Claudia Marina

Finding Design in Everyday Life Practices: The Role of Ephemeral Materiality in Subverting Object-Centered Discourse

Claudia Carolina Marina Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree Master of Arts in Design Studies MA Program in Design Studies Parsons The New School for Design 2018

Š2017 Claudia Carolina Marina All Rights Reserved

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Table of Contents List of Figures

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Acknowledgements

iii

Abstract

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Introduction: What is Ephemeral Materiality?

1–12

Chapter 1: Critical Literature in Conversation

13–40

Chapter 2: Materialism and Materiality in Makeup Practice 41–72 Chapter 3: What Makes Flan Flan?

73–106

Conclusion

107–121

Bibliography

122–125

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List of Figures Chapter 2 Figure 1. Christine Mai Nguyen (YouTube username: chrissstttiiine) demonstrating one of her makeup tricks, or tactics, using the back-end of a spoon to curl her eyelashes in lieu of an eyelash curler. “Makeup Tricks,” January 27, 2008. Source: YouTube.

Figure 2. Christine in a video from September 2017. This video was not sponsored, but illustrates the difference in quality over an approximate decade on YouTube compared with Fig. 1. Source: YouTube.

Figure 3. Screenshots from a Violette_FR Get Ready With Me video demonstrating Violette’s preferred style of doing makeup in public spaces. “MORNING RED LIPS,” September 27, 2017. Source: YouTube.

Figure 4. Lindsey as she presents herself with no makeup on. “Lindsey GRWM 2,” November 4, 2017 (unlisted video) Source: YouTube.

Figure 5. (Left) Lindsey films her “everyday” makeup look on her iPhone. “Lindsey GRWM 1,” November 4, 2017 (unlisted video). (Right) Lindsey’s husband films a Lindsey’s “nighttime” makeup. “Lindsey GRWM 2,” November 4, 2017 (unlisted video) Source: YouTube.

Figure 6. Makeup adjusted once Lindsey filmed herself. “Lindsey GRWM 2,” November 4, 2017 (unlisted video) Source: YouTube.

Figure 7 Screenshot from Lindsey's first GRWM video, showing only one drawer of her makeup collection in Sweden. “Lindsey GRWM 1,” November 4, 2017 (unlisted video).

Source: YouTube.

Figure 8. Saks Potts Collection 7 beauty look. Source: Saks Potts.

Chapter 3 Figure 1. Cover of my grandmother's collaged cookbook/recipe book. Scanned image.

Source: Claudia Marina.

Figure 2. Interior page from my grandmother's collaged cookbook demonstrating both American and traditional Cuban foods. Scanned image. Source: Claudia Marina.

Figure 3. Polaroid of Flan 001. Source: Claudia Marina.

Figure 4. Polaroid of Flan 002. Source: Claudia Marina.

Figure 5. Polaroid of Flan 003. Source: Claudia Marina.

Figure 6. Polaroid of Flan 004. Source: Claudia Marina.

Figure 7. Polaroid of Flan 005. Source: Claudia Marina.

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Acknowledgements I would first like to thank my advisor Jilly Traganou for her continual support of my research interests within Design Studies and for challenging me to look beyond the traditional paradigms of how we study design activity. I would also like to thank Clive Dilnot and Susan Yelavich for their insights as I was developing my research and writing my thesis.

This thesis would not have been possible without the time Lindsey Manas dedicated to being interviewed and documented over the course of a year for my research on makeup.

Thanks to Christine Mai Nguyen for her insights on how makeup practice is affected by YouTube.

This thesis is dedicated to my grandmother Elena, whose own engagement with design in the everyday produced a treasured cookbook, collaged from various recipes taken from newspapers and advertisements. Her passing down the book to me encouraged me to take risks in my research and ultimately helped me think about how the deeply personal can contribute to design knowledge.

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Abstract

This thesis focuses on ephemeral materiality and its role in shaping how we look at design in everyday life beyond object-centered discourse. By looking at two case studies in makeup and cooking, I analyze how design may be considered from non-expert practices that do not produce lasting or discernable objects. Traditionally, design taking place in the realm of the everyday has been examined through the lens of craft and DIY home décor or improvement, therefore privileging the objectification of design. However, the “objects” that come out of makeup and cooking practices are temporary—either washed off, eaten, and eventually (literally and figuratively) becoming part of the designer’s body as the practice develops into a cumulative form of self-making. Rather than just considering consumption as one of the steps in an object’s afterlife towards the end of its trajectory right before discarding, we can look at design activity that does not produce lasting artifacts (thus distinguishing it from craft) as a continual and cyclical engagement with materials beyond their initial consumption in order to transform the act of consuming into an intentional act of design. Because we cannot look at makeup or a home-cooked meal as an object that can be continually enjoyed or interacted with after it is washed off or eaten, the traditional material culture frameworks fall short in some respects. This thesis takes elements from spatial design studies to look beyond the traditional paradigms of object-centered design discourse in order to look at practice through non-experts’ consumption and representation of themselves as bodies navigating through spatial temporalities. It also considers the tactical and imaginative space of the “home” (whether physical or transient) against the strategies of “User-Generated Content” (UGC) in the formation of new practices via the incorporation of institutions, competencies, and images, thus positioning the everyday in an age of social media.

Qualitative research methods are used to obtain stories from makeup users and home cooks, including an autoethnography of cooking modeled from a design problem. This thesis ultimately aims to show how an elemental definition of design emerges through the concurrence of thinking, sensing, and making and can be applied to design activity at all scales. Incorporating more of the everyday into design research demonstrates how Design Studies can reframe traditional consumption practices as agentic design practices.

Keywords: ephemeral materiality, material culture, practice, design processes, lived space, wildness, prosumption, things, makeup, cooking, autoethnography, qualitative research, home, the spatial.

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Introduction What is Ephemeral Materiality?

Ephemeral materiality defies categorization. It is a term I have resorted to while researching this thesis that is essential to express a relationship between materials and making in everyday practices that would be likened to design. The complicated web of the everyday1 is only part consumption. Practices that involve consumption don’t have to be the end of an artifact’s trajectory. Artifacts that are considered ephemeral—herein described as “objects” with quotation marks to distinguish them from more traditional perceived objects of material culture—require users to tap into a refined, elemental design activity in their necessity to make do. My hope with this project is not to claim that everything we do in life is design, but if I can convince the reader that in certain banal activities of the everyday, design value can be found and brought into Design Studies discourse from an avenue other than consumption, then I will be satisfied. To assuage the anxious design practitioner or theorist—no, taking out the trash and washing the dishes are not designing, even though they can be part of bigger design processes. But those processes which are “designerly”2 in practice are due to the relationship between the person and certain types of transformational material processes which involve a degree of deliberation enacted through the concurrence of thinking, making, and sensing.

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“The Everyday,” is considered from the point of view of scholars like Michel de Certeau and Judy Attfield who have written books emphasizing the everyday in their titles. In this thesis, the everyday is used as a noun and also a verb in contexts that give relevance to quotidian life and activities taking place within this realm.

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I take the term “designerly” from design researcher Nigel Cross, who claims that the ability to design requires a specific type knowledge, competence, and performance. See Nigel Cross, “Designerly Ways of Knowing” Design Studies 3, no. 4 (1982): 221–227.

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Alone, the material culture of these practices may exist as objects (perhaps even designed by someone else), acting as tools or ingredients towards the production of something that is greater than the sum of its parts. The transformational quality of ephemeral materials affords agency to the user, who in his or her consumption is also the designer. The everyday falls into the realm of design when a practice and its material artifacts are characterized by deliberation or some sort of planning (whether casual or advanced in time) that takes place in order to achieve some kind of change.

If I were to try and explain ephemeral materiality without getting into its theory or place in the world just yet, I would liken it to cake batter. Before its final form as a spongy object of celebration, immortalized on greeting cards, it possesses a literal and figurative fluid identity. Cake batter compels the baker to taste it so that she may decide if it needs more vanilla or a pinch of salt. It also has ability to display process in material form. Did you whip the egg whites to stiff peaks before you folded them into the rest of the wet ingredients? You would know if you didn’t. The cake batter would be more viscous. A synesthete might even say it is opaque in flavor. If you pay close attention, you can taste the egg yolks, the butter, the flour, sugar, and little pieces of fruit all before it is baked in the oven transforming into a cake that, when considered, is not just more— but also “other”—than the sum of its parts.

In this sense, cake batter is also illustrative of a material consideration to practice that for the most part has remained undertheorized.3 We can only continue a practice such as cooking through the sustained use of ingredients and knowledge of how to use them in different contexts. This thesis will look at cooking and makeup practices taking place in

3

Elizabeth Shove and Mika Pantzar, “Consumers, Producers, and Practices: Understanding the Invention and Reinvention of Nordic Walking,” Journal of Consumer Culture 5, no. 43 (2005): 44.

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the spatial realm of the home within the larger umbrella of the everyday as a starting point to identify a relationship between thinking and making that happens in this space as different from how “Design”4 is practiced in the studio. The vehicle to explore this difference will be ephemeral materiality and the agency it requires from its users as well as from materiality itself.

What I Mean When I Talk About Ephemeral Materiality Materiality is both object/artifact and elemental material such as wood, metal, plastic, paper, etc. Therefore, ephemeral materiality can be a tube of lipstick in its packaging or the pigment swiped on the lips. It can be a cake or the ingredients that go into cake batter. The object-side of ephemeral materiality acknowledges the relevance of material culture studies to design in the everyday, especially in the role of consumption as design invites cultural assimilation and use beyond the traditional production/consumption dichotomy. As the design historian Judy Attfield considered the role of material culture in her own field, she found that “material culture while focusing on the material object also has broad interpretative connotations beyond the object itself, homing-in much more acutely on less stable territory—on things and places where the interrelationship between people and the physical world at large is played out.”5 Anthropologist Daniel Miller paraphrases the philosopher Georg Wilhelm

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The distinction between capital and lowercase versions of the word “design” serves to signify a difference between culturally accepted forms of “Design” and its professions (such as architecture, product design, interior and lighting design, graphic design, and industrial design) from “design” occurring as a verb rather than a noun in the everyday, which leads to colloquial use of the term “designing.” Judy Attfield describes the historical divide between the D/d design in her chapter “The Meaning of Things: design in the lower case” in Wild Things: The Material Culture of Everyday Life (Oxford: Berg, 2000), 45–74.

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Judy Attfield, Wild Things: The Material Culture of Everyday Life (Oxford: Berg, 2000), 40.

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Friedrich Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Spirit in the introduction to his edited book Materiality to claim “that everything that we are and do arises out of the reflection upon ourselves given by the mirror image of the process by which we create form and are created by this same process.”6 Though he uses this to defend a material culture theory in anthropology, material culture is limited with respects to ephemerality. This is not to say that ephemerality is not considered by traditional academic fields, only that it is considered differently than how I am looking at it. When I use the adjective “ephemeral” in relation to materiality in my work, I use it literally as having the quality of impermanence. I chose makeup and cooking as the main practices I will study because ephemeral materiality in makeup means that a face or “look” composed of various makeup products such as lipstick, blush, eyeshadow, and mascara (in varying amounts or omissions) is washed off at the end of the day. Ephemeral materiality in cooking means that the dish and all its edible parts will be digested by the body in the process of eating it. The transient artifact in use, such as lipstick or eggs, subjects itself to limited experiential time.

But others such as Attfield, whose book Wild Things is a critical text in my thesis, have a different perspective on ephemerality. Attfield’s use of the term is more conceptual when she talks about the ephemerality of fashion trends as opposed to a classic conceptualization of objectified (and therefore permanent) style.7 Fashion’s impermanence lends itself well to her purposes, yet in her qualification of ephemerality, Attfield fails to consider the designerly agency of the everyday user to make rather than

6

Daniel Miller, “Introduction,” in Materiality, ed. Daniel Miller (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 8.

7

Attfield, Wild Things, 87.

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just appropriate the material culture or stuff of life. Ephemeral materiality in Attfield’s example would be the fleeting “thingness” of a trend, but the actual material of fashion— its textiles and artifacts— are far from ephemeral.

Thus, this thesis can be said to take on a micropolitical view on materiality in contemporary design discourse in order to uncover why the relativity of materiality includes some practices under the definition of design and excludes others. Miller framed this as a condition “where some things and some people are seen as more material than others.”8

Justification The choice to focus on makeup and cooking as design-like activities came out of a realization that no one contested their processes were colloquially similar to design processes. Much like a designer, the person practicing makeup or cooking is working with materials in a transformative way. The critical literature I have engaged with in my research on the everyday from various academic fields from sociology to design history hardly refutes this. For example, Attfield claims that “the experience of engaging in the act of designing is not confined to professional designers, nor amateur do-it-yourself activities such as home decorating, it is something that most people do every day when they put together a combination of clothes to wear or plan a meal.”9 And Michel de Certeau, in introducing The Practice of Everyday Life, claims that the research which led to the book “has concentrated…on the complex processes of the art of cooking, and on

8

Miller, “Introduction,” 3.

9

Attfield, Wild Things, 17.

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the many wats of establishing a kind of reliability within the situations imposed on an individual, that is, of making it possible to live in them by reintroducing them to the plural mobility of goals and desires—the art of manipulating and enjoying.”10 De Certeau frequently uses the expression to “make do” to describe how people tactically subvert established uses of images, objects, and spaces they consume. The professional designer also has to make do with certain time restrictions, budget, materials, technology, and trends.

The link in activity between design, cooking, and makeup can seem obvious at times due to the colloquial use of design which cannot be ignored if studying how people view their own practices in the everyday. The problem with the discourse between design and everyday life, I found, was that it was either concerned with how people consumed the designed world around them—hardly likening the layman to a designer but at best a producer of meaning, an appropriator of goods—or it looked at the material culture of everyday life solely through physical objects rather than practices that produced temporary objects.

Writers concerned with practice like de Certeau were highlighting the agentic capabilities of consumers—though to be fair, de Certeau was not concerned with using the term “design” to identify this type of “making do,” as not all of the practices which he is concerned with including reading, talking, and walking could justifiably be called design. 11 Though the Design Studies scholar may adopt this language to design, there is a

10

Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven F. Rendall (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988), xxii.

11

de Certeau, Practice, xix.

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lack of acknowledging the activity of design, explicitly, as it expands to a larger population outside of professionalized design and culturally accepted everyday producers such as amateur craft hobbyists. Scholars like Attfield have worked to achieve a class redefinition of design to “demote” it from highbrow culture by focusing on the relationship between the mass-produced, ordinary object and the person who ultimately turns these commodities into personal effects.12 Material culture is just one way to examine the everyday. Can design be studied as an activity within the everyday to glean similar insights? Ethnographies of design exist such as Albena Yaneva’s Made for the Office of Metropolitan Architecture: An Ethnography of Design, but little has been done to examine what ordinary practices, which don’t fit neatly into the networks of craft, can contribute to a ground-zero essence of design.

Because of the ephemeral nature of materials which disappear after a specific amount of time, there is no lasting object to scrutinize as we would in traditional design critique, thus making the “object” of this activity much harder to recognize. Due to ephemeral materiality’s haptic relationship with the body through time, an enveloping object of identity, or at least a form of self-making, constitutes a lifelong object of this type of practice, which Lambros Malafouris considers from his Material Engagement Theory as a type of knowing, perhaps even “designerly,” that emerges from practices that involve a central element of making intertwined with thinking.13

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Attfield, Wild Things, 143.

Lambros Malafouris, “Creative thinging: The feeling of and for clay,” Creativity, Cognition and Material Culture: Special Issue of Pragmatics and Cognition 22, no. 1 (2014): 152.

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By looking at these two case studies in the context of design, I hope to open up the discourse within design studies to look at similar design-like activities in everyday life and be able to extract insight from theoretical questions on materiality, especially when ephemerality plays a role in influencing public perception on whether something qualifies as “design” or not. This thesis aims to push the boundaries of the production/consumption dichotomy in relation to design and provide an alternative design studies approach to traditional object-centered discourse from the point of view of practiced engagement with ephemeral materiality.

Review of Chapters Chapter 1 of this thesis is a theoretical exploration of ephemeral materiality’s place in design discourse and review of the critical literature I have aligned my work with. By looking at this messy design-like activity taking place between production and consumption through the analysis of changeable objects, I challenge traditional notions of the role of materials and tools in the making of a “fluid” material culture constituting everyday life. From this chapter, I delineate themes that will be expressed later in my makeup and cooking research. I develop the theme of “wildness” to express the role that agency plays coming both from the person engaging with ephemeral materiality and from ephemeral materials themselves in makeup and cooking practices. I build my qualification for wildness from the work of Attfield, who considers things to be “wild” once they defy categorization,14 as well as the work of political theorist Jane Bennett whose book Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things positions materiality as having

14

Attfield, Wild Things, 74.

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agency all its own, qualifying as a nonhuman actant according to the Bruno Latour’s Actor Network Theory.15 What Bennett describes as vibrant matter or vibrant materiality, Attfield calls “things with attitude.”16 But how did the attitude get there? Bennett positions herself on one extreme and claims that vibrant matter must have a moment where it breaks from human subjectivity and has force to act on humans and nonhuman assemblages.17 Attfield would say that the person gave the object attitude in order to fit the idea that these wild things produce a “material culture of innovation driven by a vision of change as beneficial,”18 though this adheres to a view of design as a practice rooted in modernism, which my thesis moves beyond to contextualize the argument in an age of User Generated Content (UGC) and “prosumption,” a second important theme.

Through the activity of prosumption, we understand where some consumption practices begin to qualify as design according to Stephen Knott’s three-tiered approach to prosumption as either “following,” “rejecting,” or “adapting.”19 The category of “adapting” draws from tactical responses to situations in order to access a designerly knowledge. Michel de Certeau’s notion of tactics come into play strongly in this chapter, as well as Attfield’s ideas on the ephemerality and tactility of materials in relation to the body, to shape a spatial lens of my thesis which considered the body and home as “sites”

15

Jane Bennet, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010),

9.

16

Attfield, Wild Things, 20.

17

Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 3.

18

Ibid, 32.

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Stephen Knott, “Design in the Age of Prosumption: The Craft of Design after the Object,” Design and Culture 5, no. 1 (2008): 45–67.

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of design.

Although the capstone is not a spatial study of the domestic environment, it is making a case for these sites as a type of material that factors into the ways we “make do” in an environment. This is important because issues of space are not typically considered in design, when in fact the spaces of production certainly affect the ways we design and the outcome of the activity. For example, how a small kitchen would make you cook different types of food. During and after empirical research, from both an active and analytical stance, I will look at the material and psychological environment of the home and the way it constitutes a personal space of production different from the professional space of the studio where the majority of the design work takes place in conventional design practices.

In both of my case studies, I highlight the importance of stories through qualitative research in interviews that demonstrate the rational behind an individual’s makeup practice or in my own narrative following an autoethnography of cooking. I was inspired by de Certeau’s work in The Practice of Everyday Life which makes a case for incorporating narrativity into traditional scientific discourse. When studying practice, one must also analyze the ways in which we recall how we make do.

In Chapter 2, I begin by considering the “strategies” of UGC on a platform like YouTube, analyzing how wildness might get lost as practice becomes translated to an image before examining the tactical space of the everyday through interviews and video ethnographies with Lindsey, a former product developer for a beauty brand. Using the format of YouTube’s “Get Ready With Me” videos, a genre of makeup videos that document a person’s makeup routine throughout the personal space of their home, I

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explore performance and self-making through the act of applying makeup as well as a person’s relationship to products as objects or tools.

