Objects Of Everyday Use Research Articles

Structure and properties of composite seat with auxetic springs

Scientific investigations of structures characterised by auxetic properties conducted so far have led to analyses on a molecular and macroscopic scale and few studies have been concerned with descriptions of auxetic models which could find application in objects of everyday use. The aim of this paper was to carry out numerical modelling and physical verification of furniture seat quality made up of auxetic pressure springs. The authors decided to determine system stiffness and distribution of contact pressure on their surface. The performed detailed numerical analysis made it possible to evaluate the comfort of seat utilisation as well as to assess the impact of seat modification with NHE35 foam on changes of this comfort. In addition, it was demonstrated that numerical modelling may provide a useful tool for rapid prototyping of complex, multilayer systems manufactured from materials with non-linear characteristics. Results of numerical calculations were verified in the laboratory determining the scale of errors with which these results should be interpreted.

Everyday technology: machines and the making of India's modernity

In 1909 Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, on his way back to South Africa from London, wrote his now celebrated tract Hind Swaraj, laying out his vision for the future of India and famously rejecting the technological innovations of Western civilization. Despite his protestations, Western technology endured and helped to make India one of the leading economies in our globalized world. Few would question the dominant role that technology plays in modern life, but to fully understand how India first advanced into technological modernity, argues David Arnold, we must consider the technology of the everyday. Everyday Technology is a pioneering account of how small machines and consumer goods that originated in Europe and North America became objects of everyday use in India in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Rather than investigate big technologies such as railways and irrigation projects, Arnold examines the assimilation and appropriation of bicycles, rice mills, sewing machines, and typewriters in India, and follows their impact on the ways in which people worked and traveled, the clothes they wore, and the kinds of food they ate. But the effects of these machines were not limited to the daily rituals of Indian society, and Arnold demonstrates how such small-scale technologies became integral to new ways of thinking about class, race, and gender, as well as about the politics of colonial rule and Indian nationhood. Arnold's fascinating book offers new perspectives on the globalization of modern technologies and shows us that to truly understand what modernity became, we need to look at the everyday experiences of people in all walks of life, taking stock of how they repurposed small technologies to reinvent their world and themselves.

Introduction The Crafting of Medicine in the Early Industrial Age.

The special issue "Fitting for Health" offers a critical inquiry into the co-construction of medicine and technology in the early industrial age. It investigates the "social life" of medical things, through their material configuration, invention, improvement, and diversification, the sites of their deployment, their status as both novelties and less spectacular objects of everyday use, and the challenges they faced in fitting themselves into people's lives and European res publica . The set of articles (on steel trusses, medical electricity, anatomical models, and trade catalogs) heuristically uses "technology" to analyze how medicine and its material processes were crafted, endowed with meaning, and woven into European societies. Opening the medical "black box"—circumventing its tendency to be ignored as a mediating tool—provides a significant common point of entry for the four enquiries, triggering further analysis of the relationship between humans and non-humans as shaped in medical knowledge and practice.

Recalling community: Using material culture and digital archives in Salford

This article explores strategies for engaging geographically fragmented urban communities as active participants in conceptually re-mapping their former localities. It looks in detail at the ongoing Retracing Salford project in Salford, UK, which employs the use of everyday objects and oral histories to engage and enable former residents to reconnect with their recently demolished neighbourhoods and each other. The project also seeks to document an urban working class history largely overlooked by the large-scale institutions. 
 
 The project is based on a PhD study undertaken by the author at The District Six Museum in Cape Town, South Africa, which examined the use of material artefacts in exhibitions and memory workshops at that museum (Cassidy 2009). Like District Six, Salford has undergone wide-scale demolition and population dispersal over the past 40 years. 
 
 What began as relatively simple installations in museums, libraries and the like, has now grown to include digitised versions of the family snaps, street signs and oral histories, as a developing online Streets Museum archive (www.streetsmuseum.co.uk). This article reflects on how the methodology employed in the Retracing Salford project has helped rejuvenate and reconnect these dispersed communities. The article argues that the approach used is succeeding in widening the circle of participation and debate in relation to heritage issues, in particular the absence of commemoration of working-class community culture in the city. It has also increased awareness of urban land clearance issues. Its continued success depends on numerous factors, such as developing new strategies of engagement with the community, regularly gaining publicity and organising new exhibitions and workshops.
 
