THE AUTHOR

Judy Attfield was a Senior Lecturer in History and Design at the Winchester School of Art, at the University of Southampton (UK). She was one of the pioneers of contemporary studies on material culture. 1989: Judy Attfield, along with Pat Kirkham, publishes A view from the interior: women & design. This volume addresses womens contributions to modern design, how they, as consumers, helped shape contemporary design and the male designers view on womens tastes and lives. 1989: Writes her Middlesex Polytechnic MA History of Design dissertation on Tufted carpets in the popular English house. 1989: Contributes with author John Albert Walker on his book Design history and the history of design. 1992: Writes her University of Brighton PhD thesis on The role of design in the relationship between furniture manufacture an its retailing 1939-1965 with initial reference to the furniture firm of J. Clarke. 1994: Attfield organizes the conference Utility reassessed, which results in a publication of the same name in 1999. 1999: Utility reassessed: the role of ethics in the practice of design is published. This is a collection of essays that defines and reassesses the concept of utility. 2000: Wild things: the material culture of everyday life is published. This book is the central subject of this paper. 2006: Judy Attfield dies. 2007: Bringing modernity home: writings on popular design and material culture is published.

PREAMBLE: THE AUTHORS PERSPECTIVE

Attfield started her academic career in a discipline called Design history, which was often devoted to idealize great designers and their feats. The book discussed in this paper, Wild Things, marks the authors switch from a perspective that ignores people other than renowned designers to one that explores design in everyday life.

WILD THINGS
Judy Attfield introduces the volume as a contradictory, hybrid work, for it is focused on material objects but not on things themselves; rather, on how an object works as a mediator between a person and the physical world. As the author puts it, on how people make sense of the world through physical objects. It is said that mass manufactured objects are all the same, but that changes once each of them is acquired by different consumers, who will each have an unique relation to it, effectively making it a thing, an object of everyday life.

MATERIAL CULTURE
The author presents Material Culture as a young but well established field of study, which is in its nature a cross-disciplinary subject, commonly addressing humanities and social sciences. When associated to Design History, it culminates on what is dubbed the material culture of everyday life, an outlook that comprises the work of design, making, distributing, consuming, using, discarding, recycling and so on. Design History, once a sub-field of Art History, has been an independent field for a while. There have been, in the 1980s, attempts to integrate design as commercial art and mass manufactured products in the new art history, but that approach fails to recognize crucial qualities that separate art from physical objects that serve a purpose, that are ordinary everyday things.
Whereas art enchants the ordinary object and makes it special, design disenchants it. Making design a thing reutrns it from the display shel, the collection, the museum or art gallery to the factory floor, the warehouse shelf or the forgotten corner at the back of a cupboard where it forms part of the physical effects belonging to an individual, a household, a nation, a culture ()

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THINGS
In generic terms, it can be said that things are the units that make up the totality of the physical world. However, this is a rather simplistic definition, for it does not recognize the various interpretations of the objects that result from cultural differences. The author sets out to define things, not as the totality of matter, but rather as material culture with human associations. The choice of the term things was made in order not to overrate the role of physical objects, as it implies non-special and mundane qualities hence focusing the study on what people make of the items rather than the items themselves. Favoring

From others:
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. Shortlisted for the Design History Society Scholarship Prize 2001-2002

'Wild Things is an initial foray into a territory that, for all its ubiquity and ord inariness, remains academically unchartered. For me it is not a book to agree with or disagree with, but a book to think with (and what more could you ask for?).'Journal of Design History

Wild Things: The Material Culture of Everyday Life. By Judy Attfield, published 2000 by Berg.

This book highlights key issues surrounding identity within a modernised culture consumed by consumerism and the need for objects to form our existence by objectifying the material world as a persuasive activity; it ishow people make sense of the world through physical objects (pg.1) in order to form an explanation of identity. We become innovators through a mediated process between the world and ourselves. Ubiquitous sociology investigation theorises consumption as a social activity, an embodiment of culture and consumer culture. These things by which we associate ourselves and identity have intrinsic meaning and value on capitalism and dynamics on the modern materialistic world. Judy argues that post-commodity phase refers to an object once it has been personalized and thus transformed to mediate certain social transactions related to identity.(pg.145), she claims that once we have purchased the object or commodity, we personalize them and adapt ourselves and the object to form our identity; although these things are global can our identity be seen as anything other than globalized and impersonal? Surely we are merely contributing to capitalism and the fashioning of culture, thus giving away our freedom of identity and individuality by subjecting ourselves to this rigorous control and policing this implies. There is an assumption that what we buy defines us and structures our identity, with which each person struggles to uniquely modify in order to create an illusion of individualism; however we are merely adhering to the governing of societal confinements and consumer culture, without actually asserting our independence like we are led to believe.

Attfield weds design history (which has tended to focus on "good design" as a way of raising standards in a consumerist society) with material culture (which takes a broader view of consumption and is less hierarchical in its judgments). Nice introduction to contemporary historiography of design; the book reflects the British context in which it was written.