10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17209
The article highlights the intersection between design, STS and consumption outlining practices as the central unit of analysis. The paper illustrates this perspective with reference to a variety of examples, including home improvements and do-it-yourself (DIY) projects, digital photography and plastic stuff. In the paper some questions are raised: where does competence lie? Does it reside in the human or in the non-human, or in the relation between the two? What does the concept of a human-non-human hybrid mean for the sociology of consumption? And how does the human-material distribution of competences affect the details of everyday life and what people do?
application/pdf
2038-3460
17209
2
en
Elizabeth Shove
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/
Tecnoscienza – Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
theory of practice
On “The Design of Everyday Life”
Text.Serial.Journal
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/
5
Lectures
2015-01-29
2023-06-14
2015-01-29
2023-07-27
33-42
TS
Elizabeth Shove
2014
10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17209
33
Lancaster University
2038-3460
2
theory of practice
en
42
On “The Design of Everyday Life”
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/article/download/17209/16089
5
                                                                              Lecture

On “The Design of Everyday Life”
	
  
Elizabeth Shove
Lancaster University
	
  
       Abstract: The article highlights the intersection between design, STS and
       consumption outlining practices as the central unit of analysis. The paper il-
       lustrates this perspective with reference to a variety of examples, including
       home improvements and do-it-yourself (DIY) projects, digital photography
       and plastic stuff. In the paper some questions are raised: where does compe-
       tence lie? Does it reside in the human or in the non-human, or in the rela-
       tion between the two? What does the concept of a human-non-human hy-
       brid mean for the sociology of consumption? And how does the human-
       material distribution of competences affect the details of everyday life and
       what people do?

       Keywords: Design; STS; consumption; material culture; theory of practice.

       Corresponding author: Elizabeth Shove, DEMAND Centre, Department
       of Sociology, D19, FASS Building, Lancaster University, Lancaster, United
       Kingdom, LA1 4YD – Email: e.shove@lancaster.uk




1. Introduction

    I am glad to have the opportunity to look back to the issues discussed
in The Design of Everyday Life (Shove et al. 2007) and to think about
where I now stand in relation to those ideas. In particular I want to high-
light points of intersection between design, STS and consumption. I am
therefore going to build on a selective history of these fields and pull out
some ideas which I think can be taken forward – in short my aim is to
identify points of connection and cross-fertilization.
    If you look at research in the sociology of consumption and in materi-
al culture as well, there is a tradition of thinking about the symbolic sig-
nificance of objects and a tendency to focus more on issues of acquisition
than of use. This is a very simple distinction but I think it helps to set the
scene. In science and technology studies there are again many tracks and
trends, for example themes of innovation, stabilization and scripting are
very well documented. Meanwhile in product design, there is a lot of em-

	
  
TECNOSCIENZA
Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
5 (2) pp. 33-42 - ISSN 2038-3460
www.tecnoscienza.net                              2014
34                                                          Tecnoscienza - 5 (2)

