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Subject:

Objects in social context: bibliographic references on social roles, social attributes, and social qualities of objects

From:

Ken Friedman <[log in to unmask]>

Reply-To:

Ken Friedman <[log in to unmask]>

Date:

Thu, 31 Jul 2003 14:55:33 -0700

Content-Type:

text/plain

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Dear Francois-Xavier,

Following Bruce Tharp's useful notes, I have a few suggestions for
your project with some short notes on the authors and their work.

As Bruce noted, the literature of material culture studies is rich in
useful material. Several areas of sociology and history are also good
sources. More on this below. First, a few notes on books written in
design fields.

Several designers have worked specifically on the social qualities of
objects. The involves different aspects of the social nature of
objects, ranging from their physical and symbolic uses to the ways
that using them create or recreate social behavior in the world
around them.

Donald Norman is one well-known exemplar, with such books as

Norman, Donald A. 1988. The Design of Everyday Things. New York:
Currency Doubleday.

Norman, Donald A. 1993. Things that Make Us Smart. Defending Human
Attributes in the Age of the Machine. Reading, Massachusetts:
Addison-Wesley Publishing Co.

Norman, Donald A. 1998. The Invisible Computer. Why Good products Can
Fail, the Personal Computer is So Complex, and Information Appliances
are the Answer. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.

Henry Petroski's wonderful histories of objects generally locate the
social qualities of the object by discussing their uses in social
context. He also discusses the technical qualities of the objects,
attending to the ways that these objects have developed specific
technical properties in relation to social and physical use.

Petroski, Henry. 1994. The Evolution of Useful Things. New York: Vintage Books.

Petroski, Henry. 1997. The Pencil. A History of Design and
Circumstance. New York: Knopf.

Because Petroski is an engineer, he also charts the social qualities
of large-scale objects that we design. Big things, such as steam
ships and dams, also reflect socialness, and the ways in which these
take on and generate social qualities sheds useful light on the many
small things in the world around us.

Petroski, Henry. 1997. Remaking the World. Adventures in Engineering.
New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Because any object is part of a material culture, embedded in,
reflecting, and shaping that culture, studying the ways that cultures
use objects also offers important information.

Edward Tenner locates objects in a fascinating book that studies the
problems that objects create in

Tenner, Edward. 1997 Why Things Bite Back. Predicting the Problems of
Progress. London: Fourth Estate.

Partly because the filed has been so central to the recent
development of human experience, the field of information studies has
generated a wealth of projects on the socialness of objects.

One good example is a study on how we expected computers to bring
about a paperless office when they came to do quite the opposite.

Sellen, Abigail J., and Richard H. R. Harper. 2002. The Myth of the
Paperless Office. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press.

Another fine book is Paul Dourish's study of embodied interaction. It
moves more toward the issues of interaction, but it, too, focuses on
the social quality of the objects he examines and the nature of the
social processes they shape in the world in which they are embedded.

Dourish, Paul. 2001. Where the Action Is. The Foundations of Embodied
Interaction. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.

The history of technology is another rich resource.

Patrice Flichy's study of communication technology examines objects
on several scales, ranging from systemic artifacts such as the
semaphore telegraph to networks for electricity to objects such as
the gramophone or the telephone.

Flichy, Patrice. 1995. Dynamics of Modern Communication. The Shaping
and Impact of New Communication Technologies. London: Sage
Publications.

Flichy brings out two points that you will find useful. The first is
that all technologies are social technologies. Precisely because we
create technical systems and artifacts for social use, they become
social artifacts and technologies. The second is that this fact, in
turn, means that technical systems and objects are embedded in and
used by societies in complex ways. This gives the ways we use them an
unpredictable quality, and we often find such systems developing
social uses that are effectively emergent properties. It is sometimes
forgotten, for example, that some of the early planned uses of the
telephone included news broadcasts or symphony concerts played
centrally and distributed via the telephone network. So, too, the
early etiquette of the telephone was a difficult problem for people
who believed they must be introduced to new acquaintances through
individuals already known to them,

Carolyn Marvin explores similar issues from a slightly different perspective.