 Keywords: Material culture, community participation, urban working class history

“Object Lessons”: Bloom and His Things

This article on “Ithaca” focuses on James Joyce’s use of objects in detailing and managing the description of his characters’ emotional transactions—Leopold Bloom’s in particular. It argues that, for Bloom, intersubjective relationships always have to be mediated by objects of everyday use to avoid confronting potentially extreme (and often distressing) emotional experiences. “Ithaca,” the episode that is commonly seen as the most scientific, rational, and dispassionate section of Joyce’s Ulysses , thereby emerges as a text that carefully negotiates emotional investments with the concurrent need to protect the subject from painful emotional experiences.

An innovative framework to support multimodal interaction with Smart Environments

Interaction with future coming Smart Environments requires research on methods for the design of a new generation of human–environment interfaces. The paper outlines an original approach to the design of multimodal applications that, while valid for the integration on today’s devices, aims also to be sufficiently flexible so as to remain consistent in view of the transition to future Smart Environments, which will likely be structured in a more complex manner, requiring that interaction with services offered by the environment is made available through the integration of multimodal/unimodal interfaces provided through objects of everyday use. In line with the most recent research tendencies, the approach is centred not only on the user interface part of a system, but on the design of a comprehensive solution, including a dialogue model which is meant to provide a robust support layer on which multimodal interaction builds upon. Specific characteristics of the approach and of a sample application being developed to validate it are discussed in the paper, along with some implementation details.

RFID: From Supply Chains to Sensor Nets

The next generation internet will be the internet of things (and not just of computing devices like PCs, PDAs); this is presumed to be enabled by integrating simple computing plus communications capabilities into common objects of everyday use. Radio-frequency identification (RFID) is a compelling technology for creation of such pervasive sensor networks due to its potential for ubiquitous, low-cost/low-maintenance use. However, the current drivers for RFID deployment emphasize supply chain management using passive tags, implying that RFID sensor nets require advances beyond the components and system designs aimed at supply chain applications. This work provides a glimpse of how this may be achieved.

Book Reviews: Out of Order: The Political Imprisonment of Women in Northern Ireland 1972–1998, Science, Culture, and Modern State Formation, Nations, States and Violence, Belfast: Segregation, Violence and the City, Religion, Identity and Politics in Northern Ireland. Boundaries of Belonging and Belief, Doing Things with Things: The Design and Use of Everyday Objects, of States, Rights and Social Closure: Governing

Book Reviews: Out of Order: The Political Imprisonment of Women in Northern Ireland 1972–1998, Science, Culture, and Modern State Formation, Nations, States and Violence, Belfast: Segregation, Violence and the City, Religion, Identity and Politics in Northern Ireland. Boundaries of Belonging and Belief, Doing Things with Things: The Design and Use of Everyday Objects, of States, Rights and Social Closure: Governing

The parts you throw away

With many settings struggling financially and modern toys having limited uses, practitioners need to become more innovative and creative in their use of everyday objects, as Brenda Storey explains.

Doing Things with Things: The Design and Use of Everyday Objects

Doing Things with Things: The Design and Use of Everyday Objects

Les savoirs salariés

<titre traitementparticulier="non">Abstract</titre> Ways of producing, the objects of everyday use, and the competence of workers — all these things are changing today. Everywhere, symbolic operations dominate material manipulations, and the exercise of formal technical training is taking the place of routine operations. Neither neoclassical economic theories nor regulation, it appears, can make convincing sense of these changes. The theses of cogitive capitalism, claiming that the laws governing the functioning of capitalism are also being transformed and will disappear, are based on an erroneous understanding of productive relations and a mechanical conception of economic value. The very real changes confronted by this theory are certainly one part of a complex crisis of capitalism heralding the progressive dissolution of work in different programmed collectivities rather than the resurrection of the independent worker.

Dressing down: Adolf Loos and the politics of ornament

This paper begins to suggest what might happen to ornament under the Modernist reign of abstraction and rationality. Rather than accepting the usual understanding of ornament as a category outside of modernist aesthetics, rejected by its criticism, it suggests that within the development of Modernism (and a ‘pre-Modernist’ position to which Loos would belong), ornament was a much more complicated and knotty question. The ideological motivations for a reform of the role of ornament, played out by Loos through clothing and objects of everyday use as well as architecture, and appropriated by Le Corbusier, had a significant effect on the history of architecture.

