In assembling the sample of artefacts from numerous contenders, I needed to balance and judge representation of the status quo with a manageable number of examples, proportionate to a contextual analysis forming only one phase of
the study. The first of two criteria for inclusion required prominence in popular culture as suggested by, for example, prime time broadcasting, nationwide or international outlets in the case of retailers, and web media with country or language specific sites signalling distributed markets. The second criterion was typicality in terms of common occurrence of the object or medium, its
widespread access, and affordability. Examples targeting a niche, high income or elite market segment were therefore not sought. In the case of the pre- industrial domestic settings, they were included on the basis of relevance and access, the implications of which I address in Chapter 5.
Phase 1 theoretical framework
The sample subjected to social-ecological analysis is based upon recognition of the ‘visual availability’ of culture, expressed by scholar of anthropology and sociology, Mike Ball. He refers to the built environment as “including items of material culture, persons and social actions … visually available and
symbolically significant when making visual sense of the seen world” (1998, p. 135). In seeking out a sense of the status quo in food culture, contemporary kitchen design and related practices as essential contextual analysis, I ‘read’ this symbolic assemblage of artefacts as simultaneously reflecting and
constructing popular culture, cultural identity and their contingent practices. In this approach, I accept that aspects of Eurocentric culture centred on the kitchen and cooking are visually available for interpretation, without regarding the culture reflected to be objectively readable.
In the semiotic tradition, artefacts are considered as signs, bearing and projecting meaning; as anthropologist Christopher Tilley elaborated, “material culture becomes a text to be ‘read’, and a semiotic discourse to be ‘de-coded’” (2001, p. 258). The de-coding does not, however, seek to extract a single, authoritative text from the objects and representations. In the case of examples inscribed with culturally comprehensible icons and symbols, such as the
presence of an espresso coffee machine on a kitchen bench, my reading proceeded with some assurance that drinking espresso coffee is culturally esteemed though not universally so, that making espresso at home symbolises a particular cultural competence, and that the machine’s presence is suggestive of a broader café culture outside the home, at least.
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Semiotic approaches, as outlined by visual communications scholar Theo Van Leeuwen (2001), offer some utility to the analysis with their denotative and connotative tools, most appropriate to the advertising and marketing materials and objects in the sample. Given the persuasive function of these examples, I approached these with an expectation of de-coding one or more intentional texts or messages. My critical questioning of the status quo and dominant norms across the sample demanded more penetrating scrutiny. In response, I turned to the subjective and diagnostic meaning-making of iconological
symbolism, which Van Leeuwen described as based on a “principle of integrative interpretation” (2001, p. 116). In practice, this demanded the analysis to proceed inter-textually using a range of comparative sources, scholarly and popular alike, within a theoretical framework and casting the examples against the broad ecological design principles introduced in Chapter 1, and refined in Figure 4.3.
The analytical approaches of cultural studies were also borrowed to extend the analysis beyond the interpretation of symbolic meanings. These approaches demand, according to sociologist Sarah Pink, a commitment to exercising reflective criticality in order to analyse “the social and cultural conditions within which [visual and material culture] are produced” (2007, p. 14). Focusing on the contexts of production of visual culture, the contexts of viewing, in addition to culturally shared forms, meanings and conventions, Martin Lister and Liz Wells highlighted “that looking is always embodied and undertaken by someone with an identity. … [T]here is no neutral looking. An image’s or a thing’s significance is finally its significance for some-body and some-one” (2001, p. 65). In
combining examples of visual and material culture in the sample, this emphasis on embodied ways of looking and experiencing were also applied to the
analysis, invoking the multi-sensory design considerations explored by Karen Franck and Bianca Lepori (2007), and Juhani Pallasmaa (2005).
Further emphasising the ‘social’ in the social-ecological analysis, contemporary theories of material culture studies offered deeper grounding and analytical tools, namely ‘material agency’ and ‘emergent agency’. The interwoven layers of meaning encoded in objects and representations, described above, are
understood to simultaneously reflect and reinforce the embodied cultural
identity of people (Tilley, 2001). Material things can therefore produce an effect – cognitive and affective responses, actions, particular practices – within and by people in what Tilley termed “a generative dialectic between things and persons in which neither is granted primacy” (2001, p. 261). Posing a simple example, an island kitchen bench at which stools are positioned on one side can effect sitting. At an interactional level, the same stools might effect sociability, and perhaps the sharing of cooking tasks while household members catch up on the events of the day. The stools, appliances and kitchen joinery, in turn,
presuppose particular body shapes and sizes. Things and people are understood therefore, to be in a dynamic and evolving interplay.
I also regarded the metaphor of the ‘dance of agency’, conveying this human agency-material agency dynamic, to be of compelling analytical value.
Proposed by science and technology studies scholar Andrew Pickering, the dynamic involves “a temporally extended back-and-forth dance … in which activity and passivity on both sides are reciprocally intertwined” (2010, p. 195). Applied to my examples, Pickering’s temporal emphasis provokes speculation of potential effects beyond the moment in time captured in a single image, or the limited duration of my own observation of an object. Further, Pickering’s work provokes critical questioning of the potential effects of an object or thing beyond those intended by the progenitor. Such effects, unknown in advance, are described in terms of ‘emergent agency’ (Pickering, 2010, pp. 195-198). This propensity resonates strongly in relation to product design, with
implications for ecological design. Exemplified by Shove and Southerton’s (2000) tracing of the domestic freezer’s genesis, the freezer’s emergent agency played a role in the demise of backyard vegetable gardens, as well as the ascent of industrially produced frozen, convenience food. This account
presented a poignant example of the progressive erosion of household adaptive capacity, amplifying into a broader undermining of urban resilience.