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WORK TITLE: Swedish Design
WORK NOTES:
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http://faculty.sites.uci.edu/keithmurphy/ * http://faculty.sites.uci.edu/keithmurphy/about/ * https://news.uci.edu/feature/meet-keith-murphy-ucis-professor-of-the-year/ * https://savageminds.org/2015/07/29/visual-turn-iv-people-and-stuff-a-conversation-with-keith-m-murphy-22/
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Male.
EDUCATION:Attended the University of Chicago; University of California, Los Angeles, Ph.D.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and educator. University of California, Irvine, associate professor of anthropology.
AWARDS:Professor of the Year and Social Sciences Outstanding Undergraduate Teaching Award, both University of California, Irvine, both 2016.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Keith M. Murphy is a writer and educator. He is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of California (UC), Irvine. Murphy attended the University of Chicago and obtained a Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles. In 2016, UC Irvine presented him with its Professor of the Year Award and its Social Sciences Outstanding Undergraduate Teaching Award.
Toward an Anthropology of the Will
Murphy collaborated with C. Jason Throop to edit the 2010 book Toward an Anthropology of the Will. This volume contains essays that examine the concept of the will from an anthropological standpoint. It also features a lengthy definition of the human will. The contributors discuss the will of individuals and of groups, highlighting examples throughout history. Among the peoples analyzed in the essays are the Tzotzil Maya, who live in the Mexican state of Chiapas.
S. Ferzacca, critic in Choice, suggested: “General audiences should enjoy these excellent essays, which were written with anthropologists and advanced social theorists in mind.” Ferzacca categorized the book as “highly recommended.”
Swedish Design
In 2016, Murphy released Swedish Design: An Ethnography. In this volume, he analyses design from Sweden through the lens of anthropology. Murphy identifies key aspects of Swedish design and offers hypotheses on how living with these designs has affected the Swedish people’s lives and interactions. He describes the work of influential Swedish designers, including Gunner and Alva Myrdal, Carl Larsson, and Ellen Key. In an interview with Lindsay Bell, contributor to the Savage Minds Web site, Murphy discussed the connection between anthropology and design, stating: “In a general sense anthropology has a lot to offer all sorts of design fields and is well-positioned to make the work done by designers better according to a number of different metrics. But I tend to think collaborations between anthropologists and most other kinds of professionals are almost always A Good Thing. The question is what makes the match between design and anthropology a fruitful one, and as a follow-up, why is this relationship only recently gaining wider attention, given the fact that anthropologists and other ethnographers have been working with designers outside of academia for several decades.”
Reviewing the book in Choice, M. Frank asserted: “As an ethnographic study, it adds depth to the more-frequent formal analyses of design.” Wendy Gunn, critic for H-Net: Humanities and Social Sciences Online, suggested: “Murphy’s ethnography of Swedish design is not an easy read. It requires commitment and concentration from the reader to engage with a research inquiry that spans more than ten years, involving long-term ethnographic fieldwork and dedicated scholarship. The monograph contributes to a growing body of literature in critical anthropologies of design. Murphy gives focus to what constitutes the political aspects of Swedish design and design work, the effects of the political upon social relations between people and designed things, and how meanings are made through these relations.” Gunn added: “The monograph is well written, eloquently interweaving theoretical concepts from anthropology, philosophy, and politics with historical and ethnographic detail. While impressive in the way he utilizes these concepts to trace the lines of enunciation and visibility, traces of his own critical reflexivity as a researcher concerning the limits of semiotic analysis for understanding what happens between designers during collaborative design practices in the generation and reproduction of form are for the most part unarticulated.” Gunn concluded that Swedish Design “will be of interest to scholars and graduate students in anthropology, sociology, design studies, and the history of design as well as scholars engaged in design research. Murphy provides the reader with an approach to carrying out anthropology of design, outlining thematic areas for consideration; in so doing, he offers an invaluable resource for researchers and students with interests in design and its wider social political relations, interaction analysis, and anthropological approaches to understanding the relation between the political, design processes and practices.”
Writing on the CritCom Web site, Jakob Krause-Jensen commented: “To do a study of design in Sweden is a happy choice, and it is indeed one of the great merits of this fine book that it does not focus on celebrated designers but, rather, views design in a broader context. As the title reveals, the strongest contribution of the book is the connection it makes between design and nation-building.” Jensen continued: “Swedish Design is empirically rich, well-argued, engagingly written, and speaks to multiple audiences. Apart from its regional focus and obvious relevance to studies in Scandinavian anthropology, along with its contribution to discussions of nationalism, it deserves to be read as an important contribution to the growing field of design anthropology. Its view on design is refreshing and new in its broad perspective, and not restricted to that which happens in the workshop—design is seen in context, as an assemblage of actors, practices, forms, institutions, and ideologies.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Choice, January, 2011, S. Ferzacca, review of Toward an Anthropology of the Will, p. 952; April, 2016, M. Frank, review of Swedish Design: An Ethnography, p. 1158.
Reference & Research Book News, May, 2010, review of Toward an Anthropology of the Will.
ONLINE
CritCom, http://councilforeuropeanstudies.org/critcom/ (September 15, 2016), Jakob Krause-Jensen, review of Swedish Design.
H-Net: Humanities and Social Sciences Online, https://networks.h-net.org/ (September 1, 2016), Wendy Gunn, review of Swedish Design.
