To Understand a Culture, Study Its Things
Designers excel at thinking about form and function. They are less adept at thinking about objects as cultural expression, says Prasad Boradkar, an associate professor of Industrial Design at Arizona State University and author of a new book, Designing Things: The Cultural Meaning of Objects.
“It’s not a part of normal design discourse to talk about theory—to talk about how we [designers] think about objects,” he says. He hopes the book, which is an interdisciplinary look at the cultural meanings of the things we use every day and the designer’s role in that process, will be the impetus for more discussion.
The book also explores the worth of things, the making things, the greed imperative, planned obsolescence, and even fetish objects, all the while using product examples from companies like Nike, Bling H2O, and Herman Miller.
He was inspired to include Herman Miller in the book not just because of the iconic nature of some products but also because of the company’s values, including the way it embraced design early and for the right reasons, its emphasis on durability (the 12-year warranty), and sustainability. And he admires the way the company engages external designers. It’s a great way, he says, for the company to get “a fresh perspective every time.”
On an interesting note regarding the
“things” a culture makes and uses, I remember going to a museum as a child and seeing a collection of metal objects taken from a bunch of historical sites dating back to the pioneer days. All these pieces of weirdly curved metal had the same basic design. They’ve apparently found hundreds of them – they were a common household implement. The catch is that historians have literally no idea what this thing was used for. Apparently, there is no mention of this device in any written documents from the time period. It’s just something everyone would have known the use for – just like we know what a can opener is today.
So, it’s important to keep in mind that we interpret the “things” of another culture through the lens of our own. And we don’t always have all the information!
Daisy McCarty
http://www.sandiegocubicles.com/blog/