phasis on the object, on its properties and qualities and on its users. The-
se three fields do not mesh together terribly well, and in The Design of
Everyday Life, we started to explore points of connection.
    In taking this approach we stood back and drew inspiration from a
different theoretical tradition. We argued that social theories of practice
provide a way of making new connections and generating different ways
of thinking about relationships and interactions between objects - not on-
ly objects alone, but also complexes of objects and even infrastructures -
people and practices.
    In this paper I want to outline the potential and the significance of
taking practices as the central unit of analysis and enquiry and show how
this helps bridge between the traditions outlined above. I will illustrate
this possibility with reference to a variety of practical examples including
home improvement and do-it-yourself (DIY) projects and digital photog-
raphy. This second example now looks rather old-fashioned, but when
digital photography was new – actually not many years ago – there were
many interesting transformations. In effect the elements of photography
were completely reconfigured in a very short space of time. I am also go-
ing to talk a little bit about plastic. When we looked at material culture
studies, one of the striking omissions was any serious or concerted analy-
sis of material as such. By contrast, product designers were interested in
material properties, and materiality is, of course, a key concern in science
studies. These three examples – home improvement, digital photography
and plastic - allow me to explore a number of points of intersection, all of
which still deserve more work.
    I am going to start with a very simple example drawn from science
studies. Consider someone holding a hammer, and then think about ques-
tions of competence and skill. Where does competence lie: does it reside
in the human or in the non-human, or in the relation between the two?
The notion of a human-non-human hybrid implies that the hammer alone
is not enough alone, and that a person without such a device will find it
hard to hit the nail hard on the head. Taken to heart, STS based observa-
tions about hybrids could and should be picked up in design studies. This
is important in that within design, much that has been written about ‘the
user’ wrongly assumes that competence ultimately lies in the person, not
in the thing. At a minimum, science studies says that competence is an
emergent quality that is not part of the object nor of the user. One impli-
cation is that, ‘the user’ is not a sensible concept for those who
acknowledge the intermingled character of human-non-human hybrids.
    This is one contribution and at the same time one point of difference
and departure. Let me now turn to the same topic but from the point of
view of the sociology of consumption and material culture. What does the
concept of a human-non-human hybrid mean for the sociology of con-
sumption and provision, and how does the human-material distribution
of competence affect the details of everyday life and what people do?
Shove                                                                     35


2. Distributed Competence

     My next example is drawn from the field of home improvement and
DIY. Not so many years ago, to put a good surface of varnish on a door
you would have to take the door off its hinges and lay it flat, otherwise the
varnish would drip and run and you would have all kinds of problems. To
do a really good job you needed practice: to some extent the skill in-
volved was necessarily embodied in the person. This is no longer the case.
Modern varnish is capable of drying in twenty minutes, you can apply an-
other coat within two hours and you can be really pretty incompetent and
still get a relatively good finish on the door. You certainly don’t have to
take the door off the hinges. What has happened is that the competence
that was previously embodied in the person, in the varnisher, is now in
the tin. Whilst the concept of a hybrid helps explain this transition, it
does not go far enough in such a notion, alone, does not shed much light
on parallel transitions in systems of provision and consumption.
     To address these questions we need to go further. The modern tin of
‘clever’ varnish brought the job of doing varnishing and home improve-
ment within the reach of amateurs. In so doing innovations in varnish also
constitute innovations in the economy and in the systems of expertise and
competence on which divisions of labour depend. The boundary of com-
petence between the person and things moves, and as this boundary
moves, so does the idea of what people can do for themselves, and of
when they would hire an expert in. In short, the changing contours of hy-
brid configurations have implications for, and are themselves outcomes of
changing patterns of consumption and production.
     This is just one example of just one object: a single tin of varnish. If
we are to continue with this line of thinking we obviously need to go be-
yond single objects and think about how collections of materials and tools
interact and about what this means for the types of projects that people
are willing to take on themselves. Staying with home improvement, inno-
vations in plastic plumbing provide an illustration of more systemic
change. Standardised plastic plumbing fittings were so ‘easy’ to use that
one of our respondents contemplated the otherwise risky project of relo-
cating a radiator. When things go wrong with plumbing projects they can
go badly wrong – potentially resulting in leaks and floods of water all over
the place.
     In this case, an entire system of plastic plumbing brought the radiator
moving project into the realm of possibility. The fittings clipped together.
The job went well and having gained confidence from this project, our re-
spondent’s horizons expanded: having shown that he could move a radia-
tor he was eager to take on other more challenging jobs. This was not an
unusual experience. When people talked us through the history of the
tools in their tool box, they explained that tools and skills were often in-
terlinked. Specific items were acquired for specific projects, and the tool
36                                                           Tecnoscienza - 5 (2)

