Swedish Design

An Ethnography

Keith M. Murphy

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780801453298
• eBook ISBN: 9780801455797
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Product Design
• Index: Social Sciences

Swedish designers are noted for producing distinctive and elegant forms; their furniture and household goods have an especially loyal following around the world. Design in Sweden has more than just an aesthetic component, however. Since at least the late nineteenth century, Swedish politicians and social planners have viewed design as a means for advocating and enacting social change and pushing for a more egalitarian social organization. In this book, Keith M. Murphy examines the special relationship between politics and design in Sweden, revealing in particular the cultural meanings this relationship holds for Swedish society.

Over the course of fourteen months of research in Stockholm and at other sites, Murphy conducted in-depth interviews with various players involved in the Swedish design industry—designers, design instructors, government officials, artists, and curators—and observed several different design collectives in action. He found that for Swedes design is never socially or politically neutral. Even for common objects like furniture and other household goods, design can be labeled "responsible," "democratic," or "ethical"— descriptors that all neatly resonate with the traditional moral tones of Swedish social democracy. Murphy also considers the example of Ikea and its power to politicize perceptions of the everyday world. More broadly, his book serves as a model for an anthropological approach to the study of design practice, one that accounts for the various ways in which order is purposefully and meaningfully imposed by designers on the domains of human life, and the consequences those impositions have on the social worlds in which they are embedded.

1

The Diagram of Swedish Design

Exploring design from an anthropological perspective requires establishing some parameters around what sorts of objects, practices, ideologies, and other phenomena fall under the rubric of design. And exploring Swedish design in particular requires laying out not only what makes Swedish design “Swedish,” but also what separates it from other kinds of design. In the first section of this chapter I will describe what I mean by “design” in general and how studying it anthropologically relates to important work in material culture studies and science studies. I will then detail the specific qualities and characteristics of both the ideological/political and the formal/material aspects of Swedish design. Finally, I will situate both Swedish politics and Swedish modernist design in relation to other similar political systems and modernist traditions, to identify the specific relationship between politics and design in Sweden.

Defining Design

“Design” is a curious term. It can describe very different sorts of things depending on who utters it, and for what purposes. In some instances “design” is conflated with the adjective “designer,” which describes a type of commodity typically reserved for the wealthy and elite, or those who aspire to such a station. In other cases “design” is a code word for “added value,” as when companies like Apple in the United States, or Volvo and H&M in Sweden, explicitly prioritize an attention to detail—of aesthetics, functionality, materials, and the like—as what distinguishes their goods from what their competitors produce.

Other characterizations of design focus on practicalities. In both professional and academic conceptualizations, design tends to fall squarely in the realm of the technical. There is often a marked emphasis on design as a systematic and rigorous method for creating things from specific kinds of inputs. The diverse practices of engineering, architecture, city planning, and software development, along with graphic design, industrial design, landscape architecture, and a host of other design disciplines, are all based in sets of precise principles—some of which are shared across these fields, many of which are not—that when purposefully applied to raw materials allow designers to create new objects—buildings, landscapes, posters, chairs, services, user experiences, town plans, and so on. In other words, design in this sense is a kind of controlled and cultivated creativity, with a stress on the particular practices involved in planning and creation.

An even more general sense of design, one that flows from its technical connotations, is as a basic way of making, situated somewhere between raw labor and artistic production. Design is not simply work, not simply labor, because the effort involved is carefully considered and usually subject to reflexive evaluation. Design is also not quite art—though it often bumps up against it, as we will see in chapter 4, because the objects of design, even those that foreground aesthetic qualities, are usually made to be used, to serve some practical function. From this broad perspective, design is not restricted to those with technical training or institutionally recognized skill, but applies widely to any kind of creative action that involves planning and forethought. What follows from this view is that the differences between various kinds of making are based less in what they make, or even how they make it, but more in the relative degrees of professionalization, institutionalization, and cultural prominence each is accorded.

Where, then, does that leave us in approaching design as a sociocultural practice? Design concerns process, an active, almost teleological ordering of raw materials into some resultant thing, sometimes conceived as a physical object, but oftentimes as things with less obvious contours, like “activities,” “services,” and “experiences.” I say “almost teleological” because while the general kind of thing strived for in designing is usually anticipated by its makers, other contingent specifics, like forms, functions, materials, and costs, are more subject to manipulations and unexpected outcomes in the process. Autonomous expressiveness is not necessarily design’s central concern, though neither is it indifferent to it. Instead design is primarily an intentional structuring of some portion of the lived world in such a way as to transform how it is used, perceived, or understood. Design both delimits and affords relational configurations between people, spaces, and things, and does so in considered and unconsidered ways. Design can also capture specific meanings, and constrain or facilitate interpretation. The meanings that adhere to the objects of design are always situated and contingent, and linked both to the form of the designed product and to the contexts in which it is embedded. In other words, design is a kind of directed creativity with meaningful social consequences, a gradual and granular enstructuring of the everyday world.