In Chapter 3, I look at my own cooking practices, which are influenced by my cultural heritage and relationships with food, and experiment trying to adapt my grandmother’s collected flan recipes into a vegan version that still retains the “thingness” of flan. Though I am not a vegan, I chose these parameters in order to specifically think about materiality’s role in this type of designerly process. This chapter demonstrates where material culture can play an important role and how institutions, capacities, and images help shape a practice such as cooking rather than claiming that design knowledge exists in a vacuum between maker and material.20 The degrees of self-reflexivity towards the process that autoethnography requires in its analysis portion would be important to the subject matter. The “object” that results from cooking, like makeup, culminates in dishes prepared for the individual or the group into a long-lasting (and still changeable) identity through food. They are categorized by the foods you grew up with, the ability to make and eat those foods today, and how that material is explored as an active part of self-making.

The final chapter of this thesis contextualizes the two case studies in terms of current Design Studies discourse in order to achieve an understanding of design that happens within the realm of the everyday as different from the capital-D Design in modern industrial societies. The spatial qualities of the home create a space that can be

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Elizabeth Shove and Mika Pantzar highlight the role of institutions, competencies, and images in “Consumers, Producers, and Practices: Understanding the Invention and Reinvention of Nordic Walking,” in Journal of Consumer Culture 5, no. 43 (2005), 43–64.

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analyzed as “lived space.” 21 In this space, getting ready in the morning or cooking a meal for your family is a daily design practice that constitutes a form of self-making over time.

In the everyday, design appears closer to an understanding of the concept by traditional, craft-based societies, where there is no separation from thinking and making. How we got so far away from this elemental definition that helps us understand that the notion that everyone does, indeed, design has something to do with a separation of the two poles of D/d design.

This thesis culminates in expressing the value of the everyday from a perspective that surpasses the “designing for/consuming of” dynamic. In examining Albena Yaneva’s ethnography of design at the Office for Metropolitan Architecture, one sees how the everyday can be brought back into design research and discourse in order to dispel certain myths of thinking and making taking place in separate realms, achieved by highly skilled individuals only. The value of understanding an extended design practice through everyday life will lessen the polarizing effect of D/d design. This is not to say that all design should revert to craft processes, but I do suggest that there is value in the immediacy brought upon by ephemeral materiality in the everyday that is able to reconstitute a refined understanding of design practice which can then be applied to design discourse at all scales.

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Jilly Traganou, “Wall Street: Bounded and Unbinding: The spatial as a multifocal lens in design studies,” in The Routledge Companion to Design Studies, ed. Penny Sparke and Fiona Fischer (Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge, 2016), 34.

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Chapter 1: Critical Literature in Conversation In order to position the role of ephemeral materiality in Design Studies discourse, it is important to address ephemeral materiality’s role in perceiving design value. While certain activities done outside of the professional design studio are for the most part understood under the definitions of some sort of design—namely the activity that falls under the category of craftwork such as ceramics, clothes-making, woodwork, and DIY home improvement or decor—there is an epistemological gap in design discourse when dealing with everyday activity that closely resembles design but does not aim to produce discernable or lasting objects. What exactly would we call the “objects” that result from makeup or cooking practices? In her book Vibrant Matter, political theorist Jane Bennett draws our attention to how complicated the relationship between objects, practice, and consumption can be when dealing with materiality that acts in direct relationship to the body. For example, a carrot is recognized as an object because it is in relation to ourselves as subjects. But when it enters the body and is masticated beyond comprehension then digested, “the difference between carrot and eater vanishes altogether.”1 A carrot in this example is pure—it has not undergone transformation into a carrot cake by negotiating its materiality with that of eggs, flour, spices, and the necessary cream cheese frosting that altogether defines a true carrot cake seen as an object. But a carrot cake cannot be immortalized, and the things we cook eventually are

1

Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 49.

14 eaten or thrown away, therefore drawing importance to the practice of cooking as the point of design which gives shape to ephemeral materiality.

In a similar way when women say they feel “more like themselves” when they combine different applications of concealer, mascara, and blush to look “awake” or “work-appropriate” and not “sloppy,” we would consider the activity and not necessarily the object to be a type of design.

In the 1954 novel A Spy in the House of Love, Anaïs Nin described the type of solutions-oriented and contextualized thinking involved in makeup practice that design researcher Nigel Cross identifies as “designerly ways of knowing.”2 Niin describes her protagonist …like an actress who must compose a face, an attitude to meet the day. The eyebrow pencil was no mere charcoal emphasis on blond eyebrows, but a design necessary to balance a chaotic asymmetry.

Make up and powder were not simply applied to heighten a porcelain texture… but to smooth out the sharp furrows designed by nightmares…She must redesign the face, smooth the anxious brows, separate the crushed eyelashes, wash off the traces of secret interior tears, accentuate the mouth as upon a canvas, so it will hold its luxuriant smile.”3 Nin’s emphasis on design and redesigning the face suggest that this activity, for some people, can be more than background activity. In this specific role as a designer, her protagonist has created some “thing” from a place of intent—whether we classify it as an ephemeral “object” or not, the result of “the multiple acts of composure and artifice had

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Nigel Cross, “Designerly Ways of Knowing,” Design Studies 3, no. 4 (October 1982): 221–227.

Anaïs Nin, A Spy in the House of Love (The Authoritative Edition with comments by Anaïs Nin), Kindle Edition (np: Sky Blue Press, 2010), originally published in 1954 by Swallow Press in Athens, Ohio.

15 merely dissolved her anxieties; now that she felt prepared to meet the day, her true beauty, which had been frayed and marred by anxiety, emerged.”4 Why talk about makeup and cooking as design practices, now, when people have been engaging with this type of activity for centuries? The aim of this chapter is not to classify these things as capital “D” design, but rather to highlight that incorporating these everyday practices, which deal primarily with ephemeral materiality, into Design Studies discourse has become somewhat problematic against the traditional paradigms of practice and material culture as models for understanding design as both activity and noun.

Because this project deals with issues of embodiment and literal consumption of designed “things”5 in the making and remaking of our everyday lives, it is more difficult to analyze certain practices performed in relation to, or contingent on, the body’s eventual absorption or digestion as a form of design.

These entangled questions come from a contemporary evolution that follows the shift from thinking about design from modern to postmodern. We are well beyond the shift to postmodernism which saw a need to re-examine design activity and designed things needed under a wider net of practice. In the early 2000s, this led scholars like Judy Attfield to author works that sought to expand the definition of design from its traditional

4 5

Ibid.

The term “things” here is used to express the subject of my study as distinctive from an object’s physical form/configuration that would visually and conceptually ease identification of a wide variety of products resulting from professionalized or amateur design processes by naming and categorizing them in relation to a wider world of goods. Also, the use of “things” allows flexibility to understand a practice through a more nuanced lens. For example, in my own case studies, there is a difference between makeup—which in its consumption of professionally designed products (lipstick, foundation, eyeshadow, etc.) creates another designed “thing” (literally one’s appearance), which cannot be called an object, per se—and cooking—in which the person works with raw ingredients (produce, dairy, grains, etc.) to create a thing that is outside of us, therefore more objectifiable, yet this is contingent on its visuality rather than other sensory experiences.

16 or institutionalized form to a more flexible and agentic definition of design pertaining all “things with attitude,” or those objects that form the material culture of everyday life, created “with a specialized end in view.”6 Today the layperson is practicing design in an era deeply embedded in the fabric of social media, where “user-generated content” (UGC) allows platforms like Instagram and YouTube to challenge traditional notions of the production/consumption dichotomy, in effect creating a space for distributed authorship through skill-building and sharing.

The images distributed and promoted on these platforms also provides a pseudo-object permanence to ephemeral materiality in a way that cookbooks have been doing for years, but the effect is possibly greater with makeup as we are now able to continually re-access “original” makeup looks by simply searching for them. The conceptualized “object” is a look such as “the French girl look” or the “no-makeup” look, and the products which are associated with these ephemeral objects are means to an end of achieving a desired form.

In this way, these ephemeral “objects” do saturate culture though not necessarily in a way material culture would address.

Rather than just being things you “do” without giving much thought, the prominence of makeup and cooking-related images distributed globally through social media allows people to build practices based on the images they seek out. Though images are not the sole motivation for developing an interest in a new practice, they are centrally implicated because they are culturally specific and responsive, yet are widely disseminated through social media, expanding the scope of certain “ways of doing” beyond traditional means of learning or passing down information.

6

Judy Attfield, Wild Things, 12.

17 The phenomenon of K-Beauty (Korean Beauty) in the US, for example is directly tied to the consumption and reproduction of images such as gifs (moving stills sequenced in a loop) and videos, Instagram posts, and hybrid blogs/e-commerce platforms dedicated to promoting the practice and material culture of K-Beauty. In a paper exploring the relationship between Americans’ obsession with Korean images of plastic surgery and the role social media plays, Sharon Heijin Lee stated that the widespread popularity and sharing of images such as the viral “Miss Korea gif,”7 showing the faces of Miss Korea candidates morphing into one another in attempt to show a homogenous distinctive look that defines success and idealistic beauty in this context, is part of a new visual economy created by social media sites both in the East and West—as Western media outlets are equally responsible for fetishizing the production and cultural consumption of Korean women.8 According to Lee, “netizens are not merely passive recipients...but rather themselves become producers, depending on what they do with such images (or others like them).”9 In the age of social media and user-generated content, it is true that the consumer of these images is also a producer of the global image-trend when he or she creates personal content, but there is still room in the mythical space of the home to explore the actual production of the self. The work of consumption scholars Elizabeth Shove and Mika Pantzar shows how images, competencies, and institutions are mutually dependent

7

Neetzan Zimmerman, “Plastic Surgery Blamed for Making All Miss Korea Contestants Look Alike,” Gawker, April 25, 2013, http://gawker.com/plastic-surgery-blamed-for-making-all-miss-korea-contes48090745.

8

Sharon Heijin Lee, “Beauty Between Empires: Global Feminism, Plastic Surgery, and the Trouble with Self-Esteem,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 37, No. 1 (2016): 1-31.

9

Ibid, 5.

18 on encouraging new practices to take off. Shove and Pantzar co-authored a study on the development, marketing, and use of Nordic walking sticks—a case study which demonstrates a new way to “do walking”—around different parts of Europe. They found that “relations between material objects and associated images and forms of competence are of defining importance,” especially when practice is diffused beyond its original target demographic and must adopt to what a population considers acceptable and normal.10 Considering social media and its effect on the image-seeking, competencebuilding, and institutional strategies developed based on the knowledge disseminated by user-generated content, it is valuable to consider aspects of spatial design studies, as a way to analyze design practices that are, “bordering/splintering/differentiating, rather than simply producing/consuming/appropriating—to which object-based inquiries often adhere,” according to spatial design studies scholar and proponent Jilly Traganou.11 Certain elements of the way spatial design studies looks at the production of “differentiated space” through the agentic capabilities of non-expert users/producers is useful for my study because ephemeral materiality principally operated in what Henri Lefebvre calls “lived” or “representational space.”12 This space encompasses both the possibilities afforded by the home as a mythological spatial site and the experiences of

10

Elizabeth Shove and Mika Pantzar, “Consumers, Producers, and Practices: Understanding the Invention and Reinvention of Nordic Walking,” in Journal of Consumer Culture 5, no. 43 (2005): 45.

11

Jilly Traganou, “Wall Street: Bounded and Unbinding: The spatial as a multifocal lens in design studies,” in The Routledge Companion to Design Studies, ed. Penny Sparke and Fiona Fischer, (Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge, 2016), 38.

12

Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson Smith (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1991).

19 the body using space as a critical part of the design process. Oftentimes, these practices are accompanied by ephemeral spatialities as well, eliciting a tactical need to “make do” while in transit or in a public place or in different parts of the home seeking different light sources—all of which shapes the outcome.

Wildness The importance of agency is dialectical in both talking about the agentic capabilities of the non-expert designer as well as the agency of ephemeral materiality itself in relation to themes of embodiment and self-making in daily life. In order to describe the relationship between the individual and material initially consumed, we must first look at the concept of agency in relation to the topic of “wildness” which is at the heart of both Judy Attfield’s classification of “wild things” in her book by the same title and Jane Bennett’s concern with “vibrant materiality.”

Attfield defines the moment something becomes wild once it “escape[s] the boundaries of categorisation,” though it should be noted that Attfield only considers physical things, not necessarily their practices.13 This idea of wildness-as-defyingcategorization was also expressed by Bennett in Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things when she brought up the example of the carrot eventually becoming part of our corporeal existence, drawing attention to materiality and its own agency. The two authors are focused on the wildness of things but are directly opposing in their views. For Attfield, “wild” things or “things with attitude,” as she calls them, are embedded on an object by its maker or owner. For Bennett, materiality itself possesses “thing-power,”

13

Attfield, Wild Things, 74.

20 which she qualifies as “the curious ability of inanimate things to animate, to act, to produce effects dramatic and subtle.”14 Though Attfield is principally concerned with the objectification of design, therefore making material culture appropriate to her research, there are limits to her idea of design as “things with attitude,” especially when “things” are only considered from the perspective of physical objects—whether distinguished or clutter. On the opposite end of the spectrum, “things” for Bennett can be more than just objects. Things possess an agency all their own, therefore designating a subject as a “thing” makes it an actant in a network of assemblages. In the first chapter of Vibrant Matter, Bennett describes a vitality and energy found in a pile of trash including a glove, some pollen, a dead rat, a bottle cap, and a stick.15 Rather than material culture considering these components as objects, what was important in this example was their configuration, though it is likely this assemblage was not designed to elicit a response. In this particular configuration, Bennett noted that “objects appeared as things, that is vivid entities not entirely reducible to the contexts in which (human) subjects set them.”16 These two perspectives on wildness operate in tension with each other when we ask how a thing becomes wild, or how does it get its attitude? Is it wild because humans project identity onto them? Or is the wildness coming from the materiality itself which has the agency to then affect humans? When dealing with ephemeral materiality, the answer lies somewhere in the middle. We can look at makeup products or food from both

14

Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 6.

15

Ibid, 4.

16

Ibid, 5.

21 perspectives in the differences between applying and making, as well as in the relationship of the ephemeral materiality acting on or outside the body, which affects where on the spectrum it lies as a thing.

However, one important consideration of wildness is overlooked when dealing only with things, namely that ephemeral materiality is wild because the practices are wild themselves. They operate outside of institutionalized frameworks, making them hard to categorize as pure design or as production rather than consumption. Shove and Pantzar bring up an important point in their study when they say that “the relationship between materials and practices remains under-theorized.”17 Between the user/non-expert “designer” and the final “object” there is the tool, which is both designed/produced and used towards the designing/producing of something new. In other words, it is both a product we consume and an actant that plays its own role.

There are nuanced differences between makeup and cooking when looking at them from this perspective. Makeup is acquired through conventional consumption. You buy a product at a store, use it, and then perhaps buy a new one when that product runs out. Makeup is a tool for transformation. Cooking involves tools, but for the purposes of this thesis, it is better to consider tools as far away from gadgets as possible. But would we say that eggs are a tool? In some ways, yes. Eggs are a tool to stabilize baked goods, for example, but we’d call them ingredients. If we ignore the importance of the makeup object’s form or directions for use, makeup products can be seen as ingredients, and therefore actants. While one practice interacts with ephemeral materials on the surface of skin and another at a digestive level, both the use of ingredients in makeup as well as

17

Shove and Pantzar, “Consumers,” 44.

22 cooking are carefully considered to create a desired effect—a “look” or certain type of food.

The ways we use actants (materiality in terms of ingredients or other designed things) is essential to the process of designing under wild practices that escape categorization as D/d design. I focus on the process to move away from current paradigms of consumption in order to access agentic capabilities of individuals who would traditionally be called “users,” yet are much more involved in the production of a secondary tier of design (much like traditional designers in some respects) in which consumption is only the starting point. It should also be noted that because we are dealing with ephemerality and time limits of using these objects we designed in the realm of the everyday, the culmination of faces or dishes that define our lives in a trajectory view are materially mediated. In other words, we engage with vibrant matter that has an effect on the body, but we also give meaning to everyday life via the accumulation of our personal material culture (here seen for example in traditional use/consumption models of luxury or drugstore makeup products, recipes passed down generations or new kitchen appliances). Both these directions of identity placement work through things and their manipulation by humans. This manipulation is key in order to develop an understanding beyond consumption within the spheres of makeup and cooking, which are traditionally bound by materialism.

Literally or figuratively, the products of these processes eventually become a part of ourselves—this type of “consumption” is separate from the academic view of the production/consumption paradigm. Here I am dealing with the term literally in a condition tied to the materiality in question’s effervescent qualities. The necessity of

23 thinking and operating with non-lasting objects that are meant to be eaten, washed off, or absorbed into the skin requires the person using them to work tactically with this ephemerality—in personal ways that work for the specific time, situation, and personality of the user. Ephemerality makes cooking and makeup wild practices precisely because, at the level of the everyday, it requires tactical “making do.”

Here I am using “tactics” and the phrase “making do” as Michel de Certeau does in The Practice of Everyday Life. According to de Certeau, tactics are short-lived and operate on the basis of opportunity.18 Though they aim to subvert strategies, or dominant imposed orders, they are always situational and temporary as a way of tricking the ways producers want you to use a product or space, in order to use it more fit to the individual’s needs or personality. De Certeau also likens these itineraries to “tours” which are descriptive and directional rather than a map which is dominating.19 In the next section we look critically at what separates makeup and cooking from consumption alone by considering design possibilities within the term “prosumption.”

Prosumption Design in everyday life, like the professionalized practice, is not the product of pure creation. As sociologist and anthropologist Bruno Latour states, “to design is always to redesign.”20 In the marketplace, the consumer is invited to engage with

18

Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven F. Rendall (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988), 30.

19

de Certeau, Practice, 119.

20

Bruno Latour, “A Cautious Prometheus? A Few Steps Toward a Philosophy of Design (with

24 designed objects but whether we should consider this as just consumption has been questioned by various authors writing with a fervor to dispel the myth that consumers merely receive and digest the world created for them by producers. By placing prosumption outside of the strategies of user-generated content on social media, we can begin to illustrate how a concept like “prosumption” can be used to describe activities beyond craft or mere customization.

In the Nordic walking study, Shove and Pantzar argue that consumption seen as appropriation is inadequate in explaining how consumers and producers both participate in the creation of a new practice. Appropriation, they claim, should be seen as just one facet of reproducing a practice.21 Consumers must learn how to use materials associated with the practice, but in doing so they also create and disseminate “associated practices and concepts including those of health, beauty, leisure and enjoyment of nature.”22 Shove and Pantzar are writing about Nordic walking sticks and how in different countries the practice is associated with ideas of leisure or physical fitness, but it holds true for other conceivable practices which can only reach their level of prominence in a culture through the material configuration of its image.

In an article titled “Gymnastics, Ideal Girls, and the Signal of Makeup,” writer Autumn Whitefield-Madrano makes the connection between patriotism and the “ideal American girl” in practicing and consuming gymnastics. “Gymnasts ‘need’ makeup to be

Special Attention to Peter Sloterdijk),” keynote lecture for the Networks of Design meeting of the Design History Society, Falmouth, Cornwall, September 3, 2008, http://www.brunolatour.fr/sites/default/files/112-DESIGN-CORNWALL-GB.pdf.

21

Shove and Pantzar, “Consumers,” 45.

22

Ibid., 61.