collection that builds up is both a residue of previous experience and a
platform from and on which future projects are built.
    Tools boxes proved to be revealing sites of analysis not least because
of the extent to which different tools are used in combination. The box
and its contents consequently provide some insight into the accumulation
of hybrid competencies, sometimes built up over many years. Of course
tool boxes also provide insights into failures and into careers cut short by
one disastrous project or another. In any event, the point is that under-
standing these dynamic relationships between people, projects and ob-
jects calls for more conceptual resources than those which STS provides.
    In particular we need to move beyond conventional concerns with in-
dividual objects (scripts, hybrid arrangements etc.) and acknowledge that
we are also dealing with the unfolding lives of people and with changing
of systems of provision, consumption and competence. In the case men-
tioned above, our DIY respondent acquired the skills to become an avid
consumer of further tools and materials – all of which are just so much
metal to those who lack the knowledge of how to use them. His next pro-
ject, building a Wendy house for his children, led him to add to his col-
lection of tools and materials and to his confidence and skill, again paving
the way for the next project.
    Through this example I have taken the idea of distributed competence
from STS and shown how it can be re-planted in the field of consumption
studies. In this role, such concepts provide some insight into the changing
contours of embodied and delegated or ‘materialised’ expertise, and
hence into the also changing boundaries of what people are and are not
willing to do for themselves. As indicated above, such changes have po-
tentially far reaching impact, being of relevance for the DIY market, and
for the livelihoods of professional plumbers, decorators and other trades.


3. Reconfiguring the Elements of Practice: Making and
Breaking Links

    In this section I focus on the relation between material objects and so-
cial practices, concentrating in particular on the idea that social practices
are made of ongoing configurations of elements. This takes us into new
territory. Social theories of practice do not have the same theoretical line-
age, nor do they share the same preoccupations as science studies, design
or the sociology of consumption. They are nonetheless useful in concep-
tualising relations between materiality and competence and in under-
standing how such links are made and broken. Andreas Reckwitz (2002)
suggests that social practices – like digital photography, showering, or do-
ing DIY – depend on the active integration of elements. In The Dynamics
of Social Practice, Mika Pantzar, Matt Watson and I (2012) worked with a
simplified version of this scheme, focusing on just three key elements: ma-
Shove                                                                      37
terials, meanings and skills/forms of competence. Where a practice is
regularly reproduced, these three constitutive elements are regularly
combined. For example, doing DIY projects involves ongoing and con-
tinual interactions between material, competence and meaning, including
the idea of what a project involves and what it means to do it well. That is
the basic starting point. This conceptual scheme implies at least two other
possible formulations. One in which elements (material, meaning, skill)
exist but are not yet linked in practice, and another in which links which
used to exist have fractured or broken, meaning that the practice is no
longer reproduced. A further important observation is that ‘elements’ of
practice are not static: they are defined and constituted in relation to each
other and as illustrated in the following example, they are constantly on
the move.
    The recent history of photography gives a sense of these dynamic in-
teractions. What happened when film photography was overtaken by dig-
ital photography? Which elements changed and which stayed the same?
There are certainly some areas of continuity for example in the ‘element’
of meaning. Ideas about what makes a good photograph are fairly con-
sistent: there are various shared aesthetic conventions. It is still important
to keep the head in view and not to cut peoples’ legs out of the frame.
However, the practicalities of actually taking a picture, and the material
elements involved have changed beyond recognition. Buying film is an
odd, and now specialist pursuit and fewer and fewer people know how to
manage film-based techniques of handling exposure times and the like.
While elements of meaning are relatively stable, those of material and skill
are much more dynamic.
    Whilst these ideas provide a means of conceptualising transitions in
practice, they emphasise features that are underplayed or overlooked in
science studies and design. Critically, they draw attention to the ways in
which elements combine and change, and to the point that social practic-
es are multiply connected. To elaborate, doing digital photography in-
volves making new connections – drawing on skills previously associated
with computing and transferring those over to the realm of photography.
When using a digital camera you do not need to know how to balance
light and shade: not in the way you did with film. However, to achieve a
similar result you probably do need to know how to use software like
Photoshop, and how to adjust images to your liking one pixel at a time.
This clearly involves competences drawn from another field but carried
into and then transformed (to some extent) through new associations, be-
coming part of a new assembly of material elements.
    Science studies and theories of material culture or consumption pro-
vide only partial insights into the ongoing flux of contemporary photo-
graphic practice. For Reckwitz, and for others who write about the evolu-
tion of practice, people (the photographers) simultaneously figure as the
carriers and transformers of the practice. It is they who keep it alive, or
change it, through their more or less faithful or consistent integration of
38                                                            Tecnoscienza - 5 (2)

