Design FictionsWeek 4

The Power of [Everyday] Things

The dynamic of “the everyday”

The everyday is always changing and is linked to time. Everyday reality is filled with places and things that try to control our time and our experiences.

“…the everyday as a concept emerges with modernity.” Jamer Hunt, “Just Re-do It: Tactical Formlessness and Everyday Consumption,” in Strangely Familiar (ed. Blauvelt), 59.

Strategies and Tactics

“The everyday, then is, an anxious oscillation between the gravitational pulls of stasis and change.” (Hunt, 60)

Strategies are ways of stabilizing or controlling the everyday.

Tactics are ways of destabilzing the everyday.

• Strategies are “ways of seizing space…techniques of the empowered.”

• Tactics are “simple ways of constructing alternatives.”

• Hunt, 60-62.

Tactics are dependent on strategies.

Strategy: controlling space

Tactic: improvisation

Strategy: re-exerts control

What happens when designers deploy tactics?

NEXT Architects Me, Myself and You, 2000

Dialectic: Two opposing forces operating together in tension.

Souvenirs of DisasterBoym Partners