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D W E L L I N G W I T H D E S I G N
72
“Experimental objects” refer to objects whose appropriation started as an experiment
and which required a series of negotiations and the initiator prompting
other people involved in the appropriation. Similarly, “extra object” refers to
objects that are, according to the interviewee, not necessarily redundant, but
extra in the sense that they are not really part of the interior decoration and
therefore not spatio-temporally firmly integrated within the household. An
example of “extras” is a set of furniture and the works of art that Hannele had
in her dining room in 2004. The objects came from her mother’s apartment and
she had not quite decided what to do with them. “Extras” are, therefore, usually
also “objects that wait”, a category which includes products that are waiting for
someone to, for instance, repair or collect them. Sometimes an object simply
waits for someone to make a decision about its destiny inside or outside the
apartment. Such objects are “looking for their place” and, perhaps, also “rare”,
“useful” and “seasonal”.
Apartments contain quite a lot of products that are not, for one reason or
another, currently present in the apartment. Laura’s comment is illustrative:
L: At the moment we don’t have a bookshelf as we have a big Lundia.
But we didn’t want to set it up again in this apartment because we’d
got fed up with Lundia (laughs) So we are about to have a bookshelf
covering the whole wall made here. […] So, we are going to live with
this uncomfortable lack of bookshelf for a long time until we get it.
So it’s not like we (pause). It’s not an option to go to Ikea and buy a
ready-made bookshelf for the meantime. (Laura 04 78-94)
This comment involves several bookshelves, although none of them was physically
present during the interview. There is an old Lundia bookshelf, which is
unlikely to enter the apartment any time soon. Then there is a second bookshelf,
which is hopefully going to materialise in the future. Finally, there is the somewhat
abstract Ikea bookshelf, which will quite likely not make an appearance
either. All of the bookshelves are “absent objects”, while one of them is also
a “future object”, and the comment concerning the Ikea bookshelf indirectly
acknowledges the popular category of “placeholders”, that is, objects that are
merely filling the void in a place where something else should or will be in the
future.
While the list of categories is based on the interviewees’ comments and
product biographies, it is not intended to be exhaustive. For example, several
of the categories suggest their opposites – while there are objects that are “easy
to dispose of ”, there are also other products that difficult to get rid of. What