In a 2016 podcast interview, I stated my aim to link personal furniture to special possessions and sharing activities:
[A]ctivating a practice of maintaining a relationship to objects in your life and communicating what those objects mean to … your family, to friends, so that they’re not simply lost to time, so that their significance remains
coherent and part of people’s memories of who you are.6
Toward this end, I embraced the concept of defamiliarization as a strategy for developing alternatives to current domestic furniture practices. Distinguishing personal furniture from other familiar forms in the home is about disrupting normal behaviour around the subset of treasured possessions, creating the possibility for enlivening these objects through
conversation and more frequent handling. Such furniture inevitably frustrates attempts to use them according to familiar custom; hence, there are no doors or drawers; no solid walls but merely a fabric envelope; a round form rather than a box; a tapering shape terminating in a bowl rather than rectilinear verticality.
My break with cabinetry conventions aims to provoke a reflexive reassessment in the participant. In that moment, she might remember the practice Collecting Ourselves aims to support, prompting her to consider alternative actions and values around storing and displaying possessions. This is personal furniture as part of an “ecosystem” of artefacts animated by practices engendered by carefully considered design. What I didn’t realize was that I was contributing to the still embryonic sphere of “practice-oriented design.”
Practice-oriented design is a recent outgrowth of practice theory, a cultural theory developed by sociologists and philosophers since the late 1990s. Two foundational thinkers
6 Bryan Harris, “Origins, Endings, and What Happens In-Between,” interview with Vic Hunt from the U. of
Cambridge conference “Time and Temporality” podcast audio, September 2016,
https://soundcloud.com/user-540144396-326883048/bryan-harris-anu-on-origins-endings-and-what- happens-in-between.
for practice theory, Pierre Bourdieu (the habitus)7 and Anthony Giddens (structuration)8,
formed part of my early investigation into personal identity as a duality of subjective activity and cultural predisposition. Bourdieu writes:
There is an economy of practices, a reason immanent in practices, whose ‘origin’ lies neither in the ‘decisions’ of reason understood as rational calculation nor in the determinations of mechanisms external to and superior to the agents … intelligible and coherent without springing from an intention of coherence and a deliberate decision; adjusted to the future without being the product of a project or a plan.9
Bourdieu sees peoples’ behaviour as neither free nor completely constrained, their actions manifesting reason without emanating from a process of individual reasoning. This phenomenon derives from the way individuals inherently carry forward the cultural practices and predispositions that comprise their milieu.
Bourdieu argues that individuals reproduce society not only by embracing abiding ideas and institutions but also by how they unconsciously hold a fork, sit in a chair, etc., what he terms bodily hexis. Andreas Reckwitz explains how this fits with practice theory:
A social practice is the product of training the body in a certain way…. This holds for modes of handling certain objects as well as for ‘intellectual’ activities such as talking, reading or writing.… These bodily activities then include also routinized mental and emotional activities.… The conclusion:
… routinized bodily performances are the site of the social and – so to
speak –of ‘social order’. They give the world of humans its visible orderliness.10
7 Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice.
8 Anthony Giddens, "The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration: Elements of the
Theory of Structuration," in Practicing History, ed. Gabrielle M Spiegel (New York: Routledge, 2004).
9 Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, 51.
10 Andreas Reckwitz, "Toward a Theory of Social Practices:A Development in Culturalist Theorizing,"
Shove et al. point out that practice and individual habit are not the same, because practice fulfils a recursive social function.11 Reckwitz notes that a practice plays out a pattern,
though the multitude of individual acts will vary:
If somebody ‘carries’ (and ‘carries out’) a practice, he or she must take over both the bodily and the mental patterns that constitute the practice. These mental patterns are not the ‘possession’ of an individual ‘deep
inside’, but part of the social practice.12
Practice theory also holds there are configurations of objects and spaces that accompany, support, and enable individuals participating in everyday practices. Shove suggests that practices are developed and sustained when people create links between materials (the tangible stuff of objects), competences (skills, know-how, technique), and meanings (symbolic meanings, ideas, aspirations).13 Collecting Ourselves engages cultural patterns of
storing possessions, arranging domestic interiors, self-representation, and conversing with friends and family about the meanings of certain possessions. Specifically, it aims to collapse the distance between us and our inalienable possessions, to combat the dispersal of precious items throughout a home and secondary storage areas, and ultimately, it seeks to aid retention of important possessions when a home is dismantled.
