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D W E L L I N G W I T H D E S I G N
80
Design brands made it possible for the interviewees to communicate with a
code language that reduced the complex networks of judgements to a single
handy tag. Names such as Stockmann, Artek, Ikea, Indiska, Bang&Olufsen
and Muurame are frequently used as tags or codes. Yet there is little coherency
about what the names and brands represent. For instance, it was clear that most
of designers and some of the non-designers openly despise Ikea, whereas the
rest either did not mention the brand or, like Rea, thought that it was just as
good as any other design company. On the other hand, while Janne, Laura and
Rea appreciate classic Finnish design (Artek and Tapio Wirkkala for example),
Asta openly and emphatically hates it and Hannele finds it a bit annoying
because she no longer likes the classic Finnish modernist design that she owns
and used to appreciate.
But even though both everyday language and branding offer an ample pool
of vocabulary for talking about design, it nevertheless is not always an easy
topic to discuss. One thing is that dwelling with design is deeply integrated
with everyday life, and, as such, it is a topic that the interviewees had not necessarily
thought about, so it was difficult for them to easily describe how they
were dwelling with design. One might say that I often caught people unawares.
Mervi, an interior designer, summarises this well:
M: After you’d visited the first time, I thought about my stuff, that’s to say
that I haven’t thought about them much, thought about what they’re
for. It’s like with clothes, shoes, bags, you think about those, but not
the things in your home, like, wondering why they are here. Or why
have I been looking at this thing and why, in the first place, did I
acquire it for this place and this spot. (Mervi 05 437-440)
Even so, some households in the sample ( Janne and Rea, for example) were
keenly interested in the designed products that they had in their home and
were quite prepared to talk about them. In general, all of the interviewees,
sometimes after a bit of prompting, were both interested and willing to talk
about their designed products.
On the other hand, when asked to think about and describe domestic design,
the very enterprise of dwelling with design often appeared to the interviewee
as contradictory and lacking a clear rationale by which it would be easy to
justify a product’s presence. Theo’s discussion of his interior decoration is an
example of this.