Wild Things: The Material Culture of Everyday Life

by Judy Attfield, Daniel Miller (Introduction), Eduardo Staszowski (Editor), Clive Dilnot (Editor)

Overview

What do things mean? What does the life of everyday objects reveal about people and their material worlds? Has the quest for 'the real thing' become so important because the high-tech world of total virtuality threatens to engulf us?

This pioneering book bridges design theory and anthropology to offer a new and challenging way of understanding the changing meanings of contemporary human-object relations. The act of consumption is only the starting point of object's “lives”. Thereafter they are transformed and invested with new meanings and associations that reflect and assert who we are. Defining designed things as “things with attitude” differentiates the highly visible fashionable object from ordinary aretefacts that are too easily taken for granted.

Through case studies ranging from reproduction furniture to fashion and textiles to 'clutter', the author traces the connection between objects and authenticity, ephemerality and self-identity. Beyond this, she shows the materiality of the everyday in terms of space, time and the body and suggests a transition with the passing of time from embodiment to disembodiment.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781350070714
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	09/17/2020
Series:	Radical Thinkers in Design , #4
Pages:	264
Product dimensions:	6.23(w) x 9.28(h) x 0.84(d)

About the Author

Judy Attfield was a designer and a teacher and writer in design history and material culture. In addition to Wild Things (2000), she co-edited, with Tag Gronberg, Women Working in Design: a resource book (1986); made a seminal feminist contribution to John A Walker's Design History and the History of Design (1986); co-edited with Pat Kirkham, A View from the Interior: Feminism, Women and Design (1989); co-wrote with Pat Kirkham the introductory essay and contributed to The Gendered Object (1996: ed. Kirkham); edited the anthology Utility Reassessed: The Role of Ethics in the Practice of Design (1999) and prepared a collection of her writings and articles, Bringing Modernity Home: Writings on Popular Design and Material Culture (2007). Judy Attfield died in 2006.

Daniel Miller is Professor of Anthropology, University College London. Recent books include 'A Theory of Shopping', 'The Internet: An Ethnographic Approach' (with Don Slater) and Ed. 'Car Cultures'.

Eduardo Staszowski is associate professor of Design Strategies at Parsons School of Design, and Director of the Parsons DESIS Lab, New York, USA. He is the co-editor of the Designing in Dark Times series and of the book Designing in Dark Times: An Arendtian Lexicon (Bloomsbury 2020).

Clive Dilnot is professor of Design Studies at Parsons The New School for Design, New York, USA. Recent publications include Ethics? Design? (2005) and the text for Chris Killip: Pirelli Work (2007).

Table of Contents

List of illustrations viii

Preface to the original edition x

Preface to the 2020 edition Claudia Marina xiv

Introduction: The material culture of everyday life 1

Part I Things 7

1 The meaning of design: Things with attitude 9

2 The meaning of things: Design in the lower case 35

3 Things and the dynamics of social change 58

Part II Themes 75

4 Continuity: Authenticity and the paradoxical nature of reproduction 77

5 Change: The ephemeral materiality of identity 95

6 Containment: The ecology of personal possessions 118

Part III Contexts 137

7 Space: Where things take place 141

8 Time: Bringing things to life 169

9 The body: The threshold between nature and culture 187

Conclusion 207

Afterword Jo Turney 209

Bibliography 218

Index 232

Editorial Reviews

Wild Things is particularly relevant to ongoing discussions of the politics of things. This is because of both Attfield's choice to focus on voices hitherto unheard from – working class, domestic, female voices – and her effort to situate identity construction – in particular gender and sexual identity – within the her subjects' choices to buy, use, and accrue things.” —Design and Culture

“It is wonderful to see a reprint of this seminal wide-ranging, thought-provoking book that, challenges us to consider, and then re-consider, how we think about things, and write about them too. I read the book in early draft form and often return to it; sometimes to think through things raised in it, at others for inspiration, or to remember her pioneering contributions to contemporary material culture studies and reflect upon her enormous impact upon generations of students and scholars across a range of disciplines. A designer before she turned to design history and discovered a passion for anthropology and critical theory, as well as for “history from below” her lively intellect knew no disciplinary boundaries. In Wild Things Judy's love of objects and people, ideas, herstories/histories, and grappling with theory, is everywhere apparent. Enjoy the journey you take with her.” —Pat Kirkham, Professor of Design History at Kingston University, London, UK

From the Publisher