Savage Minds, https://savageminds.org/ (July 29, 2015), Lindsay Bell, author interview.
UCI News, https://news.uci.edu/ (May 4, 2016), Paula Korn, “Meet Keith Murphy, UCI’s Professor of the Year.”
University of California-Irvine Web site, http://faculty.sites.uci.edu/ (March 27, 2017), author profile.
QUOTED: "In a general sense anthropology has a lot to offer all sorts of design fields and is well-positioned to make the work done by designers better according to a number of different metrics. But I tend to think collaborations between anthropologists and most other kinds of professionals are almost always A Good Thing. The question is what makes the match between design and anthropology a fruitful one, and as a follow-up, why is this relationship only recently gaining wider attention, given the fact that anthropologists and other ethnographers have been working with designers outside of academia for several decades."
VISUAL TURN IV: People and Stuff– A Conversation with Keith M. Murphy (2/2)
July 29, 2015Lindsay Bell
In a previous post, I described the process of an ‘Ethnocharrette’ – essentially a strategy that incorporates aspects of design methodology into anthropological practice. As part of a longer series thinking about how art/design modalities are increasingly commonplace in anthropologies that aren’t designated as visual anthropology. I wondered if this attention to art and design in anthropology is ‘new’ or simply new to me given my recent collaboration with two artists? Is there something of a “visualisation of anthropology” underway? I discussed these questions with Keith M Murphy, author of Swedish Design: An Ethnography. This post is the second half of our conversation.
Lindsay: Your book takes on how Swedish design is constituted in practice through everyday design work and refracts larger cultural and political ideals about Swedish social democracy. Your observations and engagements with designers not only inspired your book, but also some of your pedagogical strategies like the Ethnocharrette. It is increasingly common to see people working at the intersection of design and anthropology. Do you see this as being a way to make the skills of anthropology marketable outside of the academy or is there something specific that makes this intersection make sense?
Keith: I think the intersection makes sense in a few different ways. In terms of the marketability issue, sure, in a general sense anthropology has a lot to offer all sorts of design fields and is well-positioned to make the work done by designers better according to a number of different metrics. But I tend to think collaborations between anthropologists and most other kinds of professionals are almost always A Good Thing. The question is what makes the match between design and anthropology a fruitful one, and as a follow-up, why is this relationship only recently gaining wider attention, given the fact that anthropologists and other ethnographers have been working with designers outside of academia for several decades.
For me the match makes sense because both anthropology and design (I’m using the term broadly, even though design is a very diverse kind of thing) share a number of basic core concerns, the most obvious of which is a concern with people. Even if the daily work of a furniture designer is focused on sourcing the right sized screws, or an architect spends most of her mornings wrangling with CAD software, that’s all done in the service of creating objects and spaces that help constitute an everyday world of human lived reality. If anthropologists are tasked with making sense of that world, designers are charged with help giving it form, two complementary cuts in a broader human-centered project. Second, both design and anthropology are concerned with, for lack of a better term, stuff. Even though we’re all so focused on people, we also recognize that people never stray too far from their things, and that the forms those things take and the meanings they’re given are critical mediators of cultural and political experience. Third (there’s more, but I’ll keep it at three), design and anthropology both operate by means of research, which is to say, both fields explicitly value exploring and critically understanding the wider contexts in which they’re situated, rather than simply building on preconceived ideas about what they’re looking at.
As for why this relationship is only now taking on a more cohesive form, I think that abstract anthropological theorizing needed to play catch-up with the real world. I see several moments and movements in anthropology as sort of establishing necessary preconditions for the emergence of a more robust design anthropology, including material culture studies and theories of materiality, which bring things and their qualities to the fore in not-necessarily-Marxist ways; reconfiguring the critique of visualism as an attention to multisensory semiotic engagement; and a turn to the ethnographic study of making and its contexts. When taken together, all of these (and more!) begin to dismantle longstanding frameworks that separate production and consumption, material and immaterial, the visual and the textual, form and content, and lots more, and design anthropology is sort of swooping in to help redesign their new configurations.
This isn’t to say that design is perfectly suited for anthropology and vice-versa, and I definitely don’t think the match is always trued. But I do think anthropology and design can definitely learn quite a bit from each other.
Lindsay: Yes, I agree. What I think is interesting is the uptake in visual modalities by those of us whose objects of enquiry are not design or aesthetic/cultural production. For instance, we’ve talked about the debates in the infrastructure literatures that rely heavily on the issue of materiality and what is tangible and seen and what is ‘invisible’. I gained some perspective on this last fall when I participated in a symposium at NYU, Media, Infrastructure, and Aesthetics. There were people from a wide range of disciplines interested in assessing the growing scholarly and artistic interest in the aesthetic dimensions of extraction. Architecture, design and art were avenues for talking about global resource extraction and its related cultural politics, even for those of us trained outside these specifically visual disciplines. What do you make of this? Do you think this is a select group of people, or do you think there is a broader current in anthropology to take on shared interests and expertise of these other fields?