more or less changing elements. The concept of a ‘user’ radically underes-
timates the constitutive character of peoples’ roles as carriers of practice.
In other words, in integrating elements in the way they do, photographers
are part of making photography and of changing the practice as an ‘enti-
ty’ – that is as something that exists beyond any one moment of perfor-
mance.
    To elaborate, for some people digital cameras substituted for the film
versions they replaced. In these cases, some new skills were needed but in
general the process of taking pictures was reproduced as consistently and
faithfully as possible. This was not so for all. For other people digital pho-
tography opened all kinds of new possibilities: messing around with pic-
tures, swapping one colour for another, editing parts of images out and so
on. The totality of ‘photography’ represents these variant forms, some of
which are more dominant than others. And of course the story does not
end when the image is captured. Digital photography calls for and has
generated new ways of viewing pictures, new ideas about what a family
‘album’ consists of and how it is shared. Whilst some of this is about
making new links (with the computer), it is also about breaking old asso-
ciations (with an album, with film itself).
    In exploring transitions to digital photography I’ve moved from a dis-
cussion of competence embedded in things and embodied in people to a
more complicated account of the changing relation between ‘elements’
including material, competence and meaning. I have also noted that the
practice of digital photography is made and reproduced by cohorts of
‘carriers’ whose varied performances constitute what digital photography
is at any one moment.


4. Material Relations

    In this section I comment on what this analysis of elements and prac-
tices might mean for an understanding of materials and material culture.
To explore this interface I make reference to plastic, considered as a ma-
terial or, more accurately, as a vast family of materials. In the 1940s plas-
tics were heralded as materials of the future and were valued for all sorts
of different qualities: there were discussions of the wonderful possibilities
of ‘dirt proof windows’, of ‘silent, dustless floors’, and of how people
might live in the ‘plastic age’ (Yarsley, Couzens et al. 1941; Yarsley,
Couzens et al. 1943). The qualities of plastic were, of course, identified in
relation to the materials for which it substituted. Hence in comparison
with metal, plastic does not rust; in comparison to wool it is not eaten by
moths, and in comparison with ceramic it is ‘unbreakable’. The plastic
world was, in addition a world of colour, in contrast to the more mono-
chrome materials that it replaced.
    Wiebe Bijker’s very nice history of Bakelite (Bijker 1997) is a classic
tale of how the material came to be as it did. This narrative reveals the so-
Shove                                                                      39
cial groups and interests that had a bearing on how problems were de-
fined and framed and on the solutions that were constructed in response.
In staying with the topic of Bakelite, and in treating this as a bounded
material and as something that has an existence in its own right, Bijker’s
account belongs in the genre of innovation studies. As such it does not
follow through the changing relationship between the material and the
many different products – and hence product-material relations involved.
For example, in the form of a radio casing Bakelite is positioned in rela-
tion to wood, and to walnut wood in particular. But in its role as an insu-
lator (for example in electrical components) the qualities of Bakelite are
considered in relation to those of ceramic.
    On the one hand, focusing on the history of Bakelite as a material is
important and revealing – there really are innovations to be explained and
described. But on the other hand it is also misleading: in the world of ar-
tefacts people encounter plastic, or Bakelite, in the guise of an object or
product and not in some pure material form. In daily life, plastic is a tele-
phone, a hair-brush, a hair-dryer, a set of buttons, a television, and so
forth. There is therefore something elusive about how we know and en-
gage with materials. From this point of view, the qualities of a material are
not fixed or inherent: they are an outcome of the various product- or ob-
ject-encounters through which the material is known. The idea of what
plastic is good for consequently comes from nothing other than this mul-
tiplicity of material/object relations. In very practical terms, conceptualis-
ing the defects and the properties and performances of different materials
– wood, steel, plastic, etc. – is at the same time a matter of conceptualis-
ing the properties of specific artefacts again not in the abstract but as they
are mobilised in the course of accomplishing specific practices.
    The key point is that this calls for an analysis of relations and forms of
co-existence between systems of objects and practices. There are exam-
ples of work which takes this challenge on. For example, Susanna Hand-
ley’s book on Nylon (Handley 1999) provides a compelling account of
how synthetic materials transformed the realm of clothing, bedroom fur-
niture and fashion. Amongst other things, she suggests that synthetic ma-
terials had the effect of democratizing the idea of owning a whole ward-
robe of clothing that you could change and of having a variety of different
clothes from which you could pick and choose to suit the occasion. As
she explains, nylon entered everyday life through a variety of routes: the
price of individual garments dropped, the variety of garments increased,
the idea of wearing different colours for different occasions became es-
tablished, and so on. Critically these material relations operate at a sys-
temic scale: the story is thus not just one of how nylon came to be (inter-
esting though that is), nor is it an account of scripting, domestication, or
appropriation.
    One further example gives a sense of the under explored challenges of
conceptualising multiple co-existing relations between materials, technol-
ogies and practices. I am not sure that it makes sense to talk of electricity
40                                                            Tecnoscienza - 5 (2)

