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D W E L L I N G W I T H D E S I G N
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it contains the subcategories of chairs, tables and sofas. The categorisation provided
by the interviewees is based on a different logic, but taking a hold of
that logic required adopting an interviewee’s, indeed a “user’s”, point of view.
Reaching such an understanding of the designed products is important to my
work, since, to give an example, the category of “objects that are easy to dispose
of ” might refer to any kind of product, because defining what is easy to dispose
of is highly relative and context-bound. It can be said that one has to know
about the moral economy of the household in order to have an understanding
of what objects might be included in the category – what items the particular
household believes are “easy to dispose of ”. But the opposite is true as well: if
we know what objects are defined as “easy to dispose of ”, that knowledge provides
access to the workings of the moral economy.
On the surface, talking about style and design is a paradoxical enterprise.
Design is defined based on, for example, its ability to stand time, but many
things that also stand time are not defined as design. The preferred style is outlined
by broad adjectives (“old”, “fun”), but only a very limited selection of, for
example, stylistically “old” items are actually seen as suitable to a household’s
style. In a similar vein, design names and brands are used as code words; they
supposedly communicate a shared understanding of what style and value the
brand represents, but the same design brand conveys different styles and values
to different interviewees.
According to Pierre Bourdieu, taste, subsequent style and also the competence
with which cultural products are talked about are all affected by formal
education more than by social background (Bourdieu 1979). The impact
of education diminishes in favour of social background the more the object
of taste and style recedes from the official curriculum, although formal education
provides ideas about what and how to approach and classify objects of
inquiry. Interior decoration is one of Bourdieu’s examples of an area that is not
included in the curricula, but where people are constantly making judgements
about taste. In my sample, roughly half of the interviewees had received their
education at the former Helsinki University of Art and Design. The education
did not seem to have much of an effect on the competence or the vocabulary
with which they talked about design in the home.
Perhaps the most intriguing aspect is the notion that, although products
“mean nothing”, they still must meet the particular preferences of the household.
Although research on the home often emphasises the emotional and expressive
links with products, psychologists have studied people for whom “[domestic]
objects […] have the paradoxical quality of meaning ‘almost nothing’ and yet
being ‘irreplaceable’” (Csikszentmihalyi & Rochberg-Halton 1981 164). This