In tandem, the goal is to enmesh these possessions in an extended web of meaning that includes friends and families, so that the aura of these objects (carried in part by collectively remembered narratives) is not extinguished when the owner dies. This web is created by seeing and conversing about these objects — more likely if they occupy a place accorded special status within the home. As Shove suggests a practice requires,
Collecting Ourselves intends to be the linkage between materials, competences and meanings.
Through practices of daily life, we build personal and family identities. Davide Nicolini summarises the consequences of practice as follows: “[P]ractice produces sociality and
11 Elizabeth Shove, Mika Pantzar, and Matthew Watson, The Dynamics of Social Practice: Everyday Life and
How It Changes (London: SAGE, 2012), 14.
12 Reckwitz, "Toward a Theory of Social Practices:A Development in Culturalist Theorizing," 252.
network effects; it sustains stabilized regimes of saying and doing which constitute a
resource for the discursive constitution of individual and collective identities.”14 Nicolini
highlights that various threads of practice theory (e.g. activity theory) regard physical objects as powerful influences that alter and guide our thoughts and perceptions:
[A]rtefacts are recognized as transforming mental functioning in
fundamental ways. For activity theory, artefacts do not simply facilitate mental processes that would otherwise exist; they fundamentally shape and transform them. As already asserted by Marx, what we do and what we use deeply influences who we are and how we perceive ourselves. The
mediating artefacts thus make us, and transform us ….15
Objects also transform practices by inserting their own socio-material history into the activity, because they objectify methods, materials, processes, and power relations from a social world that contribute to the current individual’s actions. Furthermore, Nicolini asserts:
[T]he idea of mediation injects a fundamental developmental flavour into the discussion of practice. Artefacts are not only a way of conveying the past into what we do. They are also the main way in which we can expand our practice — and ourselves.16
But durable objects can also contribute to an ossification of practice, as I tried to show in Chapter 3 with the example of domestic furniture arrangement. Scott calls out this potential but also notes that discursive reflection by individuals may open a door to change:
“[U]nderstanding how technologies and artifacts become embedded and dislodged from
ordinary practices might reveal points of leverage for change, and therefore innovation.”17
By considering objects and practices as interconnected, design can expand its impact:
14 Davide Nicolini, Practice Theory, Work, and Organization: An Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2013), 92.
15 ibid., 107.
16 ibid.
17 Kakee Scott, Conny Bakker, and Jaco Quist, "Designing Change by Living Change," Design Studies 33, no. 3
Therefore, an equal measure of creative effort can and should be put into the act of engaging in a practice as into the act of designing an object. Whereas design as currently practiced can often have the effect of maintaining existing practices, Julier and Shove suggest that design be
oriented toward enabling change through ‘interventions that foster
innovation in practice’ and ‘open scripted’ product design.18
While I did not commence designing and making under the methodological umbrella of practice-oriented design, I contend that Collecting Ourselves shares the mission and philosophy of this budding design approach.
It is still early days for both practice theory and its application within practice-oriented design.19 Davide Nicolini argues that the still unconsolidated nature of practice theory,
what he describes as its “rhizomic” tendency to interweave a variety of sociological theories, is not a liability but a strength, as it leads inquiry into practices away from
reductionist theoretical descriptions toward ever “thicker” accounts of practice. Nicolini
advocates researching practices through a toolkit approach that draws on diverse theoretical perspectives as needed, from ethnographic, semiotic, historical, etc. He
suggests a method of “zooming in and zooming out” to describe practices at the micro and
macro level.
Chapters 1-3 exemplify this zooming in and out—my effort to clarify how practices intersect materially, politically, historically, formally, etc. The following section focuses on the information returned by the six Collecting Ourselves probes so far, with special attention given to discerning how the arks integrate with, or challenge, existing practices involving the storage and display of possessions and furniture arrangement within the home.