25 in accord not only with femininity and to soften the image of their athleticism, but to be in accord with the image and behavior of a gymnast,” Whitefield-Madrano writes.23 Makeup as material culture in the world of gymnastics is not necessarily an example of the everyday but serves to show how something that is continually washed off and reapplied daily creates a type in society which can then be accepted or challenged. In the case of gymnastics, makeup serves as a tool to promote girlish ideas, but in the case of other sports, displaying a full face of makeup is an act of defiance. The article also mentions Michelle Carter, a US gold-medalist in shot-putting who wears a full face of makeup in a sport that is embedded with masculine themes of force.24 In this sense, makeup is a design choice given agency beyond consumption. Its associated images, institutions, and assumptions about competencies all factor into a specific design choice to subvert the strategy in place. The lived space of this activity— the choice to wear makeup in a non-traditional practice—is contingent on the tactics of a specific time and space. In the worlds of makeup and cooking, this type of activity demonstrates a more engaged and agentic form of consumption which can be called “prosumption.” However, rather than seeing the prosumer as a natural evolution of the industrially-affected consumer, Stephen Knott argues that we should analyze prosumption in three tiers—not all of which are considered “design” based on the level of agency required.25

23

Autumn Whitefield-Madrano, “Gymnastics, Ideal Girls, and the Signal of Makeup,” The New Inquiry, August 16, 2016, https://thenewinquiry.com/blog/gymnastics-ideal-girls-and-the-signal-of-makeup/.

24 25

Ibid.

Stephen Knott, “Design in the Age of Prosumption: The Craft of Design after the Object,” Design and Culture 5, no. 1 (2008): 50.

26 The distinction illustrates a certain awareness of materiality and possibilities bargained through trial and error which qualify some activities as design rather than just lumping them into the catch-all net of consumption. In my case studies, it is important to continually remind oneself that the thing produced is not as important as the act of producing it, principally because these things change over time in their making and remaking thus denying a reproducible object which is how the traditional design process would consider the outcome of design activity.

Not all prosumption is design, which demonstrates how the user’s individual interest and knowledge of materials can make the distinction between simply following instructions and thinking like a designer. The first type of prosumer in Knott’s model is seen as just “following.”26 A cookbook would be seen as an object which encourages what Knott considers to be a “proactive engagement after the initial stage of consumption.”27 The designer in this case is the producer of recipes inside of the cookbook. The person following the recipe is just carrying out another person’s design to the role of a manufacturer. However, following instructions is an effective introduction to teach users how to engage with materials. Cookbooks demonstrate steps and technique that a person can then adapt when making a recipe for the second time. Knott claims that “following” behavior shouldn't just be seen as consumption either, as the prosumer is creating knowledge to then be used later. This supports the idea that design is never pure creation.

Once the prosumer knows how to engage with materials, he or she can choose to

26

Ibid., 51.

27

Ibid.

27 “reject” the instructions, which Knott identifies as his second tier of prosumption, or “adapt,” the third tier.28 Rejection as a tier of prosumption may seem contradictory, but Knott explain that even in counterculture activity, there is a dependence on the “individual possession of tools,” which would still constitute some form of consumption.29 The idea that the user is still subject to his or her environment and the tools and materials available is expressed when we consider space as a secondary type of material the making process. Depending on geographical location, climate, and space (such as the square footage of a kitchen or availability of natural light in a bedroom), the ability that our designs will be able to fully “reject” consumerism and the idea that we can produce everything in our immediate vicinity is extremely limited. Knott agrees with Elizabeth Shove in another article she co-authored with Matthew Watson, 30 wherein they write “that materials and consumer goods are themselves active agents in the configuration and distribution of competence and so of practice.”31 Finally, what Knott considers “adapting,” would most likely be in line with the ideas posited by Michel de Certeau regarding tactics and space and those of Judy Attfield regarding intent. The way Knott describes adaptation as the moment in which “the prosumer’s role can change from following to self-conscious adaptation, echoing the actions of the proactive bricoleur,”32 closely identifies the considerations I look at when

28

Ibid., 54, 58.

29

Ibid., 56.

30

Knott cites E. Shove and M. Watson in “Design in the Age of Prosumption,” 58.

31

Matthew Watson and Elizabeth Shove, “Product, Competence, Project and Practice: DIY and the Dynamics of Craft Consumption,” Journal of Consumer Culture 8, no. 1 (2008): 71, doi:10.1177/1469540507085726.

32

Knott, “Design in the Age of Prosumption,” 59.

28 exploring the role of the individual in designing with and through ephemeral materials.

However, this stage could not be expressed without the mention of the other two, as the stage of “adaptation” includes aspects of “following” and “rejecting” within. This condition is afforded by ephemeral materiality and object-impermanence’s need for the user to 1. have material competency, and 2. make definitive choices toward an end result in order to make the most out of tools or ingredients (now seen as expressive elements directly tied to the user’s intent).

This argument gives a practiced dimension to Attfield’s consideration of the material culture of everyday life. In other words, rather than just considering consumption as just one of the steps in an object’s afterlife towards the end of its trajectory right before discarding, we can look at design activity that does not produce lasting artifacts (thus distinguishing it from craft) as a continual and cyclical engagement with materials beyond their initial consumption in order to transform the act of consuming into an intentional act of design. Because we cannot look at makeup or a home-cooked meal as an object that can be continually enjoyed or interacted with after it is washed off or eaten, the traditional material culture framework falls short in some respects. In considering where agency lies in the design process through the theme of “wildness” and understanding the role of the prosumer acting outside of the strategies of user-generated content and in the imaginative spaces of the home and the body which shapes various modes of lived space, we can begin to carve out a framework by looking at spatial design studies elements present in the body and the home in relationship to design.

A challenge, thus, is to consider the things that we make that take us through life

29 and are left on the backburner of theoretical thought—makeup which takes a girl through the stages of womanhood—ideas of aging included–and food which sustains us and culturally identifies our past and present. These things form an immaterial culture, or perhaps a fluid material culture, that is ungraspable in terms of traditional objectification, yet many of the same ideas that Attfield expresses about identity can be found in the user’s relationship to making rather than projecting identity onto a thing.

Sites of Design: Body and Home Identity should not be seen as one’s personal thingness injected into an object, but rather the very appearance of identity through form itself. This thesis is limited in the sense that philosophical theory on identity cannot be fully incorporated in a rich way, yet the ideas between body and material, or body and environment, by theorists like Baruch Spinoza are acknowledged and have influenced the ideas presented by more direct sources like Jane Bennett. My concern is with the body as a site of design, which is why I use the term “identity” sparingly and prefer to use “self-making” instead, as the latter term implies a literal and procedural “making” of the self as expressed in the body in negotiation with inner self and outside world where it needs to engage with others in various contexts.

Viewing the body as a site of design practice in the case of makeup and cooking is possible because of the proximity and interaction between ephemeral materiality and the body—thus allowing a material (and productive) dimension of practice to surface.

Makeup objects remain objectified until they are used on a face. Red lipstick is no longer an object, but rather an intentional component in the gestalt of your presentation.

30 Attfield also considers the body in her work as a primary site of containment. This is the space where we directly negotiate our inner selves with the exterior objective world through materiality (i.e. how we dress, what we eat, how we present ourselves.).33 Containment is just one way Attfield analyzes the objects that concern her.34 She describes containment as a condition that “assumes agency on the part of the design process to be able to predict and control how the product will be put to use within certain parameters of space and place” [my emphasis].35 I consider the distinctions between space and place from the writings of Michel de Certeau, without whose research the nuances of my thesis would hardly be possible to express. It should be noted, however, that de Certeau’s use of the space/place dialectic is in direct contrast to the way space and place are defined in Cartesian thought, where space is a physical location and place is the social realm of how we value space.36 De Certeau identifies place as physical location, a configuration of things in relation to each other which “implies an indication of stability.”37 In de Certeau’s qualification, one can

33

Attfield, Wild Things, 238.

34

The other two are “authenticity” and “ephemerality,” though her idea of the two are different than the way I treat ephemerality when I write about ephemeral materiality. For one, Attfield’s definition of ephemerality is much more conceptual in the sense of trends and fashioning something “in” or “out.”

(Attfield, Wild Things, 77.) I am also less concerned with authenticity because as mentioned, the practice of makeup and cooking is more important than the conceptualized object formed out of this process, which only lasts for a limited amount of time. Still, I should note that Attfield’s consideration for authenticity will be referenced in Chapter 3 when I consider the case study of cooking specifically.

35

Attfield, Wild Things, 77.

36

Robert W. Preucel and Lynn Meskell, “Places,” in A Companion to Social Archaeology, ed. Lynn Meskell and Robert W. Preucel (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 215.

37

de Certeau, Practice, 117.

31 identify places with “strategies,” or proper ways of using the environment imposed by an authority (the designer/producer).38 Spaces, however involve the dynamics of movement and trajectories,39 therefore being shaped by “tactics,” or ways of doing that poach and seize opportunities based on the faults of an imposed strategy on a place.40 Tactics are never long term, which makes it a useful model to look at makeup and cooking as design through the lens of ephemeral materiality. When looking at the space of the body which directly engages with the experientially short-lived conceptual “objects” that emerge from makeup or cooking practices, we can say, as Jamer Hunt has, that “space is becoming, not being.”41 Individual bodies experimenting with their own trajectories in places eventually become the collective body of a society or group which can form and define a place over time.42 However, I am concerned here with the individual body as a site of design on a very personal level, one that must deal with the very issues of containment that emerge when we design “things with attitude”43—presumably our own attitude at a given time and place.

Attfield writes:

38

de Certeau, Practice, 36.

39

de Certeau, Practice, 117.

40

de Certeau, Practice, 37.

41

Jamer Hunt, “Just Re-Do It: Tactical Formlessness and Everyday Consumption,” catalog essay in Strangely Familiar: Design and Everyday Life, ed. Andrew Blauvelt (Minneapolis, Minn.: Walker Art Center, 2003), 61.

42 43

de Certeau, Practice, 55.

Using Attfield’s generalized definition of design, aforementioned in this chapter. Attfield, Wild Things, 12.

32 Much of the negotiation in respect of the interrelation between the individual and others is carried on through material things at the most mundane level of everyday life through bodily concerns defined by means of dress, alimentation, dwelling, technological appliances for work and leisure; but particularly in the process of consumption where many of the adjustments to the social construction of identity can be seen and transformed.44 Ways of “doing” or presenting the body via design can be seen at a very basic level from the point of view of style, which has various definitions. Attfield critiques style as being a fixed idea, such as that of “classic style” being seen as the ““timeless, ever-appropriate, beautiful, fully formed solution that appears to evolve naturally from an inherent teleology of perfection”—or what historically we would call “good design”—as opposed to the ephemeral quality of fashion, by which she means the quick turnover of fashion trends as opposed to actual material ephemerality. 45 It appears her distinction of style is more along the lines of what Michel de Certeau would qualify as “use,” a form of consumption or imposed strategic order, rather than how de Certeau thinks of style as practice rather than object. To illustrate this idea, de Certeau explains that, “just as in literature one differentiates ‘styles’ or ways of writing, one can distinguish ways of operating.”46 The ways we present the body via the foods we make or the makeup we choose to wear at different times speaks more directly to self-making as an active practice rather than the idea of imbuing a clothing item with personal meaning via ownership. Makeup,

44

Attfield, Wild Things, 238.

45

Ibid.

46

de Certeau, Practice, 30.

33 once applied, can only be preserved in an image, but we can never return to the “real thing” because the real thing exists only in context of the events surrounding it. Daniel Miller’s ethnographic work in Trinidad supports this view of practiced ephemerality, but does so using clothing, as Attfield does to a different conclusion. In his book Stuff, Miller described how Trinidadian identity is tied to the process of making do rather than just consuming and personalizing fashion. He looks at ephemerality in relation to time, rather than cultural relevance, when he describes the process of making elaborate costumes for Trinidadian Carnival. He notes an important fact that the costumes “must be discarded and re-made annually. What is celebrated is the event, the moment.”47 For Trinidadians, Miller found that style has two components of individualism and transience. This will become key in the following case studies where I look at makeup and practice as temporal design experiences in which the individual expresses her individuality with no expectation of permanence. Miller describes that the individual character of a Trinidadian person may lead him or her to not design an outfit for Carnival with much creativity. He or she may decide to copy whatever they see in fashion magazines or TV (thus partaking in “following” activity via Knott’s description), but the essential aspect for the embodied artefact is that the ensemble works for “ideally just one particular occasion.”48 In life, this is how we experience and come to terms with the work of preparing Thanksgiving dinner or a wedding makeup look. The object must be parted with unless it were an art installment—and even then, the literal disintegrable nature of materials requires the

47 48

Daniel Miller, Stuff (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010), 15.

Ibid.

34 moment to be celebrated.49 The body is central to the performance of these designed things, and the body is also centrally implicated in their disappearance. 50 Though it is true that we can conceptualize a configuration of elements and embed it with meaning, Bennett’s theory regarding vibrant matter suggests that there are certain forces brought out by the quality of materiality alone. And when dealing specifically with materiality that is temporary like food or makeup, this is especially true, since we cannot conceptualize its thing-quality—all we know is that the look makes us feel more confident or that adding coffee to chocolate recipes enhances the thingness of chocolate.

At a very physical level, certain pigments or ingredients may cause an allergic reaction on the body, which demonstrates that materiality does have its own force. Food does act on the body in a banal way, but when we are aware of a material’s ephemerality, it may cause us to intentionally use it in different ways. For example, knowing that some foods are claimed to be aphrodisiacs or that some mushroom species contain psychedelic properties. We use these ingredients at a certain place and time, incorporating their ephemeral qualities into other foods we eat rather than just eating to fuel our bodies.

Thus, the body as a site of design is important not only as a cognitive agent acting on materials, but it is also receiving knowledge from them as well. There is a dialogue in these processes not unlike more traditional forms of design. For example, in her ethnography of design with OMA architects, Albena Yaneva describes the design process

49

See Alison Knowles, “Make a Salad,” performance piece first performed in 1962 and “Identical Lunch” first performed in 1969. [Betsy Morais, “Salad as Performance Art,” New Yorker, April 26, 2012, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/salad-as-performance-art.; Friends of the Highline, “Alison Knowles Make a Salad performance on the High Line” YouTube video, November 12, 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pc5_pexVob8.; “Performance 10: Alison Knowles” MoMA, January 13–February 4, 2011, https://www.moma.org/calendar/performance/1583.

50

Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 3.

35 of the architects as an intimate relationship between the architects and the blue foam which is used to make models.

Foam guides the way designers ‘cut a straight line,’ argues Shiro [a designer at OMA], and allows more shaping, boxing, and enclosing of things. Thus, architects delegate to the material the power to enfold, to the extent that the foam can begin to dominate the model-maker at a given moment, and the ‘knowing architect’ loses mastery over the building he is striving to understand. Foam cutting is the perfect medium for rapid thinking, allowing them to imagine the new shape in the moment of cutting instead of anticipating in advance.51 In a similar way, material expresses how it wants to be used on the body by its design or agreeability to the senses (such as whether a lipstick is designed in a tube or a more general palette that encourages its use as a multi-purpose color product). Ephemeral materiality requires tactical and situational thinking and an embodied approach to the moment when it is being used in order to produce knowledge.

When dietician Jennifer Brady was developing the autoethnographic research method, “Cooking as Inquiry,” she claimed to focus on cooking because its performance sheds light on identity, body, and how we acquire knowledge “that other activities such as gardening, dance, or sport do not.”52 This might be because the materials involved in cooking, in their relationship to the body, provide for this site of negotiation and selfmaking. “Foodmaking requires us to attend with our eyes, ears, noses, mouths, and hands and draws on the knowledge we hold in our bodies,” Brady writes.53 I claim that makeup

51

Albena Yaneva, Made by the Office for Metropolitan Architecture: An Ethnography of Design (Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2009), 58.

52

Jennifer Brady, “Cooking as Inquiry: A Method to Stir Up Prevailing Ways of Knowing Food, Body, and Identity,” International Journal of Qualitative Research Methods 10, no. 4 (2011): 323.

53

Brady, “Cooking,” 326.

36 is another practice that we perform on the body and, in turn, our bodies perform out in the world. In the case of cooking, there is a more collective element of performance based on distributed authorship based in memory, history, and culture involved in the making of food for ourselves and others as well. Viewing the body as a site is important because it allows us to “do” identity but it also shows how identity is “done” overtime, by looking at it in the realm of the everyday.54 When speaking about the body, design takes the form of a verb. It is something we do, whether professional or not. When Attfield qualifies design as a verb rather than a noun55 in order to emphasize aspects of modernity and agency taking place in the containment of an object or practice, she gives another definition of design to expand on the aforementioned “things with attitude” when she says that design as a practice of modernity can be achieved on a personal level in “a practice of self-construction realised through consumption as well as in the acts of making a living.”56 It is clear by now that I do not consider the two mutually exclusive.

But to focus on the acts of making of living means to focus on the spaces of everyday life—the home, being for the majority of people in the global north, the most central locale. The home is an interesting aspect to look at theoretically because it has both elements of space and place. Geographically and architecturally, home takes the form of a place. An apartment, a mansion, a bedroom—these are all places with limitations to how we make do based on window placement, square footage, privacy, etc.

54

Brady, “Cooking,” 324.

55

The noun version of Design implies institutional authority on objects that are historically considered worth preserving and analyzing as design, which Attfield is against.

56

Attfield, Wild Things, 75

37 But home can also be a space and a mindset, such as when we go home for the holidays versus home for the day after work. Both are considered home based on the activity that goes on in this space, affirming Michel de Certeau’s theory that “space is practiced place.”57 What we do in these spaces shapes them in a way that only stories as tactical forms of mapping can describe. Based on what is available and the individual who is making do, de Certeau states that we can treat the home as “bedrooms so small that ‘one can’t do anything in them’ to the legendary, long-lost attic that ‘could be used for everything.’”58 The domestic realm is an idea shaped by spatial considerations—a kitchen can be a closet in a cramped apartment if the tenant never cooks and needs the extra storage, for example. But it is worth noting that the possibilities of the home, acting as a reprieve from the strategies of the city or suburb which dictate appropriate ways of carrying oneself depending on the location, relies on tactical ingenuity. For the most part, inhabitants of a home “make do” in ways that they can relax and experiment. The home can therefore be seen as a laboratory for the self. As de Certeau poetically put it, “Only the cave of the home remains believable, still open for a certain time to legends, still full of shadows.”59 The spatial claim to importance of the home as a type of ephemeral material in the making process would not be possible without the work of feminist architectural theorists

57

de Certeau, Practice, 117.

58

Ibid., 122.

59

Ibid., 106.

38 whose body of work as a whole has shown that “identities are contingent and situated, constructed in response to particular times and places.”60 The home exemplifies the same qualities of “otherness” that Jane Bennett expresses about thingness. Seen as a space, the home is full of wandering trajectories, possibilities and randomness when practiced that separate it from the functions assigned to the factory or studio where design activity is assumed to be creative and also productive. The activity that takes place in the home is done in private, thus allowing for an element of queerness to define the space. In feminist architectural theory, the topic of queerness is treated as a verb, which brings to light Attfield’s insistence that design be thought of as a verb, too. Because the home usually lacks professional design spaces and requires traditional spaces to be used in new ways, we can understand how “only certain uses make space queer.” 61 Queerness is situated, which emphasizes the role of the body as a site of design and as an active agent using space as an element.

Depending on where craft activity is performed in the home (such as the interior versus the garage), Attfield claims there are different forms of acceptance in terms of gender and class distinctions, such as whether the activity “is regarded as work or leisure, what type of tools and machines are used, and if the activity of making is for reasons of thrift, to clothe the family, to enhance the home, for gifts, for profit, therapy, charity, or

60

Jane Rendell, “Tendencies and Trajectories: Feminist Approaches in Architecture,” in The SAGE Handbook of Architectural Theory, ed. C. Greig Crysler, Stephen Cairns, and Hilde Heynen (London: SAGE Publications Ltd, 2012), 93.

