Grand Designs: Consumer Markets and Home-Making

by Aneta Podkalicka, Esther Milne, Jenny Kennedy

Overview

This is the first academic book to examine the long running hit series Grand Designs, which occupies a significant place in the popular imagination internationally.

The authors apply an empirically grounded, critical perspective to the study of television to reveal how people use the program in their everyday lives. The emphasis on everyday uses and meanings combines creatively with understanding the program theoretically, textually and in terms of its production structures. This position challenges framings of the popular lifestyle and factual television genre that has been dominated by a neoliberal or governmentality perspective for many years.

Presented by British designer and writer, Kevin McCloud, Grand Designs follows the progress of home owners as they embark on design, renovation and building projects at almost always dizzying scales of endeavour. Understanding the program as both a text to analyse and a site ofmaterial impact, the book draws on interviews with production members, home renovators, building practitioners and audiences, as well as references to associated media formats to provide contextual depth to the analysis. The authors argue that, as a cultural object, the program is both shaped by and enacts social discourses of home-making, design value and taste. Navigating public, commercial and promotional logics, Grand Designs sparks new forms of cultural production and consumer markets.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781137578976
Publisher:	Palgrave Macmillan UK
Publication date:	11/29/2018
Edition description:	1st ed. 2018
Pages:	177
Product dimensions:	5.83(w) x 8.27(h) x (d)

About the Author

Aneta Podkalicka is a researcher and lecturer in Communications and Media Studies at Monash University, Australia.

Esther Milne is Associate Professor of Media and Communication at Swinburne University, Australia.

Jenny Kennedy is a postdoctoral research fellow in Media and Communications at RMIT University, Australia.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction.- 2. Production: visual style, narrative structure, and the viewer renovator.- 3. Home: Ideas of home, and the work of home-making.- 4. Consumption: the ethical and the extravagant.- 5. Innovation: from represented novelty to transformation in practice.- 6. Markets: creating value in media industries and consumption cultures.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“Few lifestyle programmes achieve the popularity and longevity of Grand Designs, so why has it received such little critical attention? Thankfully, Podkalicka, Milne and Kennedy offer this book as a serious redress. They deliver us a rare treat in rich analysis of the culture of production and consumption of a programme which has thrived precisely because it speaks to the heart of contemporary anxieties about the self’s right to ‘have it all’ amid global insecurities. Read this book to understand how television navigates, shapes and tests our cultural fears.” (Helen Wood, Professor of Media and Communication, University of Leicester, UK. Editor, European Journal of Cultural Studies)