This course aims to introduce students (especially the graduate industrial design students) to the material culture and consumption literature sociologically. Tha main aim is to help them construct the relatinship between the focus of their profession and its sociological account and aspects.

Course Description

Drawing from its historical course, design profession, more specifically industrial design/product design, has been positioned discursively in relation to political economy of production and technological systems and in relation to symbolic and representational schemes of aesthetics and communication, always with reference to the workings of individual and social value system(s). Definitions of design and designing -with or without an emphasis on its industrial and/or product aspect-, accordingly what and how designer does have changed almost invariably over the course of time, thus positioning the profession inherently ever at a discursive perpetuation. Not unexpectedly, as part of the quest for understanding the role of designer and that of the meaning and value of designed object, which lead to “ideas about the status of objects and hence about the kinds of value that designers add” (Shove et.al 2007, The Design of Everyday Life, New York: Berg Publications, pp.: 119), this was reflected on the profession’s methodological workings.

Directed, basically, towards meeting the needs of users, designer is defined as the creator and agency of value of an object on which the essential relation between user and object is based. However, as Shove et. al. (2007) point out “Whilst the ambition of meeting need has helped sustain the status and identity of the design profession as a whole, it embodies and reproduces an essentialist view of demand and value that is at odds with the more constructivist approaches of much contemporary social science. Ironically, designers’ efforts to understand the user have been framed in such a way that they obscure the crucial point that rather than simply meeting needs, artefacts are actively implicated in creating new practices and with them new patterns of demands.” (9-10)

Thus, based on the idea that “Ordinary objects are extraordinarily important in sustaining and transforming the details and the design of everyday life” (Shove et. al. 2007, 2) and “that designers and designed artefacts contribute to the emergence of collective conventions and shared practices” (Shove et. al. 2007, 133-134), hence the design and use of ordinary objects are inherently social, this course –as a seminar course- aims to introduce students to a sociological and anthropological perspective on the objects/products of everyday life. Therefore, it aims to focus on current paradigms in material culture and consumption studies. Central to the course is to come to grips with the socio-cultural significance of the consumption and using patterns of products of everyday life.

Thus, topics to cover throughout the course are basically

consumption and material culture

              foundations

              theoretical approaches

disciplinary approaches

everyday life/practice

exemplary works on consumption and material culture