Marvin, Carolyn. 1988. When Old Technologies Were New. Thinking About
Electric Communication in the Late Nineteenth Century. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.

Going even further back in history, you might look into what some
look on as the first industrial revolution, a revolution of
technicality that took place in the Middle Ages. Jean Gimpel's study
investigates these issues.

Gimpel, Jean. 1992. The Medieval Machine. The Industrial Revolution
of the Middle Ages. London: Pimlico.

Arnold Pacey touches on related concerns, especially with the nature
of such large social objects as the cathedral or industrial
manufacturing tools.

Pacey, Arnold. 1992. The Maze of Ingenuity. Ideas and Idealism in the
Development of Technology. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press.

In all these cases, the focus is on some of the many aspects of
objects. Inquiry into the social quality of objects may be a central
feature of the study, or it may function as a sub-text.

One of the purposes of an annotated bibliography is to locate the
thematic topic across a wide variety of sources. A good annotated
bibliography will bring these issues into focus from among a range of
diverse source documents. Along the way, you will probably discover
material that others might not have considered in terms of the theme.

A specific and interesting topic such as the socialness of objects
will find important parallels in the niche areas of many fields.

There is a wealth of material on objects in social context and the
social nature of objects in the histories of different times.

Fernand Braudel is particularly good with this kind of material,
using his discussion of objects and their use to build up a rich
descriptive texture.

Braudel's famous trilogy is a perfect example of this.

Braudel, Fernand. 1992a. The Structures of Everyday Life: The Limits
of the Possible. (Civilization and Capitalism: 15th-18th Century.
Volume 1). Berkeley: University of California Press.

Braudel, Fernand. 1992b. The Wheels of Commerce. (Civilization and
Capitalism: 15th-18th Century. Volume 2). Berkeley: University of
California Press.

Braudel, Fernand. 1992c. The Perspective of the World. (Civilization
and Capitalism: 15th-18th Century. Volume 3). Berkeley: University of
California Press.

The first volume is particularly interesting for you.

David Lowenthal's discussion of history and historiography is another
good case.

Lowenthal, David. 1985. The Past is a Foreign Country. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.

Lowenthal's book explores objects, how we see, and how we interpret
them as a running device in examining our attitudes toward the past.
In so doing, he locates objects of different kinds in time and space,
and he embeds them in their social context. Even more, he shows how
our uses (and misuses) of these objects have helped to shape
attitudes toward the historical past and toward the present.

The book is particularly interesting for its rich illustrations.

Another useful source would be the history of specific objects. The
example of the clock in China that I gave yesterday is a case in
point.

You will find useful notes on this - and related issues - in

Boorstin, Daniel J. 1985. The Discoverers. New York: Random House.

For the clock, as a case in point (not only in China), see

Dohrn-van Rossum, Gerhard. 1996. History of the Hour. Clocks and
Modern Temporal Order. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Landes, David S. 1983. Revolution in Time. Clocks and the Making of
the Modern World. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of
Harvard University Press.

Levine, Robert. 1997. A Geography of Time. The Temporal Misadventures
of a Social Psychologist. New York: Basic Books.

Needham, J. 1965. Science and Civilization in China, [Vol. 4, Pt.
2,]: Mechanical Engineering. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Needham, Joseph, W. Ling, and D. J. de Solla Price. 1960. Heavenly
Clockwork: the Great Astronomical Clocks of Medieval China.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Rifkin, Jeremy. 1987. Time Wars. The Primary Conflict in Human
History. New York: Touchstone - Simon and Schuster.

Sobel, Dava. 1995. Longitude. The True Story of a Lone Genius who
Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time. New York: Penguin
Books.

Similar histories of the book reveal the book as a social object,
illuminating its social qualities and the ways that the book as an
object in social use shaped and reshaped the societies into which it
was introduced. This is a personal selection from a huge literature.
I like these books because they afford a cross-section overview of
the book as an object in its social context.

Canfora, Luciano. 1989. The Vanished Library. Martin Ryle, trans.
Berkeley: University of California Press.

Eisenstein, Elizabeth L. 1979. The Printing Press as an Agent of
Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Febvre, Lucien, and Henri-Jean Martin with David Gerard. 1997. The
Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing 1450-1800 (Verso Classics,
10). London: Verso Books

Fraser, P. M. 1972. Ptolemaic Alexandria. Volume I. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.

Manguell, Alberto. 1997. A History of Reading. London: Flamingo.

McLuhan, Marshall. 1962. The Gutenberg Galaxy. The Making of
Typographic Man. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

McLuhan, Marshall. 1967. The Medium is the Massage. An Inventory of
Effects. With Quentin Fiore. New York: Bantam Books.

O'Donnell, James J. 1998. Avatars of the Word. From Papyrus to
Cyberspace. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.

Piltz, Anders. 1998. Medeltidens laerda vaerld. Skellefteaa, Sweden: Norma.

Thornton, Bruce. 2000. Greek Ways. How the Greeks Created Western
Civilization. San Francisco: Encounter Books.

Tribble, Evelyn B. 1993. Margins and Marginality. The Printed Page in
Early Modern England. Charlottesville, Virginia: University of
Virginia Press.

Sociologists have done a great deal of work in the area of objects in
social context.

Torstein Veblen's work remains a classic source on conspicuous consumption.

Veblen, Thorstein. 1994 (1899). The Theory of the Leisure Class. New
York: Dover Publications.

John Diggins sets this book in larger frame that provides a useful
gloss from the other end of along century.

Diggins, John Patrick. 1999. Thorstein Veblen. Theorist of the
Leisure Class. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.

As a grand level social theorist, Norbert Elias often discusses
objects and their uses in social relations. Hidden within Elias's
great studies of civilization, you will find many examples of the
kind of research that you seek.

Elias, Norbert. 1998. On Civilization, Power, and Knowledge. Edited
and with an Introduction by Stephen Mennell and Johan Goudsblom.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Elias, Norbert. 2000. The Civilizing Process. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.

 From a different perspective, that of micro sociology. Erving Goffman
often does the same. The illustrations in Gender Advertisements offer
a rich lexicon of examples showing objects in social use, and his
classic study of the social self discusses objects in social context
at many points.

Goffman, Erving. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New
York: Doubleday Anchor.

Goffman, Erving. 1979. Gender Advertisements. New York: Harper Colophon Books.

The challenge of an annotated bibliography is that of digesting much
more information than you need to distill the relevant issues and
themes. Some sources require examining a huge book for a few short
paragraphs, a task that is nevertheless rewarding because the
paragraphs are vital to the theme. In other cases, a book or even an
article may be so rich in material that writing up the note becomes
an exercise in condensation.

That is why annotated bibliographies are so important to a field. I
will look forward to this one.

In this context, I will demur modestly on one line in your note. You
suggested that I post to this list "the slightest bit of information
related to our profession." Not so. I avoid slight information to
focus on important issues. When I post, I select and distill.

Each year, many hundreds of thousands of items of information appear
that are related to our profession in some way. Many are slight,
indeed. I ignore most of them in favor of significant issues. At
least, I ignore them in favor of issues that seem significant to me.

The slight post you remember involved a consumer survey on career
preferences for the new Barbie series. I posted it last December in a
playful moment. A similar playful moment occurred in April when Chris
Rust and I exchanged views on the work of Dr. Zeke Conran and the
Institute for Design in Other Times.

One must be careful on a list where readers have such good memories.

Good luck with the bibliography. Please post your findings when you are done.

Best regards,

Ken



--

Ken Friedman, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Leadership and Strategic Design
Department of Leadership and Organization
Norwegian School of Management

Visiting Professor
Advanced Research Institute
School of Art and Design
Staffordshire University

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