Read more
Shortlisted for the Design History Society Scholarship Prize 2001-2002 What do things mean? What does the life of everyday objects after the check-out 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 in objects lives. Thereafter they are transformed and invested with new meanings that reflect and assert who we are. Defining design as things with attitude differentiates the highly visible fashionable object from ordinary artefacts that are 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. But 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.>
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.
