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Wild Things: The Material Culture of Everyday Life - Coggle Diagram
Wild Things: The Material Culture of Everyday Life
Things
Things with attitude
Things can be defined as things with attitude, whether to perform a specific task, make a statement, objectify moral values, express group or individual identity, to represent status, or to flaunt power.
Things seem always to have been there, defining the world physically
Things don’t necessarily call attention to themselves and are only noticed when really needed or if they went missing
design in the lower case
As design became a commodity it started to be used as a way of representation and identity
Material culture studies has a direct application to the interpretation of the material world in the 20th century Western context
Things and the dynamics of social change
Authenticity
The legitimacy of an object or experience depends on knowledge that distinguish the authentic from the inauthentic.
Uniqueness is created at the moment of conception when something unreproducible happens.
Ephemerality
Relates directly to the aspects of modernity that depend on innovation.
Fashion has a special blend of in-your-face brash confidence of unadulterated truth, but it doesn’t last long enough to convince.
A condition that materializes uncertainty – now you see it, now you don't.
Containment
The frame and map on which the everyday world is reflected and an understanding is gained.
The design process professes to be able to predict and control the product of its invention within specific social contexts.
Themes
Continuity: authenticity and the paradoxical nature of reproduction
Whereas reproductions can be said to be honest copies, fakes are one of the wilder type of things which have much to reveal about the way that authenticity has been valued at different times
Reproduction furniture illustrates the role of design in the objectification of authenticity raising the contradictory opposition between the ‘real’ and the artificial
Change: The ephemeral materiality of identity
Clothes have a particularly intimate quality because they lie next to the skin and inhabit the spaces of private life helping to convey the inner self with the outside world
The ephemeral quality of textiles illustrates changes in the object/subject relation showing the ephemeral and constantly changing aspects of identity formation that characterizes the modern mentality
It is the nature of the material that makes cloth so receptive to the nuances of meaning associated with the materialization of identity
Containment: The ecology of personal possessions
Cutter is ‘a form of sublimation’
Objects in the home were selected by the person to attend to regularly and have close at hand, that create permanence in the intimate life of a person, and therefore that are most involved in making up his or her identity
‘Private space is distinct from, but always connected with, public space. In the best circumstances, the outside space of the community is dominated, while the indoor space of family life is appropriated.'
Contexts
Space: where things take place
The dwelling can be conceptualized as a physical reference point from where people relate to their inner and outer lives, their pasts, presents and futures. It is also a space for the transaction of individuality, a starting point and return from the external world.
Design does not necessarily make spaces social, people do that.
The suburb can represent the space where the middle class constructed its identity.
Time: bringing things to life
Time is experienced through duration, frequency, longevity, and change, through the relation of the body to the material world of things
Design that embodies modernity through the eternal process of renewal assumes the benefit of progress in innovation
Existential time provides a way of looking at how individuals form their relationship with time by observing how their subjectivity is objectified in material form.
The way subjects make connections with their past can be observed by the construction of their personal material worlds.
The Body: The threshold between nature and culture
The body is the threshold between the interior subjective self (the individual) and the exterior object world (society)
The body is constituted within social relations in that people can only establish their individual identity through their relationships with others.
Class, age, gender and sexuality are all inscribed on the body, contributing to the formation of self in terms of individuation, individuality and subjectivity.