Take One Object: An Ethnographic Journey through Everyday Design, Material Culture and the Home

Bringing together forty-five authors to reflect on the importance of everyday objects, this volume showcases how things found in the home can provide a valuable method of design and ethnographic study. With each chapter foregrounding an author, an object and a domestic space, it delves into the material ecologies that surround us to create a contemporary portrait of the places we inhabit.

Combining analytical and empirical perspectives with autobiographical and archival recollections, an international line-up of designers, anthropologists, artists, architects and archaeologists each focus on a single domestic artefact. These objects demonstrate how anything can become the subject of design. From everyday products such as matches, blankets, toothbrushes and lamps to more personal items like a model Trabant car, a vinyl records collection and a vyshyvanka shirt, they showcase contemporary notions of materiality in different ways. The essays span diverse cultural, geographic and disciplinary contexts as well as thematically across gadgets, personal heritage, everyday essentials, furnishings, more-than-human companions, symbolism, and the past and future.

A blend of personal storytelling with design sensibility and ethnographic insight, this will be a valuable resource for students and scholars interested in new design research methodologies and the emotive and evocative power of everyday objects.