Stories for Little Comrades: Revolutionary Artists and the Making of Early Soviet Children's Books

In the Soviet Union of the 1920s, the most prominent avant-garde artists were eager children's book illustrators. Reaching a mass audience of unformed, malleable young people appealed to their commitment to an art manifesto based on the creation of a new kind of person for the revolutionary age. At the same time, the opportunity to work for good pay along with a low risk of censorship were practical attractions. The Constructivist artists drew considerable attention in the West for their brilliant creativity in using geometric designs, machine-age forms, and an architectural sense of space in their approach to the visual arts. Rejecting easel painting as a passe bourgeois preoccupation, they turned to designing and mythologizing objects of everyday use. In a major reassessment of their work, Evgeny Steiner forcefully demonstrates that the Constructivists were as committed to implementing Utopia-regardless of the human cost-as their establishment counterparts. Basing his work almost completely on primary sources-Russian picture books from the Russian State Library, private collections, and publishers' archives-Evgeny Steiner tells his story in deft prose with a wry sense of humor. The solidness of his sources, the range of his interests, and the depth of his understanding of Russian life combine to make this an unusually perceptive book on a fascinating cultural issue that combines the visual arts, literature, and politics.

From Haptic Interfaces to Man-Machine Symbiosis

From Haptic Interfaces to Man-Machine Symbiosis

Person‐object interaction model: Understanding the use of everyday objects

This article explores the occupational use of everyday objects. It draws on current thinking within psychology, sociology, occupational therapy, and anthropology, to describe how actual and symbolic interaction with objects contributes to the development of human capacities and skills, and supports the development and maintenance of routine patterns of occupation. It proposes that objects are ascribed meaning through a process of symbolic interactionism, and that they influence self image. The proposed model of person‐object interaction is an open system. It builds on the Model of Human Occupation, conceptualising objects as having physical, occupational, and ideological domains.

The Window in the Poetic World of Boris Pasternak

F WE ASK OURSELVES in what pose it is most natural to imagine the figure of the poet who emerges from Pasternak's verses, or against what kind of background one ought to paint an ideal portrait of him, or against what kind of back cloth the action of his poems unfolds and the creative work of the poet himself unfolds, then one of the most suitable answers would probably be: by a window. The words quoted in the epigraph are about Pushkin, but essentially this is a poetic self-portrait of Pasternak himself. It is typical of him himself to list objects and to divide them into objects of the external world and objects of everyday use which exist for him on an equal footing and which enter into contact with each other. It is Pasternak himself who loves to depict various situations of the contact between the street and the room

The Rhetorical Challenge of the Everyday Object: ‘Þjóð verða til’ at the National Museum of Iceland

A museum exhibition communicates meaning at various levels, some more obvious than others. The author of this article spent several weeks at the new permanent exhibition of the National Museum of Iceland, exploring it as a visitor would, and offers a reading of the various meanings that the exhibition conveys, both verbally and non-verbally. Of special interest is the use of everyday objects to convey important themes for the nationalistic agenda of the exhibition.

Scientific Theory and Publicity

THE strictures on the methods of the B.B.C. in relation to certain broadcasts dealing with archaeological subjects, with which Prof. Gordon Childe prefaced his presidential address to the Anthropological Section at the Cambridge meeting of the British Association, has once more raised a perennial problem in scientific discussion, which is of no little public interest. The methods of the B.B.C. must be above the suspicion of propagating error, especially in relation to the advance of scientific discovery. Unfortunately, the field of research to which Prof. Childe refers has been in the past the happy hunting ground of the irresponsible theorist. In certain branches of archaeological investigation the apparent familiarity of the terminology and subject-matter- the character and purpose of objects of everyday use in the life of the past, and the inferences as to cultural and racial contact to be drawn from them- not only lend themselves to speculation, but also the more startling and sensational the exposition, the more readily it commends itself as matter likely to be of interest to the public, to those who control the machinery of publicity, the lay Press and organizations, of which the B.B.C. is the most important, engaged in the unofficial education of the public. The obvious remedy that the B.B.C. should be advised by a committee of scientific men, and that other organizations and the lay Press should consult expert opinion in order to eliminate the danger of error, is open to the imputation of stifling progress in favour of orthodoxy. The only remedy is full and free discussion without favour, after an impartial statement of controversial points at issue.