Wild Things

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.

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.

List of illustrations Preface to the original edition Preface to the current edition by Claudia Marina Introduction: The material culture of everyday life Part I: Things 1. The meaning of design: Things with attitude 2. The meaning of things: Design in the lower case 3. Things and the dynamics of social change Part II: Themes 4. Continuity: Authenticity and the paradoxical nature of reproduction 5. Change: The ephemeral materiality of identity 6. Containment: The ecology of personal possessions Part III: Contexts 7. Space: Where things take place 8. Time: bringing things to life 9. The body: The threshold between nature and culture Conclusion Afterword by Jo Turney Bibliography Index