as a material ‘element’, but the existence of an electricity infrastructure is
evidently crucial for the conduct of many practices around which daily
life revolves. Understanding the role of energy in contemporary society is
an important task, not least because of the challenges of climate change.
But none of the fields discussed – material culture, consumption studies,
science studies and design – have quite the range of conceptual resources
required to grasp the interaction between infrastructures (grids, networks
etc.), the appliances that are plugged into those grids and that are the
front line ‘terminals’ of use, and the various practices to which these
powered appliances and devices relate and of which they are a part.
    Many areas of daily life depend on variously invisible infrastructures,
and often on the coexistence of several such networks. The habit shower-
ing arguably depends on the coexistence of electricity, gas and running
water: without these infrastructures in place the practice would not take
the form it does today. In this case, focusing on the design and use of the
shower fitting alone would provide limited insight into the full range of
materiality on which the practice depends. Within science studies/history
there are excellent accounts of how infrastructures especially of electricity
have developed (Hughes 1993 [1983]). As with the story of Bakelite, the
emphasis is on how such large technical systems have come to be config-
ured as they are. But again these accounts stop short of explaining how
these arrangements are embedded in practice, or how they coexist and in-
teract.
    As I have already mentioned there are already many ideas about com-
petences, projects, practices, careers, the multiplicity of relations between
materials and the roles of infrastructures. These have been developed in
different fields and in ways that reflect previous preoccupations, for in-
stance with technological innovation, the status of ‘users’, and so forth.
Further creative work is required to bring these resources together and to
capture and represent those multiple, co-existing and overlapping rela-
tions between materials and practices that constitute the ‘design’ of eve-
ryday life. I have argued that social theories of practice provide an excep-
tionally useful point of reference and a framework that allows us to cap-
ture some of these interconnections. However, some questions remain
and one of these has to do with the role and contribution of product de-
sign.


