Stephan Moebius and Sophia Prinz (eds.), Das Design der Gesellschaft: Zur Kultursoziologie des Designs, Transcript Verlag, 2012
10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17160
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Paolo Volonté
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Tecnoscienza – Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
Stephan Moebius and Sophia Prinz (eds.), Society's design. Insights into design from the sociology of culture, Transcript Verlag, 2012
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Book Reviews
2014-01-04
2023-06-12
2014-01-04
2023-11-07
170-173
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Paolo Volonté
2013
10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17160
170
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Stephan Moebius and Sophia Prinz (eds.), Society's design. Insights into design from the sociology of culture, Transcript Verlag, 2012
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170                                                           Tecnoscienza – 4 (2)

!
Stephan Moebius and Sophia Prinz (eds.)
Das Design der Gesellschaft: Zur Kultursoziologie des Designs [Society's
design. Insights into design from the sociology of culture]
Berlin, Transcript Verlag, 2012, pp. 430

Paolo Volonté Politecnico di Milano
     It is well known that studies on science and technology pay particular
attention to the role played by artifacts in social processes. But this is not
an interest exclusive to STS. Nor, as sometimes claimed, is it a theme
raised for the first time by Bruno Latour in the gestational phase of actor-
network theory. It is instead a topic whose origins date back to the birth
of industrial society and its attendant socio-economic analysis, particular-
ly Marxian. It then found fertile terrain especially in semiotics (Barthes,
Baudrillard) and the anthropology and sociology of material culture
(Douglas, Kopytoff, Miller). More recently, it has appeared with increas-
ing frequency in interdisciplinary studies ranging among technology, de-
sign, consumption, and cultural production.
     It is therefore not surprising that the book edited by Stepahn Moebius
and Sophia Prinz – whose purpose is to lay the bases for treatment of de-
sign from the standpoint of the sociology of culture – focuses precisely on
this topic within the theoretical framework illustrated by the editors.
Whilst the book’s title specifically refers to a sociology of design, the in-
troduction furnishes a general scheme for a sociology of objects. This
seems to produce a sort of mismatch between the book’s title and its con-
tent. In fact, not all design is the design of objects, and not all objects are
objects of design (at any rate, not all things are artifacts). Designing is a
much more complex activity, whose object is a multiform reality. This
complexity should be handled by a sociology of design.
     Instead, the design that the two editors have in mind is not the activi-
ty of design as such. They consider a specific, though important, sector of
it: the industrial design of the three-dimensional objects (Dinge - things)
that populate the world in which we live. It is to this design that they ap-
ply the overall thesis of the book: that the world of things and its chore-
ography cannot be reduced to a mere epiphenomenon of the process by
which human beings associate with each other. On the contrary, things
should be viewed as constitutive elements of practices and subjectivities
because they actively give form to body movements, attitudes, sense im-
pressions, and visual perceptions. To paraphrase Bourdieu, they are sim-
ultaneously structured structures and structuring structures. According to
the authors, only scant reference is made to this idea in contemporary so-
ciological theory.
     Whilst to my mind the agency of objects is actually a recurrent,
though marginal, theme in some recent sociological theories, strangely
Book Review                                                              171
enough the area in which it is almost entirely lacking is that of design
studies, design research, and the recent methodological approaches to de-
sign. In recent decades, the world of design has discovered ‘diffuse crea-
tivity’: that is, the importance of social networks (rather than the individ-
ual’s creativity) in determining the outcomes of a design process. The fo-
cus is, for example, on participatory design, self-production, or
crowdsourcing. Nevertheless, the things, the products, still remain in the
background as mere inanimate outputs of complex human processes.
Things are not considered to be endowed with agency. I would not rule
out that this neglect of the structuring impact of inanimate material on
people’s lives is due to a sort of guilt complex of contemporary design as
it seeks to redeem its ‘original sin’: that of being born as an instrument
which served industrial capitalism to subjugate the masses to the culture
of consumption.
    Additionally, the theoretical approach entirely centred on the equiva-
lence between design processes and the world of objects is not matched
by an equally unitary structure of the contributions collected in the book.
They instead range among very different and complementary themes,
thus justifying the book’s generic title. Architecture takes up the most
space in the book, but two articles also deal with communication design.
By contrast, no space is given to the most current forms of design, those
that go by the names of service design, experience design, design for so-
cial innovation, etc.
    In this regard, it should be made clear that the book serves a purpose
strictly related to the German context, in which the issue of the relation-
ship between the design of objects and social forms has not yet found a
recognized ambit of expression and discussion. Moebius and Prinz’s in-
tention has therefore been to collect into a single volume contributions
(some unpublished, some already published elsewhere) by the principal
scholars now seeking, in various respects and in very different ways, to
develop a sociology of design in German-speaking countries. The aspect
of interest is that, by undertaking this task, the book at the same time fur-
nishes to readers external to the German linguistic space a composite and
unitary picture of the debate, the themes, and the research currently on-
going within it. And because the contributions are numerous and well-
documented, the book’s contents also furnish a detailed account of how
the social takes shape through the design activity that (actively or passive-
ly) involves material things. The disciplinary backgrounds of the authors
– sociologists of culture with a particular interest in design – means that a
linking theoretical theme runs through all the contributions. The authors
are sensitive to STS approaches, in particular to the omnipresent actor-
network theory (but not only this), but they usually frame them within
socio-anthropological theories: cultural studies, organizational studies,
sociology of culture, cultural anthropology.
    The book consists of two main parts. The first part comprises six mul-
tidisciplinary essays which, with no claim to consistency, discuss the theo-
172                                                           Tecnoscienza – 4 (2)