Keith: I think that as anthropologists continue to find new sites to examine, and new constellations of humans and their things to puzzle through, we often find ourselves not fully equipped to account for, if we use Eduardo Kohn’s phrasing, the stuff “beyond the human” (and his book is a great example of an anthropologist trying to do just that). This can really be a struggle. Of course anthropology has always cared about the parahuman materials of social life, but as we move toward treating such things less as a context thickly described and more as our central objects of inquiry, our fealty to a textual impulse in both our methods (e.g. field notes) and our representations (e.g. ethnographic monographs) can sometimes stymie us from moving beyond the human in ways that are appropriate to our field sites, and that can push anthropology forward (though I’m personally not interested in straying too far from the human). So some anthropologists start looking elsewhere for inspiration. I think part of the draw toward architecture and design, at least for me, is that, as I said, those are fields whose concerns seem to resonate with anthropology, but whose modalities aren’t ultimately subject to a textual impulse for their legitimacy. They seem to offer ways to engage with the world that are certainly visual, but really they’re multisensory, and they don’t seem to provoke much anxiety around accounting for the semiotic richness of those multisensory forms of engagement — which I think can be alluring to fieldworkers feeling oppressed by the routine obligation to transduce complex experiences into a collection of words on a page. I don’t know whether art, design, and architecture are, ultimately, some perfect parallel panaceas that will help anthropologists really confront the shifting composition of the fieldsites we find ourselves in, but I do think there’s a lot of value in seeing what might come of it.
Meet Keith Murphy, UCI’s professor of the year
'Celebration of Teaching' highlights campus commitment to excellence in the classroom and a superior student experience
PAULA KORN / UCI ON MAY 4, 2016
To associate professor of anthropology Keith Murphy, that Tarva bed frame from Ikea is more than just slat A and rail B held together with bolt C. Instead, such design schemes are imbued with social and political meaning, according to his recent book “Swedish Design: An Ethnography.”
Whether it’s through linguistics, gestures or Scandinavian furniture design, his explorations of the relationships between language, material culture, and human experience have made this University of California, Irvine social sciences faculty member a favorite with students and colleagues. He will be honored as Professor of the Year at the 2016 Celebration of Teaching. The event is scheduled for 4:30-7 p.m., Thursday, May 5, in Doheny Beach Rooms A and B of the UCI Student Center.
“I’m honored and grateful for being nominated and selected as Professor of the Year,” Murphy says. “One of the things I love most about teaching students at UCI is that I learn so much from them every day. I teach anthropology, and part of my teaching philosophy is to try to make the complex concepts and theories we cover relevant to students, to empower them to analyze their own experiences through the tools social science offers. But to do that effectively, I really need to understand my students’ point of view – and learning from them as they teach me about their world is one of the best parts of the job.”
The Celebration of Teaching, founded in 1992, is a chance to highlight the excellent teaching that happens everywhere on campus and for faculty to learn about a range of successful techniques,” says Michael Dennin, vice provost for teaching and learning in the Division of Undergraduate Education.
“The event brings together winners selected by deans as well as campus winners selected by the Academic Senate,” he says. “It allows us to recognize great faculty, such as Keith Murphy, who has demonstrated how creative course design and lecturing can both challenge students in new ways and enhance their educational experience.”
UCI’s 10-year strategic plan, released in February, emphasizes the importance of fostering excellence in teaching and learning. Improved training and rigorous peer and student evaluation are among the new programs expected to help faculty promote creative expression and human inquiry deemed essential to research and education.
In Murphy’s classes, students develop vital skills in critical analysis, according to the nomination letter from fellow faculty members.
“Professor Murphy has garnered a well-rounded reputation across campus as a fantastic teacher of language and culture,” the letter states. “He is able to relate in his classrooms the importance of language in shaping social life while also incorporating his scholarly interests on the relationship between language, material culture and human experience… he truly represents the best of teaching on our campus.”
Since the Celebration of Teaching was founded in 1992, colleagues and faculty have recognized more than 300 professors, lecturers and teaching assistants. All schools are represented in this campus initiative.
A complete list of honorees is available on the Celebration of Teaching website.
About
Hello!
My name is Keith Murphy, and I’m an associate professor of anthropology at UC Irvine. I’m a linguistic and sociocultural anthropologist, and a fair amount of my work explores the relationship between language, material culture, and human experience. For a long time now I’ve been interested in the social, political, and cultural sides of design and designing, and in particular how collaborative designing unfolds in face-to-face interaction. I’ve worked with architects in Los Angeles and furniture designers in Stockholm, and I’ve written some things on all of this, including a book on Swedish design.
I’m also drawn to studying hand gestures and other forms of embodiment in conversation, and I’ve been known to dabble in phenomenologicalish anthropology. And I really like Goffman, Geertz, and Garfinkel, which feels kind of like an admission, but also liberating, so I’m sticking with it. Anyway, there’s more to say but it’s mostly blabber at this point, so I’ll just mention that I’m currently working on a project about typography, typefaces, and why we care about fonts so much.
In 2016 I won two teaching awards at UC Irvine: the School of Social Sciences Outstanding Undergraduate Teaching award, and UCI’s Professor of the Year, both of which I’m very proud of.
Some other things about me. I went to college at the University of Chicago and got my PhD from UCLA. I’m from Boston, which I talk about a lot, and I’m a fan of the Boston Red Sox, Nancy comics, punk rock, twee pop, and avoiding social media.
QUOTED: "As an ethnographic study, it adds depth to the more-frequent formal analyses of design."