61

Hilde Heynen and Gwendolyn Wright, “Introduction: Shifting Paradigms and Concerns,” in The SAGE Handbook of Architectural Theory, ed. C. Greig Crysler, Stephen Cairns, and Hilde Heynen (London: SAGE Publications Ltd, 2012), 53.

39 for the sheer pleasure of making with no particular concern over its ends.”62 The interviews and self-reflections in the following chapters aim to bring these spatial considerations together through qualitative research methods derived primarily through interviews and observation of people in spaces they call home. But depending on the role of the body, stories also tell us that space can be used more tactically such as in transit or in various parts of the home. De Certeau’s use of the term mētis, used to illustrate a tacit type of knowledge practiced on the spot, illustrates the role of narrativity in everyday practice, especially because we are often not conscious of the specific moment we are designing versus merely living life. In practice, mētis works on accumulated time, therefore it counts on past experiences and multiple possibilities.63 When we do makeup or cook our favorite meal, we often act on second nature until memory “reveals itself at the ‘right point in time.’”64 This moment is usually brought upon the smell, taste, or look of ingredients reconfigured in such a way that it will remind you of the way your grandmother made that dish or inform you how it should taste. The end result does not emerge until you practice instruction, memory, intuition, and choice all being negotiated simultaneously through the senses. In her analysis of Wall Street and the Occupy movements taking place in Zuccotti Park, Jilly Traganou proves that design, and not consumption, of space played a role in shaping the lived space of the camp.65 Traganou claims that by employing tactics of mētis, “proto-design,” and other material

62

Attfield, Wild Things, 73.

63

de Certeau, Practice, 82.

64

de Certeau, Practice, 83.

65

Traganou, “Wall Street,” 36.

40 configurations and individual bodily preferences of how to perform in this space, design does not need to operate on expert knowledge but rather on “the development of agencyfocused capabilities, peer-to-peer dissemination, and alternative pedagogies.�66 By analyzing the development of these things through aspects of wildness, seen as the agentic relationship between both the individual and material in the formation of wild practices, we can look at the sites of design taking place in the body and home with respects to how modern-day stories are told and competencies are built on social media platforms. The next two chapters demonstrate these elements coming together to shape how individuals shape their everyday lives through thinking, making, and sensing.

66

Ibid., 36–37.

41

Chapter 2: Materialism and Materiality in Makeup Practice Exactly how is the act of applying makeup design? The question seems to elicit a gut feeling that it is, though its qualifications become complicated when compared to designed products such as the lipstick tube, the shade, formula, or packaging. Without much thought, applying makeup has been considered the practice of simply consuming a product of the designed world. However, through consumption comes the possibility of remaking and designing something else altogether. Whether this thing is called attitude, thing-ness, or the self, its intangibility and proximity to the body conflicts its practice, leaving it out of the realm of design discourse unless its argument serves to understand the production of its material goods (i.e. makeup products).

When we design a face—specifically our own—for different occasions, we partake in an agentic, visible practice of self-making. Makeup is a prime case study to analyze under the framework of Design Studies because its practice cannot be performed without its material dimension being acknowledged. Traditionally, this material dimension of practice has been seen as consumption, but through ideas like “prosumption” and the ad hoc demands of makeup’s ephemeral materiality once applied, the practice is more likened to design in thinking and making.

This intrinsic and defiant “object” is at times indistinguishable from ourselves, and other times it is perhaps clearer we are “prototyping” a new look. It emerges from the everyday practice of makeup to illustrate a relationship between practice and materials.

Instead of focusing on use, I challenged myself to look at the process of applying makeup

42 and the personal rationale that goes into deliberating the application of color, texture, and finish as design in order to mediate agency between material and individual. While makeup products can be analyzed as design, I choose to look at them in practice as part of a broader design of self-expression for different contexts when applied. Two people can own the same lipstick, but how they use it to produce desired forms distinguishes one from the other. One person may use lipstick as blush and another may blot it on for a subtle effect while yet another may prefer to swipe it on haphazardly if the color is forgiving.

Because a face-as-object is brief and malleable—subject to its environment, mood, and micropolitics—it might be more suitable to call it a “thing” that exists outside of one’s bare, bodily essence. Yet the designed face has an agency of its own that takes a person through different stages of everyday life, such as transitioning from home life to work life or special events in varying public and private spheres. Eventually, makeup practice seen as a series of ephemeral “looks” marks different time periods and transitions of a person’s life from adolescence to young adulthood to middle age and the various notions of materially expressed maturity attached to them. If we accept the difference between makeup objects (nonhuman actants) and identity (as the material assemblage of a variety of objects), it is possible to view the practice as more agentic than simply being the product of consumption (“you are what you eat/wear/use”). This qualification of “things,” falls in line with Judy Attfield’s view of “wild things”/ “things with attitude.”1 The transformation of makeup which you buy into a look which you create happens precisely at the moment of designing who you are or wish to be at that

1

Judy Attfield, Wild Things: The Material Culture of Everyday Life (Oxford: Berg, 2000), 32.

43 moment. It is the moment when the lipstick in the tube is no longer a passive object but is now a thing. It has the ability, when applied, to talk back.2 In the previous chapter, we looked at the concept of wildness, thus defined as agency, from different directions—that of the individual exerting agency onto things and that of things (whether the lipstick in the tube or as a “live” thing applied on the face) demonstrating their own agentic capacities on individuals. I concluded that the relationship between the two needed to be negotiated in dialogue through the body, which in turn, constitutes a form of design knowledge happening at an elemental level.

Makeup is both wild practice and wild material. To contextualize my argument within a larger network of players beyond the intimacy of the everyday between the self and makeup, I also look at how the theme of “wildness” may be compromised by imagemaking and skill-sharing platforms like YouTube.

In this chapter, I begin to extract how design may be communicated through processual negotiation expressed casually through a specific genre of YouTube videos known as “Get Ready With Me” (GRWM) as well as reflective interviews with experts and non-experts within the general realm of everyday makeup practice. Through this, I hope to achieve an elemental understanding of design that would help identify it at any level.

2

Here I am following the frame of thought positioned by W. J. T. Mitchell in his book, What Do Pictures Want?, 156–157, which states that “objects are the way things appear to a subject—that is, with a name, an identity, a gestalt or stereotypical template,” whereas things occupy “the moment when the object becomes the Other, when the sardine can looks back, when the mute idol speaks…” Jane Bennett cites Mitchell in Vibrant Matter, footnote 2 of Chapter 1.

44 Strategic and Tactical Prosumption: YouTube as Context and Tool YouTube now stands as a crucial platform for distributing and learning new information in lieu of magazines. One can learn how to do just about anything on YouTube with the added element of performance. The effects of broadcasting yourself regularly develops an expert-like presence that may be grappling with the private, nonexpert everyday realm offline. In an essay describing the underlying social anxiety of YouTube beauty vloggers, writer Alice Bolin describes the influence of non-expert opinions and the images they create on the consumer mindset.

From beauty vloggers, I learned which products to buy and how to use them, and which products would counteract and cover up the other products. Despite their advanced makeup addictions, [YouTubers] are first concerned with how their audience relates to them, apologizing for using products that are very expensive or discontinued, saying they know no one needs as much makeup as they own, and assuring everyone that they are never ever ‘bragging.’ ‘Homemade’ is the aesthetic, but many beauty YouTubers have become internationally popular and successful, with millions of subscribers, making big money not only from YouTube’s ads but from the cosmetic brands they work with and help create products for.3 YouTube is both context for skill-sharing and tool for skill-building. Understanding YouTube as a tool positions the website within Stephen Knott’s tiers of prosumption, in which consumption is recognized through the use of tools which are then tied to the design of another object.4 YouTube’s images are centrally implicated for the both producers and consumers of YouTube videos who actively shape and seek out “looks,” which in this thesis are seen as quasi-objects that attempt to give form to ephemeral

3 4

Alice Bolin, “The Scrying Game,” Real Life, August 9, 2016, http://reallifemag.com/the-scrying-game/.

Stephen Knott, “Design in the Age of Prosumption: The Craft of Design after the Object,” Design and Culture 5, no. 1 (2008): 45–67.

45 materiality.

In interacting with YouTube as a platform for prosumption, one does so at various levels of perceived expertise. Within the world of content creators, there are distinctions between the amateur and professional based on the quality of the content produced or whether a YouTuber has garnered the attention of brand sponsorships. There is also a separate layer of amateur/professional relationships (hereby expressed as expert and nonexpert, in order to avoid the nuanced definitions and assumptions of the aforementioned terms) between the everyday viewer and the content producer.

Operating within spaces on and off YouTube, experts and non-experts use tactics, which depending on their documentation and dissemination on the platform, then become strategies for instruction, therefore losing the essential nature of a tactic’s impermanence.

Ephemeral practices and materials are fixed to a re-accessible image for the purposes of consumption. Through the display of tactics on YouTube, brands may also see how nonexperts are using products in ways that were not originally designed for use in order to develop new products for consumption.

I will deal with the tactical and strategic relationship between viewers and YouTubers through the avenue of how these videos are incorporated back into everyday life. The qualitative research I’ve done with my research subject Lindsey Manas, demonstrates the transition from expert to non-expert, producer to consumer. Lindsey was a former product developer for a makeup brand and though she maintains product knowledge, her interaction with makeup now happens the same as everyone else—which includes watching YouTube. Though YouTube attempts to present itself as a democratizing force in new media, “the users whom YouTube invites to ‘broadcast’

46 [themselves] regularly and consistently affirm the professional, produced and defined in tandem with and at the ultimate expense of the amateur.”5The everyday and its actors are therefore seen as the site and performers of “lived space.”6 The tug and pull between expert and non-expert in the realm of user-generated content (UGC) and social media depends on a variety of factors such as how much time or money a YouTuber puts into the production of these videos in order to be seen as reputable or worth the viewer’s time. Within the world of makeup non-experts engaging with other community members on YouTube, there are genres of videos that serve distinct purposes. Among these are product-orient videos such as “unboxing,” “first impressions,” or “haul” videos, all of which to some degree document or review new products, usually focusing on a product’s package design or swatches in a fetishistic way.

In order to distance the production of things, such as a look, from the consumption of makeup products, the focus of this thesis is on the procedural, routine-driven, tutorial, or chatty nature of “Get Ready With Me” videos—oftentimes written short-hand as GRWM among the YouTube makeup community. I chose the GRWM genre of videos because it is illustrative of Michel de Certeau’s focus on trajectories and storytelling. There may also be a meta-spatial relationship when some individuals take the camera (which extends to be the viewer) on a tour of different spaces in their homes or elsewhere. Everyday

5

Nick Salvato, “Out of Hand: YouTube Amateurs and Professionals,” TDR: The Drama Review 53, no. 3 (2009): 69.

6

Jilly Traganou’s use of Henri Lefebvre’s “lived space” inspires my use here to describe the site and activity of the everyday as more agentic than the consumed space and activity happening within YouTube’s networks. Traganou adapts Henri Lefebvre’s use of “differential space” to incorporate an agentic dimension such as protest, though not all differential space is agentic which is why I choose the term “lived space” instead. Jilly Traganou, “Wall Street: Bounded and Unbinding: The spatial as a multifocal lens in design studies,” in The Routledge Companion to Design Studies, ed. Penny Sparke and Fiona Fischer (Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge, 2016), 34.

47 negotiations between consumption of makeup products alongside their preservation as objects of transformation and fluid identity-formation are evident these videos, but their value in design research for those concerned with qualifying everyday practices as design is in their rigorous documentation of different ways to make do. There is a ritualistic aspect in these videos as well as recurring instances of negotiation with the self, the product, and the environment in justification of the choices made.

Christine Mai Nguyen has been on YouTube for nine years. Watching her first video titled “Makeup Tricks” published on January 27, 2008 is like watching the transformation of most YouTubers who have been on the platform long enough to see the expectations of user-generated content get more complex, requiring professional grade equipment such as cameras, lights, reflectors, and backdrops in order to have successful audience engagement. In 2017, this video looks dated, but in it is evidence of YouTube’s origins before it became a strategic media platform for brands and advertisers. The video features Christine demonstrating her own makeup tactics to subvert products sold in the market for specific uses such as using the bottom of a spoon to curl her eyelashes.7 [Fig. 1] It demonstrates the art of making do in situations where you might not have an eyelash curler at hand or don’t want to buy one. When I interviewed Christine for this project, she

7

Christine Mai Nguyen, “Makeup Tricks,” YouTube video, 2:51, January 27, 2008, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AxtiLP379X8.

48

Figure 1. Christine Mai Nguyen (YouTube username: chrissstttiiine) demonstrating one of her makeup tricks, or tactics, using the back-end of a spoon to curl her eyelashes in lieu of an eyelash curler. “Makeup Tricks,” January 27, 2008. Source: YouTube.

had accumulated a total of 96,495 YouTube subscribers and 24,500 Instagram followers.

She told me that the experience of joining YouTube in 2008 was a very casual one. “I’m almost 100 percent sure that no one joined YouTube 10 years ago because they wanted to monetize off of it.”8 She compared it with the “haul culture” of YouTube today which relies on young women buying large quantities of stuff from retail stores and making videos about what they bought. According to a study by Laura Jeffries on YouTube hauls published in 2011, 10 stores seemed to dominate haul videos including the typical fast

8

Christine Mai Nguyen in conversation with the author on September 12, 2017.

49 fashion retailers and makeup stores. At the point of this study’s publication, Jeffries deemed the makeup brand MAC as an “uncontested leader” featured in at least 34,000 hauls.9 The number in 2017 has grown exponentially to about 2.17 million for MAC alone, proving that there is an increasing demand for this activity.10 As the taxonomy of makeup videos expands and more people are leaping into the realm of content creation, YouTubers who rely on audience engagement continually strive to make their videos likeable or sought-after by new viewers amidst the noise. The expectations from viewers as well as brands that sponsor videos require YouTubers to invest considerable amounts of money in their channels that mirrors the quality and content of their videos.11 [Fig. 2] Sponsorships do affect the “lived space” of makeup practice, coming from the “perceived” realm of the beauty industry according to Henri Lefebvre’s terms.12 When Christine is offered a product sponsorship on a video, she describes the process of filming and meeting a brand’s expectations “almost like a project when you’re in school…For the most part [the brand] would have bullet points on what to do, what to say, how any seconds on the screen [the product] has to be.”13 The video then gets submitted to the brand for approval and edits before she is allowed to post it and get paid.

9

Laura Jeffries, “The Revolution Will Be Soooo Cute: YouTube "Hauls" and the Voice of Young Female Consumers,” Studies in Popular Culture 33, no. 2 (2011): 60.

10

This number was taken from searching “MAC Haul” on YouTube as of November 6, 2017.

11

Gaby Dunn, “Making Split Ends Meet: The Hustle of Being a Beauty Vlogger,” Broadly, February 1, 2016, https://broadly.vice.com/en_us/article/9aepnv/making-split-ends-meet-the-hustle-of-being-a-beautyvlogger.

12

Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson Smith (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1991).

13

Christine Mai Nguyen in conversation with the author on September 12, 2017.

50 But Christine and other makeup YouTubers also make “vlogs” or video diaries of their day, which show spatial temporalities and often feature quick makeup routines more likely to resonate with their daily lives.

Makeup artist Violette (who intentionally avoids using her last name) but is known on YouTube as “Violette_FR” has become popular on YouTube for her tactical approach to makeup, using space as an ingredient in her design process. Her videos are based on looks which are completed in various urban public spaces, such as cafes and restaurants around New York and Paris or in transit while in a car. “With someone like her, I don’t think it’s about the product necessarily, I think it’s about the trick. You learn

Figure 2. Christine in a video from September 2017. This video was not sponsored, but it illustrates the difference in quality over an approximate decade on YouTube compared with Fig. 1. “'No Makeup' Makeup ft. Perricone MD,” September 29, 2017. Source: YouTube.

51

Figure 3. Screenshots from a Violette_FR Get Ready With Me video demonstrating Violette’s preferred style of doing makeup in public spaces. “MORNING RED LIPS,” September 27, 2017. Source: YouTube.

from that. You don’t just buy and consume the product,” Christine said about Violette’s channel.14 [Fig. 3] Tactics, in their ephemeral nature are naturally prime to become strategies once they are made public on social media. New products are designed to be used in specific ways that were once things you did out of habit, resourcefulness, or need. Trends like “contouring,” “baking,” “strobing” and “highlighting,” for example, originated as tactics in drag makeup to give the appearance of dramatic feminine features. Using a darker 14

Christine Mai Nguyen in conversation with the author on September 12, 2017.

52 shade of product on the hollows of one’s cheeks or down the bridge of one’s nose is no longer an everyday trick to change the contours of one’s face, which a person can achieve with anything from bronzer to eyeshadow or a darker shade of foundation. The new practice is tied to specialized contour kits in stick, palette, and compact form. At the time of writing this thesis, makeup retailer Sephora had 84 contour-related products including designated kits and brushes available for purchase online.15 There are also other products on the market which are inspired by consumer tactics and claim the effect of “just-blotted lipstick.”16 Products like these demonstrate the power of videos by YouTubers like Violette, who in one video showed her trick of imitating a French way of wearing lipstick that makes lipstick look like it was lived in through the effect of making the lips appear as if they were bitten.17 Through this cycle, which now includes paying YouTubers to endorse products as well invite them to design their own signature palettes with makeup brands, Jane Bennett’s idea of “American materialism” begins to take shape. Bennet criticizes American materialism as actually constituting a type of anti-materiality in the sense of obscuring the vitality of matter due to “the sheer volume of commodities and the hyperconsumptive necessity of junking [products] to make room for new ones.”18 But the role of YouTube content creators has changed as they elevate from nonexpert to experts suddenly sought-out for sponsorship deals based on the size of their audience and potential influence. Christine told me that since joining YouTube she has

15

“Contour,” Sephora, accessed May 14, 2017, http://www.sephora.com/contour-palette-brush.

16

“Generation G” [product copy], Glossier, https://www.glossier.com/products/generation-g.

17

Violet Gray, “French Lessons: Violette’s Kissable Lip,” YouTube video, 2:51, April 21, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WMJM0XRz_o0.

18

Bennet, Vibrant Matter, 5.

53 developed a heightened sense of materiality, but for people other than herself because her viewers depend on her advice for different skin types or needs. When a YouTuber assumes the responsibility of educating, whether willingly or unwillingly via the nature of content sharing on social media, a there is a balance between tactics and didactic ways of achieving a “look,” even if that look is based on the ordinary-looking makeup of women Christine admires. This is where the formation of images comes to the fore. The possibility of these images to instruct (build competency) and attract sponsorships (institutions) illustrates the culmination of Elizabeth Shove and Mika Pantzar’s approach to consumption in explaining how new practices are formed or promoted.19 The experience is not uncommon for American media-literate women. Before YouTube, fashion magazines would promote what celebrities were buying. New media sites still maintain the tradition. Christine mentions that if she reads about a product that a woman she admires uses, it can often influence making a “look” based on that woman. In a “Jeanne Damas Inspired Makeup” video, Christine recreates the signature look of French It-Girl Jeanne Damas based on an article she read where Damas mentioned a product she bought to counteract the natural color of her lips. “So, then I went out and bought it,” Christine said. “But I think that was the only thing that was the common denominator in out makeup routines. Everything else was made up.”20 The voyeuristic aspects of watching another person do makeup are now available online to pick up on tricks and habits. Christine extends this gaze to her friends who she

19

Elizabeth Shove and Mika Pantzar, “Consumers, Producers, and Practices: Understanding the Invention and Reinvention of Nordic Walking,” in Journal of Consumer Culture 5, no. 43 (2005): 43–64.

