Take One Object: An Ethnographic Journey through Everyday Design, Material Culture and the Home

Bringing together forty-five authors to reflect on the importance of everyday objects, this volume showcases how things found in the home can provide a valuable method of design and ethnographic study.With each chapter foregrounding an author, an object and a domestic space, it delves into the material ecologies that surround us to create a contemporary portrait of the places we inhabit. Combining analytical and empirical perspectives with autobiographical and archival recollections, an international line-up of designers, anthropologists, artists, architects and archaeologists each focus on a single domestic artefact.These objects demonstrate how anything can become the subject of design.From everyday products such as matches, blankets, toothbrushes and lamps to more personal items like a model Trabant car, a vinyl records collection and a vyshyvanka shirt, they showcase contemporary notions of materiality in different ways.The essays span diverse cultural, geographic and disciplinary