The Domestic Information Machine

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article explores how a group of Soviet designers investigating the future of the domestic interior at the “All-Union Scientific Research Institute for Technical Aesthetics” (VNIITE) sought to assess how technological progress might alter the relationship of the socialist citizen to their home and the objects within it in the years 1968–75. Their various designs for the Domestic Information Machine were part of a broader attempt to imagine an information-age socialism. Their research specifically engaged with Western experimental architecture and theorists of the post-industrial, such as Daniel Bell, Marshall McLuhan, and Alvin Toffler. By placing emphasis on the role of information exchange and the social agency of objects of communication, the machine's designers imagined a restructuring of the Soviet domestic interior linked to the wider world facilitated by an electronic infrastructure of machines. Aping the immaterial nature of the electronic impulses it would send and receive, the machine was imagined as a “deartifactualized” piece of equipment that could transform itself and the domestic interior according to the desires of the owner. Their work constituted an attempt to conceptualize the material environment of a “post-industrial” socialist future by questioning preconceived notions of the collective as well as the nature of consumption in the Soviet Union by replacing objects with information.