While makers—designers, in typical parlance, though any given case may involve “designers” who are not trained as such—are absolutely central to design as a sociocultural practice, design and designing do not begin and end with the human actors responsible for driving design processes. The people who cultivate design and designing are always subject to the particular cultural flows of history, ideology, and politics on which “moments of designing”—when “ideas” are transfigured into “forms”—travel. Moments of designing matter, of course, but only insofar as they are considered alongside and in complementarity with other processes that shape and form designed things. Understanding how design makes things—and makes things mean—requires understanding how objects are shaped to tolerate meanings (Murphy 2013), the processes through which they are given those meanings, and how those meanings are negotiated and argued through different suasive processes.

Material Culture and the Force of Things

The assertion that design nudges the social world in certain ways as it enstructures that world—giving it shape and meaning, even if only ambiently—assumes that designed things retain a certain social power, and the anthropology of design I am advocating draws on a number of arguments that previous social scientific studies of materiality and technology have critically addressed in this regard. These arguments include the capacity of things—in particular artificial things—to impart some effect on the world; the agency of the people who make those things and who use those things, including reference to ideas about both intentionality and unintended consequences; the particular properties of the things designed and how they relate to other phenomena; and the nature of relations between people and things (and things and other things, and things and ideas), phenomena that may not always exist as distinct from one another in the world, yet which for analytical purposes often require at least some demarcation, in order to straighten out our concepts.

There are two particular lines of influence that have significantly informed the analysis that follows, both of which are built around a critique of the deep dualism, both ontological and analytic, separating human subjects from the nonhuman objects that always already surround them. I share this antidualistic stance, along with a more general concern these approaches share for closely attending to the mediated interactions that hold between people and things. But furthering these fundamental debates is not my specific goal. Instead I use these works as both delimiters and points of departure for the discussion of design and the power of things that follows.

In a series of monographs (1987, 2010, 2012) and edited volumes (1998a, 2005), Daniel Miller has carefully developed an influential theory of materiality primarily focused on consumption. Through deep ethnographic engagements with particular consumption practices, like shopping (Miller 1998b, 2001b) and the crafting of domestic interiors (Miller 2001c, 2008), or with particular artifacts like cars (Miller 2001a), cell phones (Horst and Miller 2006), and clothing (Banarjee and Miller 2003; Miller and Woodward 2012), Miller and his colleagues have been principally responsible for drawing material culture out from the shadows of bare context and bringing it to the fore in contemporary anthropological analysis. The central tenet of this perspective is that buying, using, and interacting with objects transform not only the objects themselves and their meanings, but also the people who consume them within culturally inflected courses of action. Humans exist in complicated constellations of interaction, wherein things, people, space, time, and ideas all converge to form the social world. We give order to that world through the bonds and associations that we form with things, through which we make divisions, categories, and groupings, discern patterns, and draw connections. But what emerges from these relations is no static system. Because our interactions with objects are ongoing and shifting, these divisions are constantly subject to recasting, the categories are subject to reordering, the groupings to dissolution, and the connections to redrawing. Indeed our identities cannot be understood without reference—or even deference—to the role played by material artifacts in our identities’ processual unfolding and modification. From this perspective humans and things are always mutually constitutive, and agency—whether it seems attributable to either humans or artifacts—is fundamentally embedded in their relations (cf. Winner 1980; Johnson 1988).

The second line of influence—though the influence is somewhat less direct—is the study of sociotechnical systems, or actor network theory, most commonly associated with the work of Bruno Latour (1993, 2007), Michel Callon (1986, 1987), and John Law (1987, 1992). Perhaps even more forcefully than Miller, the sociotechnical perspective, which derives from science studies but has in recent years been applied to a wider range of social domains, advocates the complete disavowal of analytic frameworks that grant primacy to human agency in processes responsible for manifesting the social world. Where Miller sees agency as constituted in the relationship between people and objects, actor network theory treats agency as more widely distributed both synchronically and diachronically across objects, inscriptions, people, practices, events, and spaces, all of which are assumed to be equally agentive. Viewed through this lens, an empirical field of action is leveled across its various constituents, as all parties—human, artificial, and natural—become mutually invested stakeholders in the collective production of knowledge and knowledge systems. By deprioritizing the role that humans play in complex social action and elevating the role of nonhuman objects, actor network theory posits a deep structure of agency within objects and networks of objects that is largely invisible to the people who interact with them, but that is nonetheless contributory to their effective possibilities.

These areas of research represent some of the most intricate and detailed frameworks not only for thinking about how humans and objects interact, but also for thinking about how objects contribute to the broader production and reproduction of particular material and nonmaterial conditions in society. In drawing together these lines of influence to circumscribe an ambit for the anthropological study of design I have absorbed their shared critique of dualism, almost to the point of unrecognized orthodoxy, although my more humanist reflexes will admit that the sort of flattening of agency that actor network theory insists on is less preferred than Miller’s retention of distinctly human modes of agency.

For Miller and the material culture school, objects are not simply instrumental for people in carrying on courses of action, but are deeply meaningful to them in many ways in their everyday lives, and thus help give form and content not only to the physical world, but also to the concomitant cultural worlds humans inhabit. The meanings that occupy the relations between people and things can be partly idiosyncratic, but also partly shaped by social forces, practices, and channels of circulation that continuously recast objects as they move between and across different sociocultural domains. What follows is that people and things, when examined through lenses of every resolution, are not empirically distinct from one another—though discussing them as distinct may be required by language and for clarity—but are instead always mutually constitutive: people make things, but things also make people.

