and my
interpretation hopefully tell about the interesting and general aspects of living
with design, they are not intended to serve as portraits of the interviewees and
their lives. In addition, I mostly interviewed one member of the household (the
exceptions are the Ylinen family, Sakari & Elisa, Kalle & Emma, and Sanna &
Kalevi). Therefore, the data does not encourage discussion about social meaning-making
or direct observations about the negotiations that take place over
design. Perhaps as a consequence, the picture is a comparatively peaceful one,
as opposed to, for example, domestication studies on the use of technologies
where members of a family may fight over the time and place that computers
should be used (Nieminen-Sundell & Pantzar 2003). Similar to the notion of
the moral economy of the household, the perspective of symbolic interactionism
is not a topic of research in and of itself (“how meanings are interpreted
and negotiated”). To summarize, both perspectives guiding the analysis – the
moral economy of the household framework and symbolic interactionism – are
very much about negotiations, but I have not studied those negotiations as
such. Instead, I have studied the context within which the negotiations take
place when design is making itself a part of people’s everyday lives. My definition
of what can be seen as a designed consumer good was so loose that I
assumed everybody would have some types of designed products, but I did not
assume that the design would have necessarily had any particular meaning. I
assumed, though, that all designs have some meaning to the people living with
them because the existing literature easily causes one to think that all products
are meaningful. That assumption, I am suggesting here, is often misguided.
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