20

Christine Mai Nguyen in conversation with the author on September 12, 2017.

54 films “Everyday Makeup” videos documenting different women’s routines. Here YouTube affords a bit of play and spontaneity, mimicking the curiosity of watching a friend or family member get ready for the day. For Christine, and myself and surely many others, this curiosity began at home with her mother and was never about extraordinary looks or an explicit “design” expressed as a visual statement.

Says Christine: I used to watch my mom get ready every day and I was always in awe of the whole thing. She was always face cream [sic], no SPF, some kind of foundation and then lipstick. She would use [the lipstick] for her blush as well. She would wear this white musk perfume on every single day—same one. I think she still wears it today. It was a very simple routine, but I was so fascinated by it. I would look at all the products that she uses and thought it was such a cool thing, and obviously I’m not the only one who thinks that either because there’s a whole industry of people doing that.21 The beauty industry is quick to notice and incorporate “Get Ready With Me” videos into their channels to highlight new product launches. Since starting her own channel on YouTube, Violette was named Global Beauty Director of Estée Lauder, following the YouTube-to-corporate success of another popular industry makeup artist with a YouTube channel, Lisa Eldridge (appointed Lancôme’s Creative Director of Makeup in January 2015).22 Though she keeps making videos for her Violette_FR channel, she now incorporates more Estée Lauder products into these videos, and in October 2017, she filmed her own “Get Ready With Me” video for Estée Lauder’s YouTube page. In this video, her signature style of doing makeup on-the-go and talking through her process via voiceover afterward is replaced with a corporatized image of

21 22

Christine Mai Nguyen in conversation with the author on September 12, 2017.

Lancome USA, “Lisa Eldridge as Lancôme Makeup Creative Director,” YouTube video, 0:35, January 6, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvWubMzhcsw.

55 Violette waking up in a bed (following the script of Glossier’s “Get Ready With Me” videos)23 and doing her makeup in a hotel room. The video reads like a commercial for Estée Lauder products with full product names and shades appearing on the screen.

Instead of voiceover narration, there is upbeat wordless pop music playing for the duration of the video.24 With the global audience YouTube can attract, a competition for attention emerges from the beauty industry, which is always searching for influencers to promote their brand to followers. On Estée Lauder’s website, a blog post profiling Violette starts off with, “It’s not every day that someone with true artistry chops comes along to make a name for herself on the internet. And yet that’s where we found Violette.”25 The network of players including makeup artists, non-expert and expert YouTubers, viewers or subscribers, beauty brands, and the competencies promoted and demonstrated in these videos achieves the effect of taming the wildness found in everyday makeup practice. Through the sleek interface which encourages user-generated content through monetization, image-making replaces the essence of adapting and tactically making do with the materials of a situation. Though YouTube may give the impression that it unleashes wildness by encouraging content creators to make extreme makeup looks with whatever is trending in order to maintain relevance, this definition of wildness is not the same as my definition of wildness, which is characterized by the

23

See any one of Glossier’s “Get Ready With Me” videos on the beauty brand’s YouTube channel, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajGtdmdfGnc. 24

Estee Lauder, “Get Ready with Estée Beauty Director, Violette,” YouTube video, 3:48, October 27, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PNhB_U8EZyw. 25

“Violette Vibes: Meet Violette, a makeup artist and influencer who is here to make your beauty life easier,” Estée Stories (blog), Estee Lauder, https://www.esteelauder.com/estee-stories-article-violettemakeup-artist-influencer-global-beauty-director.

56 agentic display of thing-power coming from both makeup products and makeup practitioner.

The relationship between material and maker is different in the “lived space” of the home outside of YouTube. Christine has noticed the difference between her relationship with the materiality of makeup and that of her sisters or mother’s. “I think specifically on YouTube there’s no attachment—there’s no loyalty,”26 Christine told me.

As mentioned, her heightened sense of materiality such as a product’s stickiness, elasticity, smoothness, or pigment is thought of in terms of the needs of her audience rather than herself. She told me that the constant influx of products sent to her for promotional consideration creates a situation for YouTubers to “dabble and not be loyal to anything.”27 Whereas people off of social media will get attached to products, develop preferences, and ways of using it specific to their needs in a way that demonstrates agency.

Wild Products, Wild Practices My own first experience with makeup was through an eyeshadow set my mother kept under the sink. It was probably from a giftset in the ‘80s and probably the only eyeshadow set she’s ever owned. It’s about the size of a text book and holds over a hundred eyeshadow colors for a woman who was better safe than sorry in anticipation for the time—possibly once in her life, possible never—that she would need a yellow eyeshadow (although maybe just the option of having a yellow eyeshadow, and five

26 27

Christine Mai Nguyen in conversation with the author on September 12, 2017.

Ibid.

57 variations of it, would make you find an occasion to use it). This palette, not limited edition but rather limited relevancy in her life or mine, still, will never be thrown away— because it is hers, and by extension one day it will be my mother, or what material fragments I have left of her world. I can open the palette and see the actual makeup crumbling and shrinking. I can touch it and see no pigment deposited on my finger. Still, there is an indentation on one of the green shadows that surfaces to life. It rises from the subconscious territory of stuff into something with the attitude of my mother, who with two kids, a full-time job, and never anytime for herself one day decided to swipe a bit of green on her lids to see if it would make a difference. *** Wildness emerges outside of YouTube and the combination of influences between institutions, competencies, and images that exist on the platform. From a material perspective, there is a direct relationship between person and things that demonstrates things as actants on a sensory or psychological level whereas on YouTube, Christine told me that due to a high volume of promotional samples there is no room for attachment to products.28 For this project, I asked my friend Lindsey Manas, a former product developer for a beauty company, to record a set of her own GRWM videos in order to see how the format affected use and whether I would be able to extract wildness emanating from the practice and its production with ephemeral materials. I also complemented these videos with interviews over email and in person in order to differentiate a “performed� self that may arise from being in front of a camera or being exposed to the images and expectations of

28

Ibid.

58 GRWM videos on social media with the type of everyday design activity that engages with social media for inspiration. Additionally, I asked her about her relationship with materiality in her personal process as well as the way spatial differences factor into selfmaking when engaging with this everyday activity in two homes—her new home in Stockholm and her family home in Westchester, New York.

Because GRWM videos are a first-person account of a daily routine that show a gradual transformation of the self with the intention of facing the day, I gave Lindsey little instruction on how she should shoot, frame, or edit her videos. In addition to observing the way she talks about the products and her use of them, it was also valuable for me to see what Lindsey decided to leave out, what parts of her face she decided to show, and how she held the camera. This was just as much a part of the presentation of her identity as it was anticipated to be viewed through the gaze of “the other.”

This was made apparent to me after watching Lindsey’s second video, which was a nighttime “Going Out” GRWM look. To briefly contextualize this video, the first video Lindsey recorded was a daytime “everyday” GRWM, which followed her as she walked the audience through her morning routine including washing her face, making tea, and navigating three separate spaces in her room where she kept her makeup to transform herself into the Lindsey she presents to the world on a daily basis. In the makeup community, this is referred to the “no-makeup” makeup look, a paradoxical description to a deliberate configuration of products designed to appear as if the person was not wearing any makeup at all. The nighttime GRWM was intentionally bolder. As she justifies, “Usually I would never do a cat eye for going out during the day but I feel like for night

59 it’s OK to be a little more dramatic.”29 It’s important to note that Lindsey let her husband film this second video, which she admitted to making her shy. [Fig. 4] Her nighttime look was created with the “Other” of her husband in mind, and for some reason she created a slightly amplified version of her daytime look seen in the first GRWM (“Lindsey GRWM 1”),30 albeit with more products. [Fig. 5] In the last minute of the video, she emerges back on screen, this time with a front-facing camera indicating that her husband has left the room and wearing two different eyeshadow colors on her eyelids. [Fig. 6] I think that look was a little too simple for me, so I decided to totally change it up and keep the cat eye underneath but also add a shit-ton [sic] of glitter on top. So, what I did was I added my [Urban Decay] Moondust Palette here. And on my left eye, I used the blue color mixed with the purple, as you can see, and then on the right I have the awesome emerald green color mixed with this bottom one right here to finish it out since I always think you should have the lighter color on the inside to highlight and the darker color on the outside to smoke it out.31

Figure 4. Lindsey as she presents herself with no makeup on. “Lindsey GRWM 2,” November 4, 2017 (unlisted video) Source: YouTube.

29

“Lindsey GRWM 2,” filmed by Lindsey Manas in April 2017, unlisted video published by Claudia C. Marina, YouTube video, 07:39, November 4, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xcN_4F9UxMg. 30

“Lindsey GRWM 1,” filmed by Lindsey Manas in March 2017, unlisted video published by Claudia C. Marina, YouTube video, 12:28, November 4, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fmFjShcT4c.

31

“Lindsey GRWM 2.”

60

Figure 5. (Left) Lindsey films her “everyday” makeup look on her iPhone. “Lindsey GRWM 1,” November 4, 2017 (unlisted video). (Right) Lindsey’s husband films a Lindsey’s “nighttime” makeup. “Lindsey GRWM 2,” November 4, 2017 (unlisted video) Source: YouTube.

Figure 6. Makeup adjusted once Lindsey filmed herself. “Lindsey GRWM 2,” November 4, 2017 (unlisted video) Source: YouTube.

Lindsey mentions a specific Urban Decay “Moondust Palette” in both videos as her favorite. She uses it for special occasions, like her going-out look, but also uses it within the context of the everyday as well. “It’s like these amazing metallic, crazy colors.

Surprisingly this red-pink is really wearable since it blends out to like a sheer, golden,

61 weird, pinky glow—alienish—which is usually the eye makeup that I go for.”32 The palette is a limited edition, a concept in itself which feeds more into marketing and American materialism but even latent, unusable, and limited-edition trash is vibrant. It is still acting as the dust settles on the packaging and its interior contents remain suspended in the action of their last use.

Glitter is one of the categories of makeup that seems to emit wildness to such a degree that it is kept for special occasions or used with specific intent. Describing glitter as “wild” comes not from its thingness or possession as an object. It is wild in practice— in its combination with personality, location, circumstance, and associated images. When I asked Lindsey if the material quality of swatching glitter makeup or merely having it in her collection was what inspired her to use it, she responded, “I think it's in the application. I feel like it’s the manifestation of being uplifted.”33 Consumption is limited as a contextual framework for describing this sort of activity, because as Attfield notes, consumption does not take into consideration “how different things have different meanings to different individuals at different times, in different places.”34 Cultural studies is also limited, she says, because it largely focuses on marketing and image-making rather than the experiential aspects of using and re-using things to make something that is not the image advertised.35 Perhaps design as a complex activity can offer nuance in this activity that consumption cannot. Today we think of the design as a separate activity, a sort of 32

Lindsey GRWM 2.”

33

Lindsey Manas in conversation with the author on September 19, 2017.

34

Attfield, Wild Things, 136.

35

Ibid.

62 intelligence that precedes the making of the object world, but design researcher Nigel Cross makes the distinction between modern industrial societies and traditional, craftbased societies in which “the conception, or ‘designing’ of artefacts is not really separate from making them.”36 Though I’ve made the distinction between these practices and the comprehensible objects of craft, the notion that conceiving and making can happen at the same time is relevant to the qualities of ephemeral materiality. I do not attempt to position the everyday in a regression to traditional, craft-based societies because the everyday is complex and interactive when we consider facets of social media, cultural competencies, and availability. I do attempt to show how the making of an object of a second degree that starts at the traditional level of consumption can be taken further to the realm of design by this thinking.

It is not the material possession of objects that inspire design activity or make them actants, but rather their use and incorporation on the body which has implications beyond the focused activity of design. Lindsey’s use of glitter comes from a lifelong appreciation for it, but it is also heightened as she identifies herself as an American expatriate living in Sweden. The imaginative space of her home is one of the only places she feels free to try out looks that in New York would be de rigueur but in Sweden would be seen as too expressive. “I’ve never seen a person wear cool eyeshadow or an interesting lip color,” Lindsey says about makeup preference in Sweden. “It’s also because the brands that make that stuff accessible—like [the Los Angeles-based direct-to-consumer brand] ColourPop who sells funky eyeshadows for $5 which makes you think that trying those looks is an accessible thing, and they also make the application so amazing because they

36

Nigel Cross, Design Thinking: Understanding How Designers Think and Work (Oxford: Berg, 2011; reprint, London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013, 2015, 2016), 4.

63 have a cooling ingredient in it to make it sensorial—that stuff isn’t known over there.”37 The fashion culture in Sweden is still rooted in minimalism, whereas Lindsey is shaped

by American materialism. This is not a pejorative condition which favors one culture’s aesthetics and value judgements over another, but rather serves to demonstrate how Lindsey was and continues to be shaped by her background and preferences while making do with the limitations of a new geographical and cultural place. This factors into a reason Lindsey chooses glitter makeup over other types of makeup in a way that limits the argument from falling into the net of consumption alone. Similarly, the way people use social media and consume images may be appealing for the world it represents, but it might not fit in with the reality of the individual. Having watched makeup tutorials by Violette, Lindsey considers Violette’s design of the self—her overall composition presented at that moment—to be the takeaway rather than instructions for the specific look shown in the tutorial.

She did a Brigitte Bardot, or some other French person who has a very smokedout [eye] look. If I did that, it doesn’t look like a chic, French woman. It’s only chic and French because she’s doing it, and [Violette is] French. It’s the whole package of herself.38 Wild products emerge from wild practices that take place in the complexity of everyday life. In a situation where a woman is applying makeup for an event, there is a number of variables that she must consider and converse with materiality through making a look that will meet her expectations, and in some cases, the expectations of others.

Outside of YouTube, makeup practice happens much more tactically, which adds to its wildness being uninhibited by strategies. YouTube video consumption in everyday life is

37

Lindsey Manas in conversation with the author on September 19, 2017.

38

Ibid.

64 considered just “following” and not “adapting,” though the viewer can learn new tricks or become aware of new trends. However, the assumption that viewers are watching these videos for instructional purposes isn’t entirely true because oftentimes instruction is hidden away or masked in the case of chatty Get Ready With Me videos versus specific tutorials. The everyday allows for difference that is known as soon as a person tries a product one YouTuber used and realized it doesn’t look as good on her complexion, for example.

Sites of Design: Performing Design on The Body and in Everyday Life Because makeup is applied on the body, and more importantly to the face, it is an object that is vulnerable to an intimate relationship with its user. It is intimate not only in the sensory experience of use emerging from the vitality of its material composition, but also in its ability to visually express identity in translation from mind to body.

Up to this point, the practice of makeup has been an intimate and personal one based on design agency that is performed on the body and by the body in the self-making process. Lindsey described herself as her own creator which is empowering for her as a consumer because she knows that she can use products in ways that she finds most suitable to her tastes. “If I’m getting my makeup done I want to feel like that other person has this creative agency and ability to [design my face] but it’s never to the creativeness I want,” she says.39 The fact that makeup can be washed off is an important factor, not only in an encouraging sense for people to “try on” different identities, but also in a gradual and

39

Lindsey Manas in conversation with the author on September 19, 2017.

65 cumulative way that highlights how identity is formed over time. In the washing off and reapplying of makeup, one has a renewed chance to reflect the days and maturity over time. Judy Attfield writes about this in regard to textiles and their immediacy to the body, but makeup perhaps takes Attfield’s argument one step further when she says that the ephemeral quality textiles “offer[s] the means through which to examine how people use things to transact certain aspects of being-in-the-world at a direct sensory level of experience particularly with reference to time.”40 Makeup has a literal ephemerality when used that textiles do not, yet both these elements are chosen by the person and negotiated with their personhood. The reconciliation between these two dress practices is found in Attfield’s emphasis of practice over consumption in the context of everyday life rather than its image represented in media.41 She cites Efrat Tsëelon’s ethnography in The Masquerade of Femininity and deduces important aspects based on how ephemeral materiality acts in relation to time and context. Attfield deduces that Tsëelon’s study “suggests a sense of self which is expressed in different forms or ‘sartorial faces’ without any sense of loss of authenticity.”42 It is the difference between a young girl expressing identity through the heavy use of black eyeliner and one day deciding that she no longer identifies with being an angry teenager and chooses a few strokes of mascara instead to define her features.

In Lindsey’s GRWM videos, she often says things like, “I don’t know why I’m trying to convince myself that I’m a medium,” or I don’t know why I feel like my beauty

40

Ibid. 122.

41

Ibid., 143.

42

Ibid., 142.

66 dictates my clothes,” but in retrospective interviews, she is able to achieve a macro view of her micro, everyday decisions.43 Lindsey’s relationship with wild materiality adheres to specific time periods in her life, demonstrating as Daniel Miller found, that style is not always a static “classic” object in opposition to the cyclical nature of trends as Attfield would say, but that it is both transient and individualistic.44 When asked about how her style has changed over the years, Lindsey qualified the different periods in her life as materially expressed and specific to individual experience.

I think now I'm into looking ‘easy breezy,’ which means I’m not really into lipstick but more like a casual brown shadow to accent my eyes—especially this shade Cork by MAC that's like almost yellow-brown aka ‘cork-board chic.’ But compared to last year, I was doing like blue—matte blue from NYX, and then before that only red. I get these ideas for colors more so from like art or paintings and try to apply them to daily life. Blue period, red period, cork period—I know how I was feeling during each of these. I think also my makeup connects to the perfume I wear as well. For example, my junior year of college I had whiteblonde hair, silver Doc Martens and only wore this shade of lipstick from MAC called Ablaze which is discontinued— [it’s a] fluorescent pink orange. Then I would only wear men's Chanel Bleu - this whole ‘look’ was a part of this theme and cultivating an entire sphere of an image. Then over time, you let that sphere morph into something else—but I never let my different spheres products overlap.

I know if I wear Ablaze again it'll feel weird, despite if it looks good or not.45 Bennett finds that the individual agency of a material is slowly made apparent as it accommodates to varying components. Depending on space, place, individual preference, interest, need, etc., “a particular element can be so contingently well placed in an

43

“Lindsey GRWM 1.”

44

Daniel Miller, Stuff (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010), 15.

45

Lindsey Manas in email correspondence with author on May 12, 2017

67 assemblage that its power is unusually great.”46 The aforementioned idea in Chapter 1 that “space is becoming not being”47 interpreted by Jamer Hunt highlights the notion that through its spiral use, ephemeral materiality gradually defines the user and different points of her life.

Similarly, ethnographic research on design has shown that design is contingent less on a singular “aha” moment and more on a series of material manipulations followed by reflection and thinking by making. After two years of researching how design works in the practice of a major global architecture firm, Albena Yaneva affirms that the experience of design “suggests an undertone of modesty that is never accounted for with care and respect—it does not require grand gestures of radical departure from the past, but small operations of re-collecting existing bits of projects and concepts, reusing, recycling, reinterpreting, rethinking.”48 Use and re-use characterizes the everyday as making and un-making a face. The cyclical nature of this activity should be focused on as more than just consumption by analyzing the ways of making (de Certeau’s qualification of “styles” as opposed to “use”)49 which free objects and people from the generalization of consumption.

Prosumption invites the individual to be involved in the making process, but as Stephen

46

Jane Bennet, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 42.

47 Jamer Hunt, “Just Re-Do It: Tactical Formlessness and Everyday Consumption,” catalog essay in Strangely Familiar: Design and Everyday Life, ed. Andrew Blauvelt (Minneapolis, Minn.: Walker Art Center, 2003), 61.