Murphy, Keith M.: Swedish design: an ethnography
M. Frank
CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries. 53.8 (Apr. 2016): p1158.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
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Murphy, Keith M. Swedish design: an ethnography. Cornell, 2015. 254p bibl Index afp ISBN 9780801453298 cloth, $79.95; ISBN 9780801479663 pbk, $24.95
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2014-41686 CIP
For anyone who has taught the history of 20th-century design and had a student ask, "How can a chair be political?" this book will help answer that question. It is not a typical design history text--there are no large color images of landmark chairs or textiles and no evolutionary account of historically significant designers. Instead, Murphy (anthropology, UC Irvine) draws out how ordinary objects within the built environment embody Sweden's social democratic ideology: that is, the way Swedes use design to structure the everyday world they live and move about in. Murphy wants to provide an anthropology of design. To accomplish this, he examines the process of design more than the product. Chapters include attention to the house, the design world, and the design studio. In each, important moments from the 19th and 20th centuries are brought forward (e.g., the work of Ellen Key or of Gunner and Alva Myrdal), but the author is equally interested in lesser-known designers and companies that, though they may never achieve iconic status, help demonstrate the widespread cultural attitudes and assumptions toward design and politics. As an ethnographic study, it adds depth to the more-frequent formal analyses of design. Summing Up: ** Recommended. Graduate and professional collections.--M. Frank, University of Massachusetts Lowell
Frank, M.
Toward an anthropology of the will
Reference & Research Book News. 25.2 (May 2010):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2010 Ringgold, Inc.
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9780804768870
Toward an anthropology of the will.
Ed. by Keith M. Murphy and C. Jason Throop.
Stanford U. Press
2010
227 pages
$55.00
Hardcover
BF611
Many of them specializing in medicine or mental health, anthropologists ponder the role of individual will in culture and in the anthropological understanding of culture. Their topics include locating volition in anthropological theory, in the midst of action, moral willing as narrative re-envisioning, dialects of self-experience among the Tzotzil Maya of highland Chiapas, transforming will and transforming culture, and how will can be expressed and the role imagination plays.
([c]2010 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR)
QUOTED: "General audiences should enjoy these excellent essays, which were written with anthropologists and advanced social theorists in mind."
"highly recommended."
Toward an anthropology of the will
S. Ferzacca
CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries. 48.5 (Jan. 2011): p952.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2011 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
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48-2774
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2009-25678 CIP
Toward an anthropology of the will, ed. by Keith M. Murphy and C. Jason Throop. Stanford, 2010. 227p bibl index afp ISBN 9780804768870, $55.00
Some scholars might argue that for contemporary social theory, every question can be answered with two words: structure or agency. This collection, as much a philosophical discourse as it is anthropology, addresses the agency element in this quotient. Tacking back and forth from "will" as a social form that in specific contexts takes on different features, nuances, limits, and possibilities to the social process and individual psychology involved when "will" is put to use (willing), the authors seem to come to the conclusion that there is a little of each-structure in willing and willing in structure--as individuals and groups act in meaningful ways. The volume's framework is an appropriate one for examining these issues in social theory--phenomenology and psychology meld to produce extremely up-close portraits rich in ethnographic detail. In fact, the collection's major contribution is the thick description applied to thinking about human action in context. This has been, of course, a concern of anthropology since the beginning, and this volume makes an important study in this area of theoretical interest. General audiences should enjoy these excellent essays, which were written with anthropologists and advanced social theorists in mind. Summing Up: Highly recommended. *** Most levels/libraries.--S. Ferzacca, University of Lethbridge
Ferzacca, S.
QUOTED: "Keith M. Murphy’s ethnography of Swedish design is not an easy read. It requires commitment and concentration from the reader to engage with a research inquiry that spans more than ten years, involving long-term ethnographic fieldwork and dedicated scholarship. The monograph contributes to a growing body of literature in critical anthropologies of design. Murphy gives focus to what constitutes the political aspects of Swedish design and design work, the effects of the political upon social relations between people and designed things, and how meanings are made through these relations."
"The monograph is well written, eloquently interweaving theoretical concepts from anthropology, philosophy, and politics with historical and ethnographic detail. While impressive in the way he utilizes these concepts to trace the lines of enunciation and visibility, traces of his own critical reflexivity as a researcher concerning the limits of semiotic analysis for understanding what happens between designers during collaborative design practices in the generation and reproduction of form are for the most part unarticulated."
"Swedish Design: An Ethnography will be of interest to scholars and graduate students in anthropology, sociology, design studies, and the history of design as well as scholars engaged in design research. Murphy provides the reader with an approach to carrying out anthropology of design, outlining thematic areas for consideration; in so doing, he offers an invaluable resource for researchers and students with interests in design and its wider social political relations, interaction analysis, and anthropological approaches to understanding the relation between the political, design processes and practices."
Gunn on Murphy, 'Swedish Design: An Ethnography'
Author:
Keith M. Murphy
Reviewer:
Wendy Gunn
Keith M. Murphy. Swedish Design: An Ethnography. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014. 264 pp. $24.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-8014-7966-3.
