The Screen and the Drum: On Form, Function, Fit and Failure in Contemporary Home Consumption

This paper explores consumers' connections to their domestic objects. Focusing on two particular objects (televisions and vacuum cleaners), the paper reflects upon why consumers desire particular domestic objects and how they assemble, arrange and use things in the home. It reveals how function...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Design and culture 2009-11, Vol.1 (3), p.307-328
Main Authors: Louise, Crewe, Nicky, Gregson, Alan, Metcalfe
Format: Article
Language:English
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:This paper explores consumers' connections to their domestic objects. Focusing on two particular objects (televisions and vacuum cleaners), the paper reflects upon why consumers desire particular domestic objects and how they assemble, arrange and use things in the home. It reveals how functionality is intimately infused with form, how design informs the consumption of everyday domestic objects and how both function and form can fail, deceive and trick. The mundane movements and moments that comprise homemaking encompass a whole suite of entanglements between object, subject, agency and space. In all sorts of ways this opens up exciting - but also difficult and perplexing - possibilities for consumer agency in the production of home. New kinds of temporality, the rapidity of fashion and design shifts, transformative technologies and new modes of fabrication require new forms of consumption knowledge, competence and skill. (Author abstract)
ISSN:1754-7075
DOI:10.2752/174967809X12556950208907