48

Albena Yaneva, Made by The Office for Metropolitan Architecture: An Ethnography of Design (Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2009), 103.

49

Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven F. Rendall (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988), 30.

68 Knott has made clear, only once the individual makes the distinctive break from “following” to “adapting,” therefore engaging designerly knowing/thinking, can we move away from consumption and take this activity fit within the parameters of an extended design practice.50 Ephemeral objects are susceptible to time and the experience thereof. A “go-to” look may be reconfigured and renegotiated when aging is observed. Suddenly, new objects come into purview like anti-aging products or a sense of obliged maturity that demands women over a certain age shouldn't wear glitter on their eyelids. In the day-today life of a person, however, identity morphs multiple times depending on context and space. Lindsey told me she views makeup as “this flexible facet that can ebb and flow with my moods. It operates as a function of like my daily costume. If I want to look tough, I'll wear a cat eye because I know black makes my eyes look severe.”51 A “look” comes directly from intent, and Lindsey says she is inclined to do a look whether in New York or in Sweden if the situation calls for it. Yet her influences, interests, and ability to carry out conceptualized looks on the everyday is affected by geographical space and local space.

She considers makeup to be negotiable because it is the last step in her everyday routine. If she is pressed for time, she will take a few products with her in her bag and apply her makeup in the car or on the train. There are nuanced differences based on how public/private transient space is. “Yesterday I didn’t wear makeup, but the day before I put on foundation on the train, but my eyebrows in the car,” Lindsey said when I

50

Knott, “Design in the Age of Prosumption.”

51

Lindsey Manas in email correspondence with author on May 12, 2017.

69 interviewed her during a visit to New York in September 2017. When she has the time to get ready during her visit back home to New York, or when she’s putting effort into a “look,” Lindsey says she prefers to do her makeup at home, on her bed, and near a window due to comfort and lighting. In her Swedish GRWM videos, she does the same indicating that a fixed space to lay out products and think about them is not relevant to her in everyday life. She prefers compact mirrors, which she can take on the go, or bring up close to her face for detail. In both Sweden and New York, I notice that Lindsey never does her makeup in the bathroom, which seems to be tied to her environment. “My mom had the bathroom painted neon green, and then painted a better color which was neon peach. There’s one window which is very small, so [the overall lighting is] the glow of whatever color the wall is.”52 Her makeup collection in New York is tied to memories such as perfume from her first internship or blue eyeshadow palettes, what she calls “cluttery extra” or what she couldn’t bring to Sweden when she moved. Her everyday makeup is in her house in Sweden, divided among four drawers. While in New York, she works with the remnants left behind and a travel case of her staples that define her current look—golden eyeshadow, lipsticks she brought with the expectation of matching to certain New York locations, “easy makeup.”53

52 53

Lindsey Manas in conversation with the author, September 19, 2017.

Ibid.

70

Figure 7 Screenshot from Lindsey's first GRWM video, showing only one drawer of her makeup collection in Sweden. “Lindsey GRWM 1,” November 4, 2017 (unlisted video). Source: YouTube.

Whether in New York or Sweden, Lindsey finds that her use of social media, particularly Instagram has become a way to access images from home or away into collections which she uses for inspiration. “I make different boards of inspiration. One of them is fashion which is also fashion and beauty looks. It’s not like I’m saving these for replicating, it’s just aesthetically helpful such as the Saks Potts eye look.” She references a frosted-blue eyeshadow look from the Danish fashion brand Saks Potts “Collection 7” campaign to note the differences between consuming these images in Europe versus the United States. [Fig. 8] “Especially being in Scandinavia because Danish Elle is everywhere and Danish Elle always features Saks Potts but here it’s like ‘Saks who?’”54 Her access to Danish Elle has affected how she does her makeup as much as the lack of access to other

54

Ibid.

71 culturally available images such as those of American Teen Vogue, for example, which she says are delayed by a minimum of one month”—a fact which altogether reflects her hunger to do makeup in ways that express herself as someone “other” than the Scandinavian image of minimalistic makeup.55

Figure 8. Saks Potts Collection 7 beauty look. Source: Saks Potts.

In my study of makeup, I’ve found that deep relationships to products are achieved when used in negotiation between idealized self and the exterior world, spatially represented through the body and different geographies of “home.” The face designed through makeup is continually reconstructed and negotiated through material interventions indicating that the self is not fixed but rater evolutionary though different

55

Ibid.

72 periods of time—retrospective eras where one recognizes a “look” and also at the micro everyday level contingent on mood and appropriateness according to context. The material of makeup is representative, though not to be confused as a mask to a “true” self.

Makeup is not a masquerade but rather means of expression and transformation through materials. Doing your makeup constitutes a form of knowledge in practice because of the haptic nature between body and perception. This knowledge is gained over time and in reflection of the practice, such as when Lindsey is able to associate certain product shades with certain periods in her life. She does not plan who she will be six months from now, but institutions, competencies, and images can factor into this gradual self-making through her ability to access images for inspiration on social media. Rather than recreate these looks, the essence of the look which she must fit to her body remains latent until the right moment when blue eye shadow works for her without wanting to look like she is wearing a face designed for someone else.

73

Chapter 3: What makes Flan Flan?

Designing how we eat and obtain the foods we eat has been a topic of interest for designers, food scientist, grassroots activists, chefs, and anthropologists, yet always coming from the vantage point of what design can do for the everyday cook.

In 2014, Paola Antonelli, senior curator, department of architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art, gave a talk at the 2014 MAD4 conference titled “What’s Cooking Designing”, where she told the audience, “I think designers really need you”[emphasis my own].1 Using the example of Italian automobile designer Giorgetto Giugiaro’s design for Barilla pasta, which resulted in a noodle designed in the shape of a car door gasket,2 Antonelli conveyed that the old modernist preoccupation of Design with perfecting form actually got in the way of the home cook trying to make a meal.

“Nobody bought it,” Antonelli said. “Why? Hello. Ask any Italian woman (or man) and she would have told you that some parts would overcook and some others would undercook…. So, in some cases, these basic units of food cannot be touched by anybody but generations after generations.”3 What happens when we reverse the script and consider what the everyday cook can contribute to design—and not just making themselves available to designers as research subjects to continue the designing for/consuming of paradigm. By now, I hope

1

Paola Antonelli, “What’s Cooking Designing” (presentation at the MAD 4 Conference “What is Cooking,” August 24, 2014), OpenTranscripts, http://opentranscripts.org/transcript/whats-cookingdesigning/.

2

Italdesign, “Marille,” http://www.italdesign.it/project/marille/.

3

Antonelli, “What’s Cooking Designing.”

74

the reader has a sense of my engagement with thinking and making operating in fusion within the realm of the everyday. This is not to say that the everyday is not part of modern industrial society and its production, but it expresses that in the tactical and lived space of the everyday, designerly activity happens with and through things. Within the field of archeology and cognition studies, Lambros Malafouris refers to this activity as “creative thinging” which describes making processes that are “continuously generated and transformed in the constructive dialogue between maker and material.”4 Malafouris’ attention to continuity and transformation in an individual’s cognitive relationship with material culture feels similar to Daniel Miller’s notion of transience and individuality in a processual way. With makeup, the transience is visual and performed continually through a person’s life, but the practice of cooking offers a different perspective by acknowledging that cooking is not always done for oneself, but also must respond to the expectations of others such as when preparing a group meal. Distributive authorship can be found in cooking through the concept of mētis, or on-the-spot tactical knowledge taking from the memory of past experiences to present multiple possibilities available for a recipe to go in the moment. This will be important to keep in mind as I describe how everyday cooking practices are linked to self-making practices in negotiations between availability and access to foods, interest in food trends or trying out new recipes, cultural traditions, and representations thereof through dishes and their making. Through an analysis of my own cooking practices, I attempt to show how “things” like recipes are developed through a dialogue between ephemeral materiality and making. This takes a granular view of materiality in order to incorporate a multisensorial knowledge gained

4

Lambros Malafouris, “Creative thinging: The feeling of and for clay” [emphasis author’s own], Creativity, Cognition and Material Culture: Special Issue of Pragmatics and Cognition 22, no. 1 (2014): 144.

75

from simultaneously “thinking” and “doing cooking”5 as Jennifer Brady attempts to illustrate in her research methodology, “Cooking as Inquiry.”6 Within this concurrence of thinking and doing, there is a planning shift from that transforms a larger scale of conceptual thinking to a micro scale of tactical sensing. This type of design knowledge happening in the everyday can only be captured in practice. With all the planning and diligent recipe following, there are still moments where you know that the main dish needs more salt, or perhaps you aren’t fond of spice, or your experience with thyme in a previous recipe visually informed you that one tablespoon of the seasoning turns any dish into a Christmas tree. Agency discharges both from the cook and the ingredients beyond their initial manipulation in a way that is expressed through sense.

With my own autoethnographic research, I attempt to make different versions of the same foods in order to understand “wild” qualities of materiality, here seen as ingredients in the production process. Wildness, as in the previous chapter, is considered from the position of both Jane Bennett and Judy Attfield, linking agency between materiality and humans through the making of ephemeral materiality with materials that are also ephemeral.

In order to position cooking as design rather than incorporate it into design discourse as an activity of consumption, it is important to acknowledge that consumption cannot altogether be escaped. Cooking will be analyzed as a practice of prosumption in

5

Though grammatically incorrect, this terminology is intentional in order to make the reader think differently about what goes into practice rather brushing by the term to take practice for granted. It is inspired by the term “do walking” used by Elizabeth Shove and Mika Pantzar in “Consumers, Producers, and Practices: Understanding the Invention and Reinvention of Nordic Walking,” in Journal of Consumer Culture 5: 43 (2005): 45.

6

Jennifer Brady, “Cooking as Inquiry: A Method to Stir Up Prevailing Ways of Knowing Food, Body, and Identity,” International Journal of Qualitative Research Methods 10/4 (2011): 321–334.

76

engaging with materiality both visibly designed (recipes, cookbooks, etc.) and those less so (produce).

Taking a meal or the oft-mentioned cake to be a designed thing rather than a consumption practice requires us to acknowledge foremost that all design is re-design, as Bruno Latour would say,7 but also that the practice of cooking itself is not a pure interaction with “raw,” untouched, and therefore un-designed food products. As food scientist Cesar Vega points out, “Cooking from scratch is a fallacy unless we redefine what scratch really means. Today life without processed foods is not possible.”8 He goes onto describe that the ingredients that go into a clementine cake—“eggs, sugar, cream cheese, butter, whipping cream, flour, corn starch, and of course, clementines”—are all the results of a “complex transformation of the original raw material,” save for the eggs and clementines.9 However, one could argue that the agricultural food system that produces the distinctions between free-range, farm fresh, organic, caged, small, medium, large, extra-large, “Jumbo,” and powdered eggs are all subject to designed systems— same for clementines.

The everyday cook is unable to position his or her cooking practice as a total rejection of consumerism, as Stephen Knott would claim that even in rejecting and adopting counter-culture techniques such as veganism or the Slow Food movement for

7

Bruno Latour, “A Cautious Prometheus? A Few Steps Toward a Philosophy of Design (with Special Attention to Peter Sloterdijk),” keynote lecture for the Networks of Design meeting of the Design History Society, Falmouth, Cornwall, September 3, 2008, http://www.brunolatour. fr/sites/default/files/112-DESIGN-CORNWALL-GB.pdf.

8

César Vega, “On the Fallacy of Cooking from Scratch,” in The Kitchen as Laboratory: Reflections on the Science of Food and Cooking, edited by César Vega, Job Ubbink and Erik van der Linden (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 267.

9

Ibid., 264.

77

example, one is still prosuming tools that make this lifestyle possible. Moreover, “rejecting” patterns of prosumption following Knott’s critique demonstrates that the tactical quality of rejection is always subsumed by a larger strategy. According to Knott, counter-cultural values and movements became target for marketing schemes that recognized the value in highlighting consumer agency. The Slow Food Movement or veganism as promoted in lifestyle blogs and especially on YouTube show how both traditional producers and “increasingly sophisticated” consumers “promoted the idea of individual distance from the status quo.”10 The activity of “processing” foods at the production level is not dissimilar to that of making/cooking. In other words, we should not take the activity for granted in place of the “object” of processed foods. By focusing on the activity of processing which “can include a variety of different physical, chemical, and biological actions including mixing, blending, baking, frying, grilling, chilling, coating, adjusting of pH, adding salt, coloring, and fermenting,”11 Vega confirms that cooking can be seen as design taking place at the “adapting” level of prosumption. Cooking thus can be likened to a type of design found in amateur craft where the act of cooking is entangled with—but not necessarily contingent on—knowing how to engage with material.

Judy Attfield claims that “the kind of agency exercised in the commonplace, however is much less deliberate than the self-conscious process of ‘design’ which is concerned with control over the form of the physical environment and world of goods.”12

10

Stephen Knott, “Design in the Age of Prosumption: The Craft of Design after the Object,” Design and Culture 5, no. 1, (2008): 56.

11 Vega, “Fallacy,” 268.

12

Judy Attfield, Wild Things: The Material Culture of Everyday Life (Oxford: Berg, 2000), 89.

78

However, to suggest this is to privilege the professional realm of design and other professions as being the only spatial dimension where intentionality plays a role in transformation. Accidents happen in the realm of professional design without deliberate placement, and deliberation happens in the everyday every time we make or do something to get from point A to point B—perhaps with as more agency because the stakes are much closer to one’s personal investment. What Attfield may be suggesting is that there is less of a singular moment when we become aware that we are “designing.”

Cooking is certainly a self-conscious process. One does not simply fall into the practice without engaging with the appropriate tools or materials. Even the act of whipping together a meal last minute based on what you have at hand requires intention, a degree of planning, and tactical responses to the materiality via the senses. For these reasons, cooking can be seen as closely linked to design activity and designerly thinking. Though we may reflect on a specific moment of “design” when it comes to the development or adaptation of recipes, the everyday cook who may not be aware that he or she is “designing” a meal engages in design casually through the making of food, and she develops a design knowledge over time based on how long it took to make the dish or how its flavor could be improved.

The role of cultural foods (or perceptions thereof) is involved in the making of “objects” but also non-visual material interactions. An elemental aspect of design is knowing through trial-and-error or one’s own culture that “certain elements ‘don’t go’ together,” Attfield writes—“that chocolate sauce does not go with pasta. But the cultural

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specificity of such distinctions is revealed by considering, say the Mexican use of chocolate in savoury dishes.”13 Yet Fabio Parasecoli, writing within the realm of food studies, notes that even cultural heritage through food is constructed in the present moment. In a study of ItalianAmerican themed chain restaurants in the United States, Parasecoli analyzes the material culture of Italian-American heritage through food as “invented—or at least recreated—as a marketable experience to respond to contemporary preferences.”14 While I am not concerned with marketing, the idea that we adapt our practices to contemporary preferences is important to acknowledge as we do not cook the same way as our mothers or grandmothers did. We are either spatially limited or choose to swap out ingredients for healthier or preferable alternatives, which can sometimes be influenced by market trends and “foodie culture.” Food heritage plays a role in cooking practice which cannot be overlooked because we cannot deny, as Parasecoli claims, that the food we cook and eat is “charged with relevant emotional and symbolic connotations,” playing an “important role for the imagination,”15 which must be considered when dealing with agentic, lived space.

This is where my work veers from Malafouris’ pure conception of “creative thinging.” Malafouris looks at clay as a material “dynamically coupled” with the ceramicist’s own practice “as if maker and material, potter and clay, can participate in

13 14

Ibid.

Fabio Parasecoli, “We Are Family: Ethnic Food Marketing and the Consumption of Authenticity in Italian-Themed Chain Restaurants,” in Making Italian America: Consumer Culture and the Production of Ethnic Identities, ed. Simone Cinotto (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014), 245.

15 Ibid.

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each other’s sense making.”16 While this plays an important role in my exploration of cooking and makeup practice as design,17 Malafouris maintains a narrow view of practice and only examines the moments when clay and potter interact rather than considering the network of interactions between institutions, competencies, and images as Elizabeth Shove and Mika Pantzar discovered are deeply involved in the formation of new practices.18 For Malafouris, “the constituents of the creative process are not to be found before or outside the throwing or shaping of the pot,”19 yet considering the cultural and emotional aspects of foods, their images, and associations with the self, the home cook engaging with materiality cannot ignore his or her own memory, emotion, or imagination related to food. Understanding how material culture plays a role in cooking will factor into my own embodied research practice which cannot be performed without acknowledging the cultural influences of where the food I am making comes from, its associations with celebration in Cuban culture, and the memories and questions of my late grandmother’s own cooking practice. This next section of this chapter takes inspiration from Jennifer Brady’s “Cooking as Inquiry” method which “understands food not simply as an object of study, but makes foodmaking the means of garnering understanding about food, identity, and the body” [emphasis original].20 By

16

Malafouris, “Creative thinging,” 150.

17

Malafouris’ concern for the creative is interchangeable for my concern for the designerly, and at one point in the paper, Malafouris uses the verb “design” to describe this type of creativity. See Malafouris, “Creative thinging,” 152.

18

See Chapter 1 for more detailed explanation. Elizabeth Shove and Mika Pantzar, “Consumers, Producers, and Practices: Understanding the Invention and Reinvention of Nordic Walking,” in Journal of Consumer Culture 5: 43 (2005), 43–64.

19 Malafouris, “Creative thinging,” 153.

20

Jennifer Brady, “Cooking as Inquiry: A Method to Stir Up Prevailing Ways of Knowing Food, Body, and Identity,” International Journal of Qualitative Research Methods 10/4 (2011): 323.

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cooking/designing, I take a more cautious approach to the term of identity and instead prefer using the term “self-making,” as it implies an active aspect of making/doing involved in practice. Rather than separating themes of wildness, prosumption, and space into sections, I will address all three in a narrative style that attempts to mimic the lived experience of embodied research.

Five Tries on Flan When my paternal grandmother passed away this summer, I didn’t know much about her life other than the fact that she fit the archetypal role of a Cuban grandmother. I knew that she was born in Havana—but there was no year. Her children, three men including my father—the oldest—didn’t even know how old she was until my uncle became responsible for her medical records. We now know that her birthday was on June 15, 1921, making her just short of 95 years old before she died. My grandmother had hearing problems, so communication on my end was always uncomfortable because it required yelling at her. My conversations with her when I tried to learn more about her life were never a back-and-forth dialogue for this reason, but once I did get my question through, she enjoyed talking about the unconventional pathways she took to provide a better life for herself and her children. After her three children were born, her husband decided to move the family to Madrid. My father and his brother’s lives were subsequently shaped by periods of divorce and honeymoon. My grandmother married and divorced my grandfather three times. During divorce periods, she would move to North Andover, Massachusetts, to be with her parents and siblings who immigrated here after they left Cuba. I learned at her funeral from my uncle who couldn’t understand why she

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would get back together with their adulterous father, that she moved back to Spain to remarry not because she loved him, but because being a single, immigrant mother in an offshoot neighborhood of Boston proved harder than expected to maintain three boys.

This is all preface to say that the kind of life my grandmother lived as an individual was not all available to me through family history, but I did learn some of it through objects.

Like the fact that she was an avid collage-maker and craft amateur. For every wedding, every grandchild, every stage of life, she made elaborate albums which were never just photographs inserted inside the transparent film and cardboard-backed sheets.