Reviewed by Wendy Gunn (University of Southern Denmark)
Published on H-SAE (September, 2016)
Commissioned by Michael B. Munnik
Keith M. Murphy’s ethnography of Swedish design is not an easy read. It requires commitment and concentration from the reader to engage with a research inquiry that spans more than ten years, involving long-term ethnographic fieldwork and dedicated scholarship. The monograph contributes to a growing body of literature in critical anthropologies of design. Murphy gives focus to what constitutes the political aspects of Swedish design and design work, the effects of the political upon social relations between people and designed things, and how meanings are made through these relations. An important contribution of this ethnography to existing research in this field is the author’s attempt to challenge the ways anthropologists conceptualize the relation between form and matter towards different ways of thinking about the meaning of things within sociopolitical systems. He does so by combining in-depth analysis of cultural phenomena with detailed ethnographic studies of designers’ design practices and the things they make. In so doing, he proposes a semiotics of material production, which aims to build partial connections between performative aspects of language in use with ideologies underpinning and framing assumptions of the politics of Swedish design.
Murphy asks us to consider two main questions: How are things designed to be political? and How are things made to mean? He critically analyzes how the political nature of Swedish design is reproduced, tracing the role played by social actors and institutions. He achieves this through a semiotic analysis of where, when, how, and why everyday narratives of Swedish design have an important role in maintaining ongoing significance for the public consciousness both inside and outside of the nation-state. In the introduction, “Disentangling Swedish Design,” Murphy proposes to go beyond a claim that design has politics. Instead, he brings to the fore “the complex ways through which design is constructed, abstracted, distributed, operationalized, and given meaning in Sweden” (p. 25). He explores this through a series of cultural domains: the home, the design world, the studio, and the global design market. In chapter 1, “The Diagram of Swedish Design,” the author presents his analytical framework, relating this to material culture studies and science studies. Drawing upon Gilles Deleuze, he argues that Swedish design operates as a diagram mapping sociopolitical landscapes of people, things, and ideologies. Importantly, the diagram makes visible generational aspects of how an object comes into being and the roles that lines of enunciation and visibility play within that. Consideration is given to the ways anthropologists conceptualize the relations between form and matter, and Murphy argues that a more sophisticated understanding is required while reflecting upon the meaning of things. Building upon the linguistic anthropologist Asif Agha’s concept of “enregisterment,” Murphy sets out to reestablish links between “the visible and the articulable, between forms and ideologies of design in Sweden” (p. 49).[1] In tracing these links, he provides detailed historical contextualization of social democracy and the role played by design, referring to cases in Scandinavia and the former East Germany. He is careful, however, to point out that historical contextualization of the sociopolitical aspects of design are always variable and contingent.
In chapter 2, “Building the Beautiful Home,” Murphy provides factual historical detail to substantiate the lines of visibility apparent in the metaphorical use of home as an organizing principle by political parties for transforming Swedish society from the 1930s onwards. National romantic ideals of home and nation become intertwined, laying the path for aesthetic reform, problematization of judgments of taste, and reconceptualization of beauty, encompassing a synthesis of art, design, and industrial production. A key figure here in reshaping Swedish sociopolitical cosmology at the turn of the century was the feminist and social critic Ellen Key. A central issue in her work was how beauty should be made accessible to everyone through everyday products. Importantly, as Murphy discusses, Key began to challenge predominant Kantian ideals of pure beauty confined to the realms of fine art; instead she began to link beauty and the experiencing of everyday things with a different kind of beauty related to simplicity, affordability, and functionality. According to Murphy, the tracing lines of enunciation are evident in the policies and writings of Gunnar and Alva Myrdal and can be compared to a form of social engineering described as a piecemeal approach, characterized by its openness, transparency, and flexibility. However, lines of enunciation appear to become most visible in the publication of the 1931 manifesto “acceptera." Here, the authors—Sven Markelius, Pers Eskil Sundahl, Walter Gahn, Erik Gunnar Asplund, and Gregor Paulsson—extend Key's ideas of aesthetic reform and reconceptualization of beauty to encompass the entire built environment, whereby the idea of ugliness ceases to exist. The main issue, articulated eloquently by Murphy in this chapter, is how key artists, architects, designers, and academics in this period influenced not only the design of things but the design of the Swedish welfare state (policies) and the crucial role the home and home life played here in social reform. The author demonstrates clearly how the politics of social democracy in Sweden become embedded in the ongoing material engagements within people’s everyday environments.
Chapter 3, “In the Design World,” gives focus to the reproduction of the diagram of Swedish design discussed earlier. Murphy aims to situate design work within the wider social context of the Stockholm design world. His second aim is to account for how contemporary designers reproduce the conditions for the reproduction of stylistic vocabulary common to Swedish design despite the fact that the politics of design are rarely discussed by designers. After Mikhail Bakhtin, Murphy argues that contemporary designers he has been working with continuously juggle their ideals and commercial pressures in order to survive economically. This results in heteroglossic artifacts which are essentially forms embodying multiple meanings. Form and meaning have, according to Bakhtin, become controlled and regimented within the modernist project. Classifying and categorizing design objects to make them culturally meaningful is one of the main roles assigned to the design world, alongside generating economic value for designers. Murphy’s main arguments in this chapter rest with, “the circulation of design objects through all of these design world domains, and in various modes, is precisely what affords their appropriation as political objects, even if their creators do not affiliate with such voicings” (pp. 123-124). By way of conclusion, his findings reveal that “to most designers operating in the Stockholm design world, the lines of enunciation are easily recognized but left largely unarticulated in how they conceive and describe their work. But not the lines of visibility. These lines persist, and the designers are quite involved in their reproduction” (p. 127). The designers Murphy interviewed did not explicitly admit to their design work being political. However, some references to moral responsibility of how people should interact with things was apparent; the question remains whether this is particular to Swedish design or the contemporary Stockholm design world. Many contemporary designers across many fields of design, including industrial, interaction, interior, architecture, and so forth in many different countries, are concerned with social and political aspects of design and designing.