5. Conceptualising the Role of Design

    Many objects are produced without input from product designers so
just what is it that product designers really do? In promoting and selling
their services professional designers imply that they have something extra
to add, but what is this added value? Designers themselves have certain
ideas but how does ‘design’ figure in representations of materials and ob-
Shove                                                                      41
jects of the kind developed in science studies, consumption or material
culture? There are different options on offer.
    One view is that design is in some way injected into an object, which is
in some or in many respects ‘improved’ as a result. The idea that design-
ers endow artefacts with specific qualities is widespread. There is rather
more uncertainty about exactly what qualities these might be, but in gen-
eral, such an approach suggests that the designer has a rather powerful
role, and that the object itself does not.
    A second family of ideas starts from the proposition that ‘value’ is not
a quality of the object itself, but is something that is accorded to an object
by many actors – not by designers alone. From this point of view design-
ers do not have a unique role but are instead one amongst others involved
in the ongoing activity of attributing and removing judgements of quality
and value. By implication, the value of an object does not last forever, it
changes all the time as the different actors circulate around it adding and
taking away different sorts of meaning. At a minimum this means that if
they are to add value or to contribute, designers need to understand how
objects are positioned and how values and meanings are attributed by
others.
    A third possibility, and one that is consistent with a theory of practice,
is that designers have a part to play in configuring the materials, ideolo-
gies and competences of which social practices are made. In other words,
engaging with objects is at the same time engaging with elements of com-
petence and meaning. There is some point of connection between this
idea and the conclusion that artefacts actively configure experiences, im-
ages and forms and competences. From this point of view it makes sense
to conceptualise design as an intervention in practice. Ironically, this de-
pends on turning attention away from ‘the’ object or its purported quali-
ties and properties, and on focusing instead on objects-in-action, that is in
their role, along with co-requisite elements of meaning and competence,
in the ongoing reproduction of practice.
    Some designers already make such claims. For example, representa-
tives from IDEO explain that “we think of product in terms of verbs, not
nouns, not cell-phones but cell-phoning” (Kelley and Littman 2001: 46).
Of course their role in making cell-phoning is limited: at the end of the
day they work with the object itself, and with a product that is sold. As
such they cannot literally make the practice of phoning but they can and
to some extent do realise the significance of taking phoning as the central
topic and focus of their work, not the phone itself. Reference to the ‘user’
restricts the full force of this realisation and it is worth underlining the
point that what we might think of as practice oriented design involves
much more than taking users into account – instead it calls for under-
standing and intervening in the lives of practices, the elements involved
and the changing cohorts of ‘carriers’ who keep such practices alive.
    In conclusion if you go along with the view that things have some kind
of absolute quality, then you might well conclude that designers (or users,
42                                                              Tecnoscienza - 5 (2)

or somebody) provide that quality and add that value. If you focus on
things as part of situated practices/actions, it is obvious that there are no
lasting qualities and that ‘properties’ change all the time. From this point
of view it follows that design does not have a special or unique role along-
side all the other processes that are going on. Finally, if you consider ob-
jects as material elements of social practice, it would make sense to sug-
gest that designers are involved in shaping not just material elements,
which have no role in isolation, but the entire complex of elements (in-
cluding competence, meaning) of which practices are made. Taking this
idea forward, designers, amongst many others, are engaged in making and
reproducing complexes of social practice.
    A final word on the implications for sustainability. It is tempting and
common to think of sustainable design as that which promotes efficiency:
producing ‘the same’ object or service but with fewer resources. Or that it
is about configuring objects so as to support durability, re-use or recy-
cling. However, there is a much broader and much more significant sense
in which all designers, regardless of their commitments and green creden-
tials, contribute in some small way to the ongoing reproduction of a vast
array of social practices that depend on arguably unsustainable flows of
energy. By implication promoting sustainability is not about designing ob-
jects: rather it depends on asking more fundamental questions - what are
these objects for, of what practices are they a part, and can these systems
of practice be somehow ‘steered’? That would be the place to start.


References

Bijker, W. (1997) Of Bicycles, Bakelites and Bulbs, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press.
Handley, S. (1999) Nylon: A Celebration of Design from Art Silk to Nylon and
   Thinking Fibres, London, Bloomsbury.
Hughes, T. (1993 [1983]) Networks of Power: Electrification in Western Society,
  1880-1930, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University.
Kelley, T. and Littman, J. (2001) The Art of Innovation, London, HarperCollins-
    Business.
Reckwitz, A. (2002) Toward a Theory of Social Practices: A Development in Cul-
   turalist Theorizing in “European Journal of Social Theory” 5 (2), pp. 243-263.
Shove, E., Pantzar, M. and Watson, M. (2012) The Dynamics of Social Practice:
   Everyday Life and How It Changes, London, Sage.
Shove, E., Watson, M., Hand, M. and Ingram, J. (2007) The Design of Everyday
   Life. Oxford, New York, Berg.
Yarsley, V.E. and Couzens, E.G. (1941) Plastics [With plates and portraits of the
   authors.], Harmondsworth and New York, Allen Lane.
Yarsley, V.E. and Couzens, E.G. (1943) Plastics in the Home, London, J.M. Dent.