She would cut out images from magazines, newspapers, advertisements, greeting cards, and packaging to make multilayered, visually rich books documenting life. I inherited one of these—a collaged cookbook of recipes taken from newspapers, advertisements, and food labels from Miami in the 1970s and 1980s. The cookbook is falling apart in its state. Its binding is dissolving, having originally been a plastic-bound three-subject spiral notebook from Dollar General Stores as the cover shows. [Fig. 1] Material that is seemingly physical like paper can also take on ephemeral qualities over time. The cooking knowledge only gained from practicing these recipes will be what remains of the book once it disintegrates. She decorated the cover with a large cutout of a woman’s hand offering strawberries. Above this, inexplicably there are four separate images of fried eggs in the collage. Inside, every page is laid out in modular, compact fashion of different recipes, mostly in Spanish but some English as well, detailing health food trends of the time, from “The wrong foods make you fat,” by Rose Dosti detailing “DO use yogurt instead of sour cream. DON’T use butter instead of diet margarine or vegetable oil spray” to more culturally rooted features like “El origen de las 12 uvas” by Carmencita San

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Miguel which explains the historical origin of a Cuban tradition to eat 12 grapes at midnight on the New Year.

In her practice of putting together the book, my grandmother could also have been said to be concerned with the “control over the form of [her] physical environment and world of goods.”21 Despite her lack of applied culinary interest, the intention to design this book with her favorite recipes collected over time as the weekend paper was delivered to her demonstrates the moment of design originating in the planning or conceptualization stage. By laying out the recipes taken from “a stable—even formulaic—informational genre, produced and consumed by mostly women, designed to supplement the domestic instruction of mothers and home economics teachers”22 my grandmother was adapting these texts to her own life, collecting the recipes she valued for their cultural relevance to Cuban food as well as new ways to adapt to American products and cuisine. [Fig. 2] I was fascinated by this book for the simple fact that my grandmother rarely cooked. She preferred to go cafeterias to get her food. The times she did cook were not successful family members recall. My cousin remembers eating rubberized, over-salted steak and leftovers from the cafeteria in her apartment.

The cookbook reads as an intricate and intentional design of the self, or of an aspirational self at least, balancing the tastes and traditions from Cuba with the American ways of making do with ingredients, new processed foods, and trends. While she never

21 22

Attfield, Wild Things, 89.

Jennifer E. Courtney, “Understanding the Significance of ‘Kitchen Thrift’ in Prescriptive Texts about Food,” in Food, Feminisms, Rhetorics, ed. Melissa A. Goldthwaite (Carbondale, Il: Southern Illinois University Press, 2017), 48.

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cooked, I image the practice of thinging of this book to tell of her life, as Malafouris explains would be “temporally stretched but unified experiential assembly comprised of living moments that differ in duration, intensity or location, but it nonetheless remains a material process that is open to empirical investigation.”23

23

Malafouris, “Creative thinging,” 154.

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Figure 1. Cover of my grandmother's collaged cookbook/recipe book. Scanned image. Source: Claudia Marina.

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Figure 2. Interior page from my grandmother's collaged cookbook demonstrating both American and traditional Cuban foods. Scanned image. Source: Claudia Marina.

87 My own cooking practice, as taken from recipes in book and then adapted to my

everyday life will be the subject of embodied research, where I look at my own cooking practice in making flan to empirically understand how the concurrence of creative thinging and designing happens in everyday life through the interaction and subsequent contemplation of ephemeral materiality.

I chose to make flan because it’s the only food I can remember my grandmother cooking—and truly enjoy making—as she made it an event to present her famous flan every Thanksgiving. She kept the recipe secret, perhaps for similar personal reasons why she liked to keep her age secret, until she could no longer make it herself and then passed it down to my mother and my aunt, who have since made their own versions. My mother only learned that my grandmother made her flan in a pressure cooker, with a special tin mold which she passed down to her once she gave her the recipe. Still, it never tasted the same. My mother’s technique made a flan that was crumbly and not smooth. The pressure cooker and the ingredients had to be just right, or else the steam would curdle the custard.

One year on Thanksgiving, my aunt did a better job but told us she didn’t even bother making the caramel from scratch. She bought caramel at the store and filled it in the molds before it was time to pour the custard in so there would be no fuss worrying if the caramel cooled down too fast when put into the pan.

Still, in her cookbook with its collage of various Cuban and American dishes, my grandmother made it a point to include 20 separate recipes on flan throughout the entire book, serving as a visual marker of her obsession with it. The final flan recipe, “Flan de Caramelo” is possibly her own perfected recipe because it is one of two handwritten recipes. I doubt she ever made most of the recipes in the book, but her compiling of them

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into a separate cookbook where she chose exactly what to feature based on her preference or expectation of need is no different than the User-Generated Content and everyday curatorial practices found on Pinterest or YouTube. Finding 20 flan recipes leading up to two hand-written ones, I can only deduce that she must have made some and thus learned how to make her flan through a balancing act of reading these and judging them with previous flans from memory. This book, which lies outside of a traditional cookbook, is embedded with her own agency and is now a wild “thing” in my hands. The repetition of flan recipes in their variations presents its own agency to suggest that there is not one way to cook a flan, despite its simple ingredients. In asking “What makes flan flan?” I am questioning whether these 20 recipes can suggest possibilities to design flan recipes beyond what is in the book. If flan is no longer reliant on a stable ratio of eggs to milk as one would think to get the texture we think of when we close our eyes, then it is possible to take these recipes and adapt their knowledge to modern cooking trends.

Here I challenge myself to use recipes from this book to learn exactly why each recipe calls for different ingredients and different processes of cooking. What does each step, addition, or omission contribute to the original author’s and my grandmother’s idea of flan? By learning about the material properties of flan and its ingredients through engagement, I attempt to work my way towards designing my own recipe for a vegan flan. This creates a design problem and thus a challenge.

The wildness of flan and the versions I attempted to make come from the simple fact that flan is just a mixture of eggs, milk, sugar, and vanilla. It is liquid, but undergoes its own wild, chemical transformation beyond my manipulation, though as a cook, I am

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centrally implicated in its success as is my knowledge, touch, and taste for the ingredients.

In the 20 flan recipes my grandmother compiled and perhaps designed on her own, nine of them were for “Flan de Calabaza,” or pumpkin flan;24 four were for “Flan de Caramelo,” or the classic caramel flan; one “Flan Gran Flanero”; one “Flan de Queso Crema” (Cream Cheese Flan); three recipes taken from a newspaper featuring flan recipes with the names Rosalina, Monette, and Antonia tied to them; one “Flan de ‘Eggnog’”; and one simply named “Flan.” Adapting a selection of these recipes that demonstrate different ways to stabilize liquid ingredients will hopefully lead to the material knowledge to design a recipe for vegan flan that fulfills the criteria of flan’s taste, texture, and solidity without using animal milk or eggs which are its main (and sometimes only) ingredients.

In order to bring in elements both from Brady’s “Cooking as Inquiry” method and Malafouris’ Creative thinging, I tasked myself to make five versions of flan in a process that took me through the stages of Stephen Knott’s tiers of prosumption (Following, Rejecting, Adapting).25 My research naturally led to me practicing prosumption as “following” and “adapting” rather than rejecting, but I should clarify that “rejecting” activity in prosumption, such as when I attempt to make vegan flan, is not about rejecting consumption patterns and adopting a counter-culture vegan lifestyle, which still depends on consumption through the market or a YouTube community promoting the change. I

24

Flan de Calabaza is less a seasonal pumpkin dish as we would think of Western, temperate agricultural and cultural fall/holiday foods in the “pumpkin spice” sense. Flan de Calabaza is a common type of flan in Cuban restaurants and does not scream pumpkin flavor. Instead, the pumpkin provides a textural element to be explored later in this chapter.

25 Knott, “Prosumption.”

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personally do not adhere to a vegan diet but chose to focus on making a vegan version because conventional flan relies primarily on the qualities of animal-based products such as milk and eggs. These simple ingredients (though processed), when combined by the cook through a process of mixing, heating, and pouring, transform from a liquid to a solid. When I attempt to make vegan flan, I am “adapting” my knowledge of previous flans which I made by “following” the recipes from my grandmother’s collaged cookbook.

Following the recipes was essential to the overall cooking process because one would think that as few ingredients that are technically required to make flan, there wouldn’t be much leeway in terms of cooking time, steps, or extra ingredients. But in reality, every single flan recipe in my grandmother’s cookbook was different. Some methods were familiar, and I chose them to see what a specific ingredient would contribute to terms of texture, such as the use of condensed and evaporated milk in lieu of whole milk. Some recipes called for whole eggs, others for just the yolks, and some a combination of both, but the ratio of eggs to milk varied from recipe to recipe. Each flan recipe was as individual as its maker, proving that there was not one simple way to make flan. Engaging with the wildness/thingness of eggs, milk, sugar, and vanilla through different recipes would build skills while working with ingredients in order to follow instructions in both “unique and idiosyncratic ways that bear traces of their labor.”26 Additionally, the space of my home and domestic environment played a role in the tools and process I adapted to make these recipes. Before starting this experiment, I recorded myself cooking a meal in my family home in Miami which was much larger

26

Knott, “Prosumption,” 54.

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than my kitchen in my apartment in New York. In comparison, cooking in my domestic space in New York required much more planning than it did in Miami. This is partly due to geography and culture but also due to direct space as my family kitchen in Miami has more cupboard and pantry space for more ingredients we might anticipate needing for a number of future recipes, whereas my limited pantry space in a kitchen shared with two other people in New York requires me to make frequent trips to the grocery store and plan my meals based on ingredients I need to go buy. Because in Miami, flan is everywhere and part of the culture, my family kitchen not surprisingly would have ingredients like evaporated, condensed, and whole milk and enough eggs to always feed a family of four. While I followed the first four recipes in terms of ingredients when conducting the experiment in New York, I was spatially limited in the types of tools I could use. I did not have a pressure cooker, so I had to rely on a simple water bath for baking some flans. I also did not have the necessary equipment like pans or flan molds to jump into the experiment. Even in the stages of designing the experiment, I needed to plan which flans I would make based on what they would teach me about flan’s texture, solidity, and taste as well as make sure I had all the tools or substitutions necessary to accurately process the ingredients.

Space directly contributed to me reducing each original recipe by half in order to make just enough to fit four individual custard molds instead of making one large flan each time. The recipes are therefore adapted to meet the spatial restrictions of my home, though below they are represented in their original measurements to suggest that the original batter could still be processed in individual molds (as pictured), only more individual flans would be produced. In the imaginative lived space of my home, there

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may very well be a case in which using four eggs rather than two would have produced a better flan but that required more volume that I could not afford. The intimacy of space in my kitchen translated to the intimacy of ingredients and tools, oftentimes using the same pot I made caramel in to make the custard. Overall, I did not face any problems in dividing the original recipes by half. Failed versions based on taste or texture were due to a total omission of eggs as one recipe called for rather than failing as a result of divided ingredients. Still, these “failed” versions might also be considered wild, as attempting to escape the confines of what flan could or should be. In a pumpkin flan recipe, the result of this failed flan reminded me of another dessert my maternal grandmother would make.

The taste was definitely not flan, but it was still delicious and brought up memories of other dishes, which can lead to different and perhaps intentionally wild moments captured from failed recipes. This brings to mind the trend of “deconstructed” recipes which focus on the individual taste of a dish’s components rather than its form and visual identity.

In my research, I experimented with pre-writing activities that would encourage reflection based on the thing-ness of liquid versus solid, sweet versus savory and how materiality was changed through concurrent thinking and making. I also recorded myself on video making each recipe, talking to the camera to explain how I arrived at various decisions based on sensing, for example, that the caramel did not look like it would be enough to cover the four custard molds, or that the addition of cinnamon to the pumpkin flan transformed the recipe into something else entirely, even if I could not put my finger on it at the moment.

93 In Miami, I was able to position my camera on a tripod and record the entire

space of my kitchen as well as my movements, but as mentioned, due to different spatial variables in New York, I often found myself propping my camera on a set of stacked books, on the window ledge, or taking it with me for a first-person point-of-view perspective as I cooked with one hand and filmed with the other. Finally, the resulting form of each flan was captured by polaroid to immediately include in my research journal as well as a digital version to show more detailed aspects of that recipe’s texture and solidity.

Flan 001: Flan de Caramelo

Figure 3. Polaroid of Flan 001. Source: Claudia Marina.

This recipe was one of the last one’s in the book, handwritten by my grandmother, and was also the simplest in terms of ingredients. Because I was working in the kitchen of my New York apartment, which is considerably smaller than that of my family home

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in Miami, I should note that I worked with limited counter space and pots. Because I would be making multiple versions of flan, I also reduced every recipe by half to produce four individual flans rather than one big flan to share.

As previously mentioned, there were two hand-written Flan de Caramelo recipes near the back of the book. If going of a theme of progression, I would deduce that this was her preferred one since it came after the previous recipe which called for four whole eggs, and this one only called for two whole eggs and two egg yolks. It is a simple custard recipe with just milk, eggs, sugar, and vanilla, translated below: •

¾ cup sugar

•

2 eggs plus 2 yolks

•

2 cups milk

•

1 teaspoon vanilla There were no instructions for how to make the caramel for the bottom of the

molds, which would then be the top when the flan was cooled and inverted, so I called my mother and asked her how to do it. She instructed me to just heat about two tablespoons of sugar in a pan but not to let it burn. I wasn’t sure if I should keep it still or keep stirring it, but I went with the former and it burned a little, but not enough to alter the taste. The color was dark brown rather than a light brown. This recipe was also interesting to me because the milk is heated with the vanilla, and it calls to be raised to a boil then cooled before you whisk in the eggs and the sugar. I made a mistake while following the recipe and added the eggs to the milk and then brought the mixture up to a simmer, just enough to get hot since I didn’t want to scramble the eggs after making the mistake of putting them into the milk too early. It didn't affect the end result.

95 This first flan took the longest to make since the recipe did not include oven times or

how hot it should be, I left it at 375 degrees Fahrenheit and based on another recipe in the book, deduced that I should leave it in a water bath27 for about 35 minutes. After poking it with my finger, I thought it wasn’t firm enough, though to be perfectly honest, I had no idea whether most of the firming up would happen outside of the oven. I called my mom again and then I called my other grandmother, who told me that when you poke the flan with the end of a knife or a skewer, it should come out clean. It took about 1 hour and 15 minutes in the oven to achieve this texture.

The next day when I ate the flan, I was pleased with how it turned over, achieving the perfect form I was looking for. The recipe, divided in half, did not produce a flan with much volume, but it was light, which is how I remember my aunt’s flan on thanksgiving or the Goya packet instant-flans you can buy at the grocery store. I wrote in my field notes that when you took a bite, it almost dissolves in your mouth, and it didn’t taste eggy but had a mild taste of sweet milk and vanilla. Its flavor once baked is not like cake which transforms into a spongy object “other” than the sum of its parts. While flan still had the transformation of liquid to a solid, it tasted pretty much the same as it had when I tasted the mixture pre-baking. This flan was also the jiggliest in texture. Without the viscosity and opaqueness of condensed milk, I don’t think it would work well as a flan that can be sliced.

27

For those unfamiliar, a water bath is a baking technique that distributes heat in a gentler way. It is achieved by pouring boiling water into a baking dish and placing another dish or baking mold inside of the dish holding water. The water should reach the sides of the inner-dish, but should not be so filled as to risk flowing into the inner dish. With the heat of the oven, the water steams the custard without burning it.

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Flan 002: Flan Campesino

Figure 4. Polaroid of Flan 002. Source: Claudia Marina.

Notes from this recipe, taken from a newspaper clipping as most of them in the cookbook are, sat that this flan is made the “Cuban way” using condensed and evaporated milk. The recipe also notes it is very “easy to make.”

This recipe featured instructions for the caramel which was just ¾ cup of sugar with ¼ cup of water. There was noticeably more sugar in this recipe, even if I divided it in half, than the previous two tablespoons I used in the last recipe. For the flan itself, the recipe called for one can each of condensed and evaporated milk, four whole eggs, and one teaspoon of vanilla. Unlike the first recipe, this flan required no stovetop heating, rather pour all the flan ingredients into a food processor or blender, mix, then put into the molds and bake in a water bath at 325 degrees Fahrenheit for 1 hour and 15 minutes.

97 Even reduced to half, the recipe produced an individual flan with more volume or

height. When inverted, it seems crumbly but moist, but it’s not actually crumbly. When tapped with a spoon, the flan is stiff, not jiggly at all. It is dense and cake-like and sliceable. It requires you to bite into the piece you put into your mouth rather than it dissolving in your mouth like the last recipe. I’m able to deduce that the speed of the blades in the food processor aerated the mixture a bit to create the sponge-like bubbled at the bottom. It is not tough, but rich. The two types of milk directly contributed to the texture and intense, sweeter flavor of this flan. I began to start thinking that I could possibly achieve a similar texture to this with tofu when I got to making a vegan version.

Flan 003 Flan de Calabaza

Figure 5. Polaroid of Flan 003. Source: Claudia Marina.

I wanted to make this recipe of flan from the cookbook because I noticed that it had no eggs, and I was skeptical of its efficacy. I thought that if it did work, using this method would be suitable for the ultimate goal of adapting to a vegan flan. Because of

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this omission and therefore no danger of eating raw eggs, this recipe did not call for a water bath or to even be baked. Instead, it’s cooked on the stovetop with the cornstarch as a thickening agent added in with the rest of the ingredients so that it achieves what must be a gel-like texture. The full ingredients are below •

1 ½ lbs. pumpkin

•

1 can condensed milk

•

2 cups water

•

1 stick cinnamon

•

½ teaspoon salt

•

6 tablespoons cornstarch

•

¾ cups sugar

•

1 tablespoon vanilla As I was making this recipe, I commented on camera (which I had used to film

my cooking sessions for research) that I wasn’t sure if this recipe was supposed to resemble flan because the texture seemed too much like a puree or pudding. The next day, when I attempted to unmold the individual flan, it collapsed proving that the cornstarch was not a suitable stabilizer and wouldn’t work in my vegan version. The taste was good, but the addition of the cinnamon made it taste truly like a seasonal pumpkinpie themed dish, as if the flan were a take on pumpkin pie filling. It tasted just like another recipe my maternal grandmother would make called “Dulce de Calabaza,” but nothing like flan.

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Flan 004 and 005 Vegan Flan with Agar Agar and Tofu

Figure 6. Polaroid of Flan 004. Source: Claudia Marina.

I had done some research on vegan stabilizers or substitutes for gelatin and found a recipe on YouTube for a vegan mango pudding which introduced me to agar agar, a seaweed derivative in the form of flakes that stabilizes liquids into solid, jelly-like textures. What intrigued me to try agar agar in designing/ “adapting” a vegan flan was that the YouTube video demonstrated the mango pudding being flipped from its mold and holding its shape. While I did some research on thickeners and knew vegans used flaxseed with water to make a “flaxseed egg,” the material properties and consistencies of flax eggs works in baked flour goods such as cakes and muffins, but I wasn’t sure it would be right for flan, especially since flax eggs, or its alternative, chia seed eggs, gel into an egg-like texture but maintain a granular texture that would go unnoticed in muffins but would remove the flan-ness of flan.

100 Since the Flan de Calabaza proved to me that cornstarch is a thickener, not a

stabilizer, I’m decided to try two versions of flan. The first of the vegan flans (Flan 004) was inspired by the first flan I made “Flan de Caramelo” for its simplicity. My process in making this flan was to take the original recipe and swap out the materials, record its process and making specific to its materials, and record the results.

Flan 001 Ingredients: •

¾ cup sugar

•

2 eggs plus 2 yolks

•

2 cups milk

•

1 teaspoon vanilla

Flan 004 Vegan Ingredients: •

¾ cup sugar

•

2 tablespoons agar agar

•

1 cup coconut milk

•

1 cup almond milk

•

1 teaspoon vanilla I came up with 2 tablespoons of agar agar because the instructions for use on the

packet detailed a ratio of 1 tablespoon of agar agar to 1 cup of liquid. Other notes on the process of designing this recipe came from my experience eating Flan 001, 002, and 003.