One of the core advantages of actor network theory is its ability to handle practically any phenomenon it is applied to, including not just humans and artifacts, but also inscriptions, images, discourses, practices, and more. Relying on the principle of “generalized symmetry” (Callon 1986), according to which every element of the network must be accounted for with the same methodology, thereby not privileging any one node over another, actor network theory can easily incorporate any object of inquiry into an analysis without generating much methodological anguish—though matters like power, intentionality, consciousness, and concerns that never surface (Winner 1993) are more difficult to account for. While the methodological rigidity attached to generalized symmetry is not, I think, a tenable approach—from my point of view, regarding different kinds of phenomena on their own terms respects their particular integrities and makes for better analysis—the basic ecumenical stance of actor network theory, in which a diversity of factors at multiple scales are viewed as contributing to the social reproduction of larger distributed systems, even when the contribution is not immediately visible or direct, is critical.

Latour (2008), noting the “weakness” of the concept of “design,” which can encompass practices, styles, collections of things, attitudes, discourses, and more, has attempted to identify some of its most basic components within an actor network theory framework, and highlights five features in particular. First, because design is, in a sense, doing something less than “building” or “constructing” and is instead focused on incremental changes to the world, Latour claims that design is a particularly modest creative endeavor. Second, design is also a domain dominated by skillful pedants preoccupied by “a mad attention to the details” of what they make (Latour 2008:3). Third, design is a process of sign making, concerned with manipulating not only materials but also meaning and interpretation. Fourth, design does not seek to reinvent the world from scratch but to transform what already exists. Finally, design is inseparable from ethics, from evaluations of good design and bad design not just in terms of taste, but also in terms of its material effects. All of these criteria, loose and unaligned as they may be, are indeed central to delineating design.

Finally, I will add that Alfred Gell’s (1998) emphasis on indexicality for facilitating the force of artifacts to affect the world is essential for evaluating how design connects to and interacts with practices, discourses, ideologies, and objects of various kinds, and in the process helps identify family resemblances between them. Indexical relationships are key for establishing and sustaining family resemblances across different phenomena. But rather than treating indexes as “natural signs,” as Gell does, linking objects to creators, I treat them more as “naturalized signs,” that is, signs that undergo cultural, social, and political procedures whereby the abductive field is reduced by degree, and indexical objects with some degree of “fit” are specified. Moreover, indexical signs are not the only kind of signs involved. Attending to multiple design practices, operating at multiple scales, that give cultural form to objects, not just as blunt artifacts but also their specific qualia and the semiotic “bundling” (Keane 2003) that those qualia entail, reveals how designing generates and distributes “dynamic interconnections among different modes of signification at play within a particular historical and social formation” (Keane 2003:410). In other words, design is, in part, a process of naturalizing signs and sign relations.

Diagramming Swedish Design

Bearing in mind this framework for studying design in general, I will be arguing in the remainder of this book that in Sweden svensk design in particular operates as a diagram, in Gilles Deleuze’s (1988) sense, a set of relations linking the everyday world—composed of objects, spaces, people, and more—to the cultural ideologies that motivate the persistence of a social democratically infused “way of life.” For Deleuze a diagram is a sort of map of social relations—and forces between social relations—that is agnostic as to the ontological state of its components, marking “no distinction between content and expression, a discursive formation and a non-discursive formation” (Deleuze 1988:34). Animate human subjects and inanimate artifacts, institutions and the discourses that help shape them, temporal events and atemporal flows are all gathered and delineated and rendered real within the diagram. As Jakub Zdebik (2012:1–2) describes it, the diagram “values the unformed, the state of flux, the dynamic, the movement towards actualization. It also deals with organization, forces at work in social and cultural constructs; it is a way to travel from one system to another. The diagram allows a glimpse of the state that comes before the formation of an object, and of what goes into its formation.” In other words, while the phenomena captured by the diagram may themselves subsist and circulate precariously, the diagram supplies them with a provisional stability without fundamentally transforming them in any way.

As a diagram that maps Sweden’s sociopolitical landscape, Swedish design is composed of lines drawing together people (designers, consumers, curators, citizens, politicians), things (everyday objects, their particular forms and arrangements), and ideologies (of care, responsibility, equality, justice, beauty) such that the modern sociopolitical formation of Sweden, with all of its attendant norms and cultural values, is constantly marked and remade at the level of everyday life. In this sense a diagram is also machinic, “a precise state of intermingling of bodies in a society, including all the attractions and repulsions, sympathies and antipathies, alterations, amalgamations, penetrations, and expansions that affect bodies of all kinds in their relations to one another” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987:90), which through the forces that hold between these elements “constructs a real that is yet to come, a new type of reality” (142). T...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. The Diagram of Swedish Design
• 2. Building the Beautiful Home
• 3. In the Design World
• 4. In the Studio
• 5. Displays of Force
• Conclusion
• Notes
• References
• Index