A study in design

Chris Tilley and I came up with this project in 1983. We were fascinated by the prospect of a disciplinary field that again took material culture and design seriously. We saw such a material culture studies as central to what was being called post-processual archaeology.

So we spent the year in a comprehensive study of the design, marketing and cultures of consumption of beer in northern England and Sweden. We collected cans, applied structuralist and semiotic analysis, researched patterns of alcohol consumption, conducted ethnography into drinking culture, visited breweries, interviewed designers.

The cans from both countries are remarkably different (colour set, iconography, text). On the one hand we connected systematic differences in material culture to different histories of drinking and health cultures in England and Sweden. On the other hand the study revealed the indeterminacy of a category such as beer can, its immediate dispersal, as soon as we tried to analytically pin it down in our social scientific approach.

To understand this very simple matter of production, consumption, style and design involved exploring a centrifugal network of connections through breweries, their design and marketing strategies, histories of commercial packaging, economics of the drinks industry, alcohol consumption – legislation and health issues, cultural signification. Contact with the sociology of technology (Hughes, Mackenzie, Lemonnier, Norman) in Paris in 1992 helped me see how to deal with this matter of field (rather than object), and a disciplinary space between sciences, social sciences, arts, humanities. I took up the implications of this heterogeneous networking (concept after John Law) in a lecture course on design in Leiden (1993), relating it to notions of lifecycle and biography. Theoretical background – from post positivist social science through semiotics to new sociologies of technology and their close links with constructivist science studies.

This study has led directly to another major project in material culture studies and design research - DaimlerChrysler 2015 - a five month collaborative project running in 2005 and investigating digital media in the car experience of 2015.

Publication

ReConstructing Archaeology: Theory and Practice. With Christopher Tilley. Cambridge University Press, 1987, Second edition: Routledge, 1992

The life of an artifact. Fennoscandia Archeologica 15:15–42 (1998) (originally delivered as two lectures in Leiden in 1993) - [link]