Flan 003 “Flan de Calabaza” did not have eggs and tasted nothing like flan, leading me to worry whether the thingness of flan was in the eggs.

101 Whole milk has also been essential, but to get the richness but not risk the vegan

flan simply being a gelled coconut milk recipe, I replaced the 2 cups of milk in the traditional recipe with 1 cup of coconut milk and 1 cup of almond milk, though any nut milk would world such as cashew milk or macadamia milk.

According to Malafouris, “creativity often happens when there is an increased mismatch between experience and prior expectations,”28—as explained, cooking required this level of tactical engagement and agency on my part and the materiality of agar agar to make the impossible possible. It was after I heated the mixture on the stove to dissolve the agar agar flakes then poured it into the molds with the same caramel sauce as Flan 002, “Flan Campesino,” that I began to let the mixture cool on the countertop and intuitively touched the surface to see if the agar agar was working.

It was only possible to know through cooking, and therefore through material engagement, that the haptic feedback of the current mix of ingredients was not enough to suggest it would firm up to the point of not losing its shape when fully cooled. At this point I took half the mixture and added just shy of a third tablespoon of agar agar flakes straight into the molds and stirred it in. This was not planned but rather was due to sensing that the process I developed and the amount of agar agar in combination with the thinner consistency of coconut and almond did not yield a liquid that would set up like a custard but might in its current state refrigerate to the solidity of a gelatin.

Then, as a planned experiment, I took the remaining mixture and added half a block of silken tofu to it and used the food processor technique learned from the Flan 002 to mix the ingredients. I arrived at this technique knowing that mixing the semi-solid tofu

28

Malafouris, “Creative thinging,” 150.

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by hand into the custard would leave lumps that could only be avoided by whipping it through an electric tool. I also knew I wanted to experiment with tofu after having seen other vegan deserts use tofu to create a voluminous, light texture. Flan 005 with silken tofu produced an opaque, more voluminous flan like Flan 002, while Flan 004 had qualities of both Flan 001 and 002. Flan 004 was less voluminous like 001, but denser in texture like 002. Perhaps I could have done without the extra agar agar in Flan 004, but it was worth noting that this crucial step to its success was only achieved through making and the instantaneous knowledge garnered from different recipes and insights from family members as well as the memory of my grandmother’s benchmark flan.

Figure 7. Polaroid of Flan 005. Source: Claudia Marina.

I should note that while Flan 005 with silken tofu produced the most archetypal flan in terms of form and sliceable texture that was solid yet not too firm, the addition of the tofu was overpowering, making the entire desert taste watery with an aftertaste of soy, not at all like the delicate milk and sugar custard. The taste of Flan 004 was similar to

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flan—not simply gelled, sweetened coconut milk, which I took to be a success. It has the subtle sweetness, but not the full-bodied richness of the animal fat in cow’s milk, yet its form coupled with its function to produce flan-like satisfaction as a cruelty-free substitution also made me qualify this as a successful recipe for my own repertoire of recipes to pull up from memory as needed.

Concluding Thoughts The spatial elements of home and how it affects my cooking practice in New York versus Miami was constantly on my mind. Research in my home in Miami took into consideration not just the physical space of my kitchen, but the cultural climate, its grocery stores proliferating with Cuban and other Hispanic deserts like tres leches, dulce de leche, boniatillo, merengues, and of course flan of all varieties—coconut flan, pumpkin flan, caramel flan, cream cheese flan, guava flan, chocolate flan, etc. While I’m in Miami, the availability and permeation of these images and resources makes me not think about making flan ever, whereas in New York, I actively seek out to make it outside of special occasions because it reminds me of my grandmother or of Cuban restaurants I’ve ordered flan from. Though its ingredients are simple and can be found in any grocery store in North America, its process is what transforms flan into a thing with cultural meaning, associations, and preference in our lives.

Agency comes both from the material and also the person cooking, as I noticed I adapted to how the material of vegan flan was reacting before letting it fully set. Having taken images of flan from memory, the experiences of making and eating three other nonvegan versions to learn the material agency of milk, eggs, sugar, and vanilla, and the

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recipes developed from other cooks and their imagined processes of creating each a different flan with different ingredient combinations and different cooking times to create a desired flan that was either creamier, sturdier, jigglier, sweeter, subtler, egg-free, fussfree, or technically savvy and superior to other recipes.

What makes a flan better than others? The question is personal and no quantitative data can tell us what makes the best flan, statistically, because one person’s best may not be the other person’s best. An interesting question to ask is what makes flan not flan? This reflexive knowledge that a distinguishes a flan from some other desert such as a crème brûlée or a pudding comes from the agency of flan itself. You also intuitively know when a flan is not a flan from memory and cultural experience based on your own capacity for agency in everyday life. Design—whether in the everyday or professional studio, whether ephemeral or artefactual—needs to respond to certain expectations. In the case of cooking, that expectation is to be edible, which all of the flans I made were. But not all of them were preferable. And the domestic space of the home allows for preference and personal mythology to make an appearance.

Our preference, use, and narratives in our homes and kitchens, outside of the professional kitchen or culinary lab, is a treatment of space expressed only via the stories taking place within these spaces.29 The idea comes from Michel de Certeau writing on the matter in The Practice of Everyday Life where he elaborates his tactics versus strategies approach further into the mythological space of the everyday. Narratives found in wild things like my grandmother’s cookbook exert agency to define and transform space by

29

Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 122.

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one’s own terms. Despite a “pre-established geography,”30 that defines my New York kitchen in terms of space and what it allows, the food I decide to make, and subsequently the ways I use my kitchen transforms it into a “Cuban Kitchen” while I am in it. Physical space is now defined material and practice and how I identify in this space. By performing variations of flan recipes, I am preserving a part of my Cuban culture, and I am also continuing the narrative my grandmother began to create with her collage. Each author’s recipe for flan can be seen as a prototype on what flan should be. Some escape the parameters and have the possibility to become something else entirely, while others may demonstrate more thing-quality based on their form, texture, and solidity. To her book, I add two new ways to make flan adapted to a contemporary set of interests that might address global and local issues of sustainability through a growing American interest in veganism. Though my mythological practice does not end here, as the lived space of the kitchen is made up of moments that shape through trial and error when practiced. In a book chapter examining the role of recipes in writing history, Carrie Helms Tippen claims that “the rituals of baking seem to be as fundamental to the performance of authentic southern identity as the recipes themselves.”31 Tippen describes how identity is maintained by people who migrated from the geographical and mythological South to the Northern cities in the United States by continuing a tradition of cooking practice as a way to maintain a “connection with ‘the ancestor’”32 The ancestor in my case is literally my grandmother, but my identity and hers (as evidenced by her

30

Ibid.

Carrie Helms Tippen, “Writing Recipes, Telling Histories: Cookbooks as Feminist Historiography,” in Food, Feminisms, Rhetorics, ed. Melissa A. Goldthwaite (Carbondale, Il: Southern Illinois University Press, 2017), 23.

31

32

Ibid.

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deliberation of what goes in the book) is constructed through the continued design and adaptation of an altogether larger, metaphorical ancestor found cooking in the kitchens of Miami, North Andover, Spain, and Cuba.

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Conclusion A thesis that principally looks at the objects of ephemeral materiality cannot be immune to process—both in the consumption of materiality and its subsequent use as a tool or medium in the design and secondary production of another ephemeral object. This thesis looked at two ephemeral “objects,” which exist under this adjective in part because they are the products of assemblage—a tactical response in the moment that leaves no footprint. By looking at the formed objects that result from an individual’s makeup and cooking practice—examined as “looks” and completed recipes—we must consider the reconfiguration and negotiation of materiality at an elemental level. This is not without recognizing the context of the everyday which permeates through these objects and their contribution to a fluid material culture which takes a person through various life stages of self-making.

Positioning the everyday and its actors as a realm in which design can occur is a counterpoint to more traditional design discourses that look at the everyday as a principle realm of consumption. Design Studies looks to the material culture and rituals performed in the everyday as lowercase-d design, and while the difference between lowercase and uppercase versions of design may be institutionally driven, one cannot deny the cultural relevance and colloquial use of the term to describe a wide range of activities. It is also colloquial among Design Studies to mention that “everyone can—and does—design.”1 It seems almost silly to cite such a general statement, but design researcher Nigel Cross beat me to it, and yet a version of this universal truth has been re-examined in so many

1

Nigel Cross, Design Thinking: Understanding How Designers Think and Work (Oxford: Berg, 2011; reprint, London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013, 2015, 2016), 3.

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words by others like designers J.C. Jones and Norman Potter, design strategist Ezio Manzini, anthropologist Bruno Latour, design historian Judy Attfield, Nobel laurate Herbert Simon etc.

But if you ask these thinkers if everyone can be a designer, however, their words might be less flexible. It’s a negotiation with “yes, but…” or “yes, if….” Designers, by this logic, still are privileged to a position of being master planners, “creative” thinkers, separating drawing and planning from construction and making. But what if we were to look at the everyday through the lens of design, giving agency to former “users” and repositioning them as designers rather than consumers? Scholars like Jilly Traganou and Stephen Knott have explored this possibility, and their contribution to the field has contributed to the framework of how I describe designerly activity in my own work.2 To borrow a simple definition from Donald Schön, a designer can be—and is— anyone who “makes things.”3 I have taken the qualifications of “things” from both the perspectives of Judy Attfield in her book Wild Things and Jane Bennett’s use of the term “thing power” in Vibrant Matter. Things are conceptually entangled objects that may be “Design” (and thus visible in a museum or in the marketplace, for example) or “design” (and be the product of amateur craft or DIY activity). By using the word “design” in everyday life, we acknowledge both a type of process as well as the products that emerge from that process. Whether these things are conceptually considered equal and worthy of study focuses on political themes of power—in the everyday we may consider this a

2

Traganou with her focus on non-expert agentic use of space and Knott with his focus on design abilities of the prosumer.

3

Donald Schön, The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action (New York: Basic Books, 1983), 78.

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micropolitics of materiality. As Daniel Miller has pointed out in his work on materiality and material culture, the notion of materiality can be quite flexible. Materiality should be seen in relation to contexts in order to consider how its role can change and different forms (and sometimes formless iterations, or in this case temporary) of materiality may have contributed to the idea that “some things and some people are seen as more material than others.”4 The qualification for things expands when objectification plays a role. Anything can be a thing, and through material engagement anything can be the product of creative thinging.5 But when dealing with ephemeral materiality and its limited verification as a “tangible and lasting”6 object, the parameters of material culture fall short. Though the ephemeral “object” has been a point of inquiry in my research, examining practice, rather than the validity of makeup “looks” versus makeup products to fit into the material culture umbrella, makes it possible to recognize a ground-zero essence of design activity found in some practices that have only been brought into design discourse through the former avenues of consumption.

4

Daniel Miller, “Introduction,” in Materiality, ed. Daniel Miller (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 3.

5

Lambros Malafouris, “Creative thinging: The feeling of and for clay” [emphasis author’s own], Creativity, Cognition and Material Culture: Special Issue of Pragmatics and Cognition 22, no. 1 (2014), 140–158.

6

Daniel Miller, “Introduction,” 4.

110 And Design, after all, is a practice, subject to the institutions, competencies, and

images that shape it as a profession.7 What distinguishes design from walking but not makeup or cooking, is the element of making. This making is informed either by previous skills learned from participating in prosumption at the “following”8 level such as watching YouTube videos or following a recipe’s instructions for the first time. The difference in making between professional design and the everyday is a spatial dynamic which highlights the “lived space”9 of the home as an agentic domain still open to opportunities, imagination, and social relaxation from dominant imposed orders and the strategies of the urban and suburban landscape.

Design in the everyday occurs much more along the lines of how traditional craftbased societies perceive design in which the elements of thinking and making are combined. Thinking in this concept is used to convey conception or ideation, which in industrial societies happens as a separate design activity from construction or production.

When Nigel Cross describes this type of craft behavior, he aligns himself with the Lambros Malafouris’ definition of creative thinging. While the two thinkers come from different fields—Cross from design research and Malafouris from cognition studies— both use the example of the potter working with clay to form a vase or some other ceramic artefact. Potter claims that a potter makes his object “by working directly with

7

Linking institutions, competencies, and images towards the formation of a practice is taken from Elizabeth Shove and Mika Pantzar’s model in “Consumers, Producers, and Practices: Understanding the Invention and Reinvention of Nordic Walking,” in Journal of Consumer Culture 5: 43 (2005), 43–64.

8

This category of prosumption is taken from Stephen Knott’s article “Design in the Age of Prosumption: The Craft of Design after the Object,” Design and Culture 5, no. 1 (2008): 45–67.

9

This term is generally taken from Henri Lefebvre’s writings in “The Production of Space” (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1991) to identify a spatial dynamic that is shaped by the affordance of personal mythologies and escapes an imposed order from the rest of society.

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the clay, without first making any sketches or drawing of the pot” [my emphasis].10 Malafouris adds to this argument by claiming that while a professional potter—removed from the everyday and DIY craft—may “entertain various working hypotheses or ideas about what the final product might be or look like…those working ideas have little to do with or contribute to the potter’s tectonoetic awareness. This kind of material consciousness is felt and becomes realised through the harmonious negotiations and improvisations between fingers and material.”11 Clay has strong associations with craft which still produces objective artefacts, but food and makeup are eaten, absorbed, or washed off. Their value as material in daily life lies precisely in its impermanence and material engagement creates a prolonged, elemental design practice at a micropolitical or individual scale. Looking at ephemeral materiality and its relationship to practice before and after it is used—as it is considered, tested, tasted, then committed—heightens the question of what is being left out of design research and why?

Dematerialization by ephemerality “raises a certain psychic anxiety,” according to design historian Linda Sandino.12 Though this example shows the divide between art and design, ephemeral materiality can also raise questions between design and craft or design and consumption.

Designing in the everyday looks much more like amateur craft, not in the artefacts produced, but in the likened process of immediacy between thinking and making. Thus

10

Nigel Cross, Design Thinking, 4.

11

Malafouris, “Creative thinging,” 151.

12

Linda Sandino, “Here Today, Gone Tomorrow: Transient Materiality in Contemporary Cultural Artefacts,” Journal of Design History 17, no. 3 (2004): 284.

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considering the everyday from the vantage point of how Design History looks at craft production would glean insight into other productive, temporary, and lifelong processes— “a unified experiential assembly comprised of living moments that differ in duration, intensity or location, but it nonetheless remains a material process that is open to empirical investigation.”13 Because of the elasticity of practice in the everyday, professional designers and the field of Design Studies should look to the everyday and the amateur to examine this type of designerly making. And by looking at practices that involve the reconfiguration and negotiation of ephemeral materiality, a more nuanced idea of what falls under the parameters of “Design” may also be achieved. This ensures that the everyday is taken seriously as a realm of practice and study at an individual level rather than using the information based on use and consumption as insights to design better products for the prosumer. There is value in relearning what it means to design when studying the everyday acts of form giving—to the self or to the food one identifies with and chooses to serve to others as well—for the professional designer to incorporate a splintering, agentic knowledge that design begins in realm of the personal, where things are wild and deliberation and agency work to the capacity of the body and the home. Only then can we begin to earnestly capture wildness and transform it into innovation within the wider discourse of good design.14

13 14

Malafouris, “Creative thinging,” 154.

By “good design,” I differentiate from the historical modernist association that was concerned with type and form. Here I follow Bruno Latour’s thinking on good design from an ethical perspective based on his talk “A Cautious Prometheus? A Few Steps Toward a Philosophy of Design (with Special Attention to Peter Sloterdijk)” which describes that under current global and cultural conditions, design cannot stand as “matters of fact” but rather “matters of concern.” Since everything, including cooking and makeup practice today can be considered design, we are forced to ask ourselves if it has been well or poorly designed. This extends to the personal realm of the everyday—as mentioned before, the ephemeral “objects” which

113 Design is an activity that requires continual engagement and questioning with the

problem at hand. Donald Schön called it a “conversation with the materials of a situation.”15 From his research in The Reflective Practitioner as well as Albena Yaneva’s ethnography of design at the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), I will suggest parallels between the way design works in everyday practice and in the field of architecture. Of course, the stakes are much different when designing the built environment than when applying makeup or making a flan, but the purpose of this exercise is to notice moments where the everyday can be brought into design with regard to the model or prototype.

The prototype is likened to the craft object. Though I have been principally focused on ephemeral materiality (and prototyping materials are not exactly transient), the focus between the two is on the process, using the knowledge from working with ephemeral materiality to extract insight on a different, more intimate, and immediate way of engaging with materiality in the design process. In the everyday, and especially with ephemeral materiality, immediacy and learning by trial-and-error is required because the material will eventually cease to be an object. Outside of the everyday, what questions can this type of engagement raise on the current way we design and prototype ideas?

To firsthand acknowledge that the designer is also a consumer, we can draw parallels to the way Schön described design as a “conversation with the materials of a situation.”16 Rather than say that design is a conversation with a situation in hopes of

emerge from these practices are still subject to expectations (such as for a meal to taste good, or for a makeup look to be work-appropriate) and action in everyday life.

15

Schön, Reflective Practitioner, 78.

16

Schön, Reflective Practitioner, 78.

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improving it, he injects a material dimension that cements its importance to the design process. This highlights Shove and Pantzar’s claim that “practices involve the active integration of materials, meanings and forms of competence.”17 I cannot cook without ingredients, nor can I create certain dishes without using certain tools that do what the hand cannot such as blenders. I cannot put on my office-appropriate face or highlight certain features such as my lips, my eyes, my cheekbones without makeup products. But at a more engaged level of design extending beyond consumption, the everyday maker considers meanings, technique, and finishes according to his or her preference.

“There’s such a connection [between material and making],” Lindsey told me in our last interview. “You could easily buy a Chanel foundation and apply it with a brush, but are you taking the biggest scoop and, like, shoveling it in? Are you digging the brush into the blush and applying it?”18 She questions at what level of engagement does design happen, and as she is saying this she makes it clear that degrees of transformation don’t have to be drastic in the everyday to put together a thoughtful representation of the self.

She considers the different ways of applying blush and the tactile knowledge that comes from hand movement, finish and feel of the product, and the visual feedback happening simultaneously in the moment. The everyday makeup wearer does not envision a “look” for every day of the week but gradually builds up preferences for ways of using products as tools for designing. Agency from both the product/tool and the person using it is directing how the makeup will look as one may adjust or “converse” with the material agency to see what goes together (Will a matte-finish foundation settle well with a cream

17

Elizabeth Shove and Mika Pantzar, “Consumers, Producers, and Practices: Understanding the Invention and Reinvention of Nordic Walking,” in Journal of Consumer Culture 5, no. 43 (2005): 45.

18

Lindsey Manas in conversation with the author, September 19, 2017.

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or powder blush? How much glitter is appropriate for daytime, and how can you either enhance or knock down products that already have glitter built in?). As Lindsey pointed out, “Are you choosing [to apply blush] like a [contrasting] 1980s line-thing, or are you applying it to look like this soft baby Korean-inspired [look]?”19 In architecture, as in product or industrial design, there is a consideration of materials, finishes, ways to apply it, and semiotics that can no longer be separated from the design process or be called “styling.” According to Schön, the designer “shapes the situation in accordance with his initial appreciation of it, the situation ‘talks back,’ and he responds to the situation’s back-talk.”20 The moment that the situation “talks back” is actually the moment when the designer, makeup aficionado, or cook realizