The Design of Everyday Life

The Design for Every Life by Elizabeth Shove is the very first publication that relooked design in the lens of social practice theory and ask how to think about the agency not only of individual artifacts but of interrelated complexes of stuff? Concluding from four empirical studies including kitchen renewal, DIY project, digital photography and plastic material, this book points out that the reproduction of every day practice involves actively and effectively configuring and integrating multiple material objects. Furthermore, the practices are inherently unstable depending on the recurrent integration of materials, image and competence. Patterns of consumption depend not only on what people have but what people do.

This book illustrated the importance of using practice as entity to design for and imply the direction for future study. Deriving from the social practice theory, materials, image and competence are three core elements for a social practice. Currently, Designers often considered introducing new stuffs to build sustainable behavior within people’s daily practice. However, fail to consider the other two elements, designers could only create minimal impact. As a result, it is important to take all of three elements into consideration while designing for people’s practice, but this book had not yet developed the methodologies for practice-oriented design.

Side-note (Directly quote from book)

Kitchen renewal

1. Patterns of consumption relate to future-oriented visions, not only of having but also of doing.
2. Doing matters for having and have matters for doing.
3. It takes energy and effort to keep having and doing in balance, and to maintain a provisional equilibrium in which conventions and visions of domestic life are preserved and reproduced.

DIY Project

1. The reproduction of everyday life involves actively and effectively configuring and integrating complex assemblies of material objects — it is not a matter of appropriating or of being ‘scripted’ by isolated artifacts.
2. Effective configurations are composed of materials, but also of meanings and forms of competence.
3. Competences are frequently distributed between person and things. These distributions matters for divisions of labour and for formulation of projects and practices.

Digital Photography

1. Practitioners’ careers, formed of many instances of performance, combine to define the career of a practice-as-entity.
2. The trajectories of practices-as-entities are inherently unstable, depending as they do on the recurrent integration of materials, image and forms of competence by more or less “faithful” cohorts of practitioner carriers.
3. Product innovations consequently relate to innovation in practice, but not in ways that are easy to control or anticipate.

Plastic material

1. Symbolic relations between materials and objects are co-determining and cumulatively important for what gets made and for what things are made from.
2. The details of material culture reflect producers’ and designers’ (working) theories of the relation between things and people.
3. In supposing that things meet needs, dominant theories of design overlook the possibility that needs are the outcome of practice and that materials are themselves implicated in the reproduction and transformation of the design of everyday life.