In chapter 4, “In the Studio,” Murphy traces the effects of everyday design practices on reproducing Swedish design’s normative lines of visibility. Ongoing interactions between designers during collaborative design work are understood in terms of shaping the conditions necessary for a cultural geometry to reemerge. At the same time, collaboration is central to what Murphy calls "form giving" and thus how objects come into being. He argues that form giving is not just a process of a designer’s individual choice. Rather, it comes through the interactive work that the collaborative team do together within the design studio. Murphy observes that after many years of collaborative working it is sometimes difficult to determine who actually designed the things made, due to designers developing a shared style. Borrowing from Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari the argument that all language is made up of order words, Murphy proposes that design interactions are organized through an overlapping between order-words and pass-words, which help structure form giving, resulting in an emerging design. He elaborates in detail on inscriptive practices and the role played by perlocutionary inscriptions (after J. L. Austin), arguing that perlocutionary inscriptions are made by ordering practices and result in the fixation of form towards a finalization of an object. According to Murphy, the diagram of Swedish design relies upon multiple forces, with the performative being the most visible and is responsible for keeping “the cultural geometry in play through the order-words and perlocutionary inscriptions that contributes to the ongoing reproduction and conservation of the cultural geometry in the very barest moments of form giving” (p. 149).
Chapter 5, “Displays of Force,” discusses historically the role played by national and international civic exhibitions, trade fairs, museums, and IKEA play in propagating Swedish design. Working with Michel Foucault’s concept of heterotopia, he introduces these four institutions, which he identifies as part of an exhibitionary complex contributing to the “cultural substance” of Swedish design’s democratic, functional, modern, and caring qualities (p.203). The public’s role in experiencing these qualities, according Murphy, is central when experiencing Swedish design, and the four institutions presented are central in conveying a Swedish design identity. He clearly articulates how these institutions do their work in making design Swedish through offering publics imagined futures, embodied experiences, utopian spaces based upon seemingly possible realities, modesty of scale, and the embodiment of ideals into tangible objects for consumption; Swedish identity is thus celebrated as a brand.[2]
Throughout the book, Murphy refers to an impressive list of theorists and utilizes their concepts with skillful precision. In designing a social cosmology, he refers to Antonio Gramsci’s work on hegemonic political systems to discuss how the cultural geometry and its forms of organization in Sweden are not enforced upon people living and working in Sweden. Rather, people have taken up political systems in Sweden because they “resonate with people’s experiences” and as such are plausible (p. 213). As he says, “Thus the myth of Swedish Design is, in fact, real” and proposes that the reason for this could be that design has an important role to play in the Swedish social cosmology (p. 214). This is made possible through widespread accessibility to household products which “perform much of the mundane work of managing mundane hardship” (p. 215). By way of conclusion, he outlines the broader implication of his findings and proposes further areas for consideration in an anthropology of design: further elaboration of his semiotics of material production; interrelation between political systems and the role played by designers in shaping social life through designed objects; the relationship between broader categorization of style, material culture and politics, and the details of design processes and practices; and development of the means for registering the ways designed things are made, transformed, and embedded into social life. Importantly, underpinning the foregoing is a coupling of thing making (what he terms cultural geometry) with meaning making (what he terms the final vocabulary) as closely related social processes. He acknowledges, however, that while language is crucial for his semiotic inquiry, it is one among many resources used by people engaged in meaning making.
The strength of the ethnography is the attempt to link the generation of form with the wider social and political conditions for reproduction of form. Building upon primarily the theories of Austin, Paul Ricoeur, Deleuze and Guattari, Charles Sanders Peirce, and Charles Goodwin, he offers a detailed analysis of designing in action and form giving within design practices of designers working in design studios in Stockholm. While this is a fascinating study in its own right with regard to how design form comes into being during collaborative design processes, I am still left wondering if this was particular to the Swedish design diagram or characteristic of collaborative designing practices (for the most part industrial designers--furniture and consumer products) in general. I say this because I recognize and have experienced firsthand, through participating in collaborative design practices, similar characteristics of collaborative design processes and practices in Denmark and Norway. In the fifth chapter, Murphy convincingly demonstrates the role institutions play in creating, substantiating, and branding Swedish design; here, the lines of enunciation and lines of visibility are clearly accentuated.
Throughout the book, the author refers to design in a general sense and presents excerpts of dialogues with himself and industrial/furniture designers within design studios in Stockholm. Design processes and practices are not the same across all design fields, and there is a tendency for the author to overlook this when making claims regarding the nature of the political in Swedish design and the influence different design methodologies and methods have upon form giving. There was also a tendency to present an anthropological point of view as providing understandings of Swedish design, which until Murphy’s ethnographic study have been limited. In this respect, reference to literature on cooperative design, participatory design, co-design, sustainable design, and design activism to name but a few approaches might have been helpful. As it is, I was not entirely convinced that the empirical materials of designers practices presented to support the claims of the particularities of Swedish design are in fact any different from more general understandings of industrial design processes and practices.