retical bases of the topic. The second part of the book instead collects
empirical analyses of concrete situations of everyday working and non-
working life.
    It is difficult to provide an overview of the first part of the book (au-
thors: Karl Hörning, Aida Bosch, Albena Yaneva, Joachim Fischer, Heike
Delitz and Gert Selle), and I shall not attempt to do so. However, I would
stress that reading the book confirms the difficulty for a contemporary
theory of objects to contemplate the two opposed aspects of their social
role with consistency and thoroughness. As Aida Bosch also points out in
her chapter, objects have a twofold nature. On the one hand, they are se-
miotic entities: that is, they possess a segnic, symbolic dimension. They
are (almost) never in and of themselves, but instead refer to something
else. In other words, they are dense with meaning. On the other hand,
they are also material entities, and as such they incorporate the traces of
an existence, an individual biography, and they then interact with human
bodies to open up unexpected possibilities of new experiences. As semi-
otic entities, they ‘speak’ to humans with an apparent personality, but
they are ultimately the product of the human capacity to produce mean-
ings. As material entities, they seem inert, but in fact they silently exercise
their agency in human and non-human networks. Hence the effective so-
cial action of every thing is always the product of the inextricable inter-
weaving between its agency and that of the humans whose experiential
domain it inhabits.
    The second part of the book is a collection of case studies that show
the influence of the sphere of objects on everyday life and social organiza-
tion. They are grouped according the different social spaces with which
they are concerned. First considered is the private space of everyday life,
with particular regard to the home and the car (authors; respectively
Christiane Keim and Mareike Clauss). In both cases, the emphasis is on
the gender constructs that architecture and design contribute to produc-
ing through the action of their respective artifacts. Then several contribu-
tions (Claudia Mareis, Hannes Krämer, Guy Julier, Sophia Prinz and
Roger Häussling) are devoted to professional life as regards both the de-
signer profession and other professional activities. If some of these con-
tributions – those on design practices and cultures – are merged together,
one obtains a first important nucleus of a sociology of design on the pro-
duction side. In this regard, it should be pointed out that, while the soci-
ology of fashion has since its origins (e.g. in Simmel) jointly considered
the two sides of production and consumption, still today the sociology of
design tends to divide between two distinct areas, where production is
largely the subject of organizational studies and STS, and consumption
the subject of cultural studies and sociology of consumption. This divi-
sion recurs in the book. Finally, a third group of contributions (by Mi-
chael Erlhoff, Ann-Lisa Müller, Hanna Steinmetz and Lutz Hieber) ad-
dress the issue – sociologically highly topical and delicate – of public
space. Here the treatment extends to urban spaces, and design is almost
Book Review                                                             173
exclusively thought of as architecture and urban planning. One contribu-
tion analyses visual communication in public (urban) space, while the ob-
jectual dimension disappears. This is striking, because it highlights a his-
torical shortcoming of design studies compared with the large body of
literature that now exists, at global level, on public art.
    Overall the book, notwithstanding the inevitable limitations of a col-
lection of unrelated studies, is a rich and important source for the sociol-
ogy of design, and it makes a stimulating contribution to study on the so-
cial role of objects.