Design is presented at points throughout the book in generalist terms. As such, it is difficult for the reader to know what kind of design the author is referring to, what kind of designers he is working with, and therefore what particularities of different kinds of design practices are specific to each design field. Design can be concerned with the design of objects, but it can also be concerned with non-object-oriented processes—for example the design of strategy, policy, engineering systems, and infrastructure. I was also struck by the focus on the Stockholm design world as being the center of world design and Swedish design. I wonder how designers and design educators working and/or being educated in Umeå, Gothenburg, and Malmo would respond to that. What appears absent from the Stockholm design world that Murphy refers to is designers working either as independents or within larger companies who are focusing on more user-oriented approaches to designing. Here, there is an extensive history that references and acknowledges the social, political, and collaborative aspects of designing computer systems, artifacts, and industrial products in Sweden.
The monograph is well written, eloquently interweaving theoretical concepts from anthropology, philosophy, and politics with historical and ethnographic detail. While impressive in the way he utilizes these concepts to trace the lines of enunciation and visibility, traces of his own critical reflexivity as a researcher concerning the limits of semiotic analysis for understanding what happens between designers during collaborative design practices in the generation and reproduction of form are for the most part unarticulated. Swedish Design: An Ethnography will be of interest to scholars and graduate students in anthropology, sociology, design studies, and the history of design as well as scholars engaged in design research. Murphy provides the reader with an approach to carrying out anthropology of design, outlining thematic areas for consideration; in so doing, he offers an invaluable resource for researchers and students with interests in design and its wider social political relations, interaction analysis, and anthropological approaches to understanding the relation between the political, design processes and practices.
Notes
[1]. Asif Agha, “The Social Life of a Cultural Value,” Language and Communication 23 (2003): 231-273.
[2]. Further reference could be made to Penelope Harvey, Hybrids of Modernity: Anthropology, the Nation State and the Universal Exhibition (London: Routledge, 1996).
Printable Version: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=45655
Citation: Wendy Gunn. Review of Murphy, Keith M., Swedish Design: An Ethnography. H-SAE, H-Net Reviews. September, 2016.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=45655
QUOTED: "to do a study of design in Sweden is a happy choice, and it is indeed one of the great merits of this fine book that it does not focus on celebrated designers but, rather, views design in a broader context. As the title reveals, the strongest contribution of the book is the connection it makes between design and nationbuilding."
"Swedish Design is empirically rich, wellargued, engagingly written, and speaks to multiple audiences. Apart from it’s regional focus and obvious relevance to studies in Scandinavian anthropology, along with its contribution to discussions of nationalism, it deserves to be read as an important contribution to the growing field of design anthropology. Its view on design is refreshing and new in its broad perspective, and not restricted to that which happens in the workshop—design is seen in context, as an assemblage of actors, practices, forms, institutions, and ideologies."
Swedish Design: An Ethnography
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Design: An Ethnography)
It is a curious fact unique to Scandinavian countries that design is now associated with the nation. The
labels “Danish,” “Finnish,” “Swedish,” etc. imply much more than merely design made in Scandinavia;
such national branding brings with it ideologies of essentialized Swedishness, Danishness, and
Finnishness, and points to intriguing connections between aesthetics and welfare state politics. How
does social engineering happen through the faculty of taste and the concept of beauty? How do
particular forms and lines come to symbolise a certain ethos, and become the cornerstone of a project
of Swedish nationbuilding? How does cultural identity, quite literally, take shape?
These are the larger questions Keith Murphy addresses in his book Swedish Design: An Ethnography.
The book combines a close focus on design work itself—material objects, design studio environment,
interactions—with several wide angles to give a sense of the historical, cultural, economic, and
political context of such work, which enables us to understand how design becomes Swedish design,
i.e., how particular forms have become vehicles for a politics and a morality, or as Murphy explains, “Tables, lamps and chairs are
not just things, in this perspective, they are just things” (1).
During the first part of the twentieth century in Sweden, a modernist aesthetic came to supplant what could be described as an
aristocratic aesthetic based on costly materials and timeconsuming artisan production processes. This new aesthetic fit
industrialization because its shapes and forms were easy to massproduce, which again resonated with social democratic ideals of
equality, and also with ideas of modernity and development as it promised to solve problems in a rational and transparent way.
Murphy thus traces the historical link between a social democratic ideology and this new idea of beauty. These visions were
articulated and communicated by prominent politicians, artists, architects, and educators like Ellen Key, Carl Larsson, Gunnar, and
Alva Myrdal etc. who shaped public debate and perceptions starting in the 1870s and continuing for the next hundred years,
effectively establishing a “cultural hegemony.”
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Such a link between social reform and modernist aesthetics is also seen in other Scandinavian countries, where social democratic
parties managed to turn themselves into “people’s parties,” a trajectory which, for instance, distinguished them from their German
counterparts and other parties that remained more classbased. In Denmark, popular enlightenment (“folkeoplysning”)—including a
particular vision of the beautiful and the good—became a correlation to the social reforms of the 1930s, which heralded the welfare
state. Consequently, like in Sweden, a version of functionalism came to be associated with political reform, a functionalism softer
than the “brutal modernism” of Bauhaus.
I must admit that upon first receiving Murphy’s book, a question immediately arose in my mind: what is there to say about Swedish
design? Denmark has a design heritage beginning with Arne Jacobsen, Poul Henningsen, Jørn Utzon, and companies like Bang &
Olufsen; Finland has Marimekko and Alvar Aalto. Sweden would be hardpressed to come up with designer names of the same
stature. However, I soon realized those feelings were likely born out of a petty sibling rivalry of sorts (perhaps owed a little
something to the fact that the book landed in my mailbox two days after Sweden had eliminated Denmark from the European
championship soccer tournament). One need only to think of companies like Hennes & Mauritz or IKEA to realize that, in terms of
global impact, Swedish design has no rival. Therefore, to do a study of design in Sweden is a happy choice, and it is indeed one of
the great merits of this fine book that it does not focus on celebrated designers but, rather, views design in a broader context. As the
title reveals, the strongest contribution of the book is the connection it makes between design and nationbuilding.
Although Swedish Design is primarily an exploration of design processes in context, it also contributes to discussions of nationalism.
Analysts of nationalism have pointed out how such ideologies often create their affective ties or “primordial sentiments” through
metaphors of kinship—“fatherland,” “motherland,” “homeland” etc. (Anderson 143). Such metaphors often refer back to an idyllic,
pastoral past. Murphy argues, however, that Swedish nationalism is of a different kind. It is more demure and banal—more goodnatured
and subliminal—as its messages are ostensibly democratic and materialized in the inconspicuous paraphernalia of
everyday life. It is revealing in this context how nationbuilding in Sweden has revolved around the idea of “home” rather than the
“family:” from the 1930s and until the 1970s the social democrats managed to promote the idea of Folkhemmet and turned it into
Swedish collective conscious. By invoking the “home,” explicit parallels between private, family relationships, and public, social ones
are directly linked to the material context in which they are embedded. The home works as a physical manifestation of social
relations—a home is made from things (tables, chairs, beds, household appliances). And through the idea of Folkhemmet, the social
democratic party recast the home as a primary site for political reform and explicitly exploited the positive emotions and associations
with the care and security, which Swedes had invested in their home lives.
To analyze how lines and shapes attain such powerful ideological significance, Murphy draws on Deleuze’s concept of “diagram,”
understood as the relationship between “lines of enunciation” and “lines of visibility” (Murphy 38). In the case of Swedish design,
lines of enunciation consist of policies and ideas focused on care, practicality, rationality, egalitarianism, and sustainability, i.e., the
more abstract cultural ideologies behind a social democratically infused way of life and lines of visibility, which are unadorned forms
like right angles, clear surfaces, and straight lines that come to connote or bear some iconic resemblance to the ideological values.
One of the great strengths of Swedish Design is to see design not only in a larger historical, political, and cultural context, but also to
challenge ideas of design as the work of solitary genius and, also, to recognize it as a social process. Consequently, in a central part
of the book, the reader is invited closer to the ethnographic ground as Murphy explores the work practices of two designers in a
contemporary studio in Stockholm. Here we get an insight into the way that designers collaborate and share ideas. Murphy has a
particular focus on the language that the designers use, and he suggests that they work through what he calls a “formal calculus,”
defined by a binary opposition between angles/squares and roundness/curves. This calculus is continuously invoked when they
discuss their work and deliberate whether to push it in either direction. Murphy pays particular attention to the vocabulary through
which aesthetic judgment is passed, noting, for instance, how definitive and negative adjectives like “ugly” are carefully avoided, and
how aesthetic evaluations are carefully calibrated through the use of more mellow adjectives like tråkigt (boring) or roligt/kul
(fun/cool). He also analyzes how the designers explore creative possibilities through abductive reasoning—through comparisons
they make links between emergent forms and existing objects, or people, thereby ordering the potential trajectories their designs
might take.
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Design inhabits an ambiguous position between “art” and consumer goods: designers must show a dual allegiance to selling and
showing, and the measure of the accomplished designer is her or his ability to traverse those fields. It is also a key point that it is the
design items’ movement between those spheres that afford their appropriation as political objects.
In the last part of the book, Murphy looks at what he calls “the exhibitionary complex”—public institutions like museums, design
exhibitions, furniture fairs, and department stores like IKEA—which in their different ways serve to consecrate and transform objects
into “Swedish” design. Such institutions have different relationships to time: Museums and design exhibitions are oriented towards
the past and the future respectively, and together they serve to elevate and turn things into “art” and transform them into “heritage.”
Furniture fairs and IKEA also put objects on exhibition, although at a more mundane, accessible, and immediate level: those
exhibitions are oriented towards the present while representing an attainable future.
Swedish Design is empirically rich, wellargued, engagingly written, and speaks to multiple audiences. Apart from it’s regional focus
and obvious relevance to studies in Scandinavian anthropology, along with its contribution to discussions of nationalism, it deserves
to be read as an important contribution to the growing field of design anthropology. Its view on design is refreshing and new in its
broad perspective, and not restricted to that which happens in the workshop—design is seen in context, as an assemblage of
actors, practices, forms, institutions, and ideologies.
Reviewed by Jakob KrauseJensen (http://pure.au.dk/portal/en/persons/jakobkrausejensen(938a1e67742a4bb494b1
4d98fe8e19f9).html), Aarhus University
Swedish Design: An Ethnography (http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/?GCOI=80140100526160)
by Keith M. Murphy
Cornell University Press
Hardcover / 264 pages / 2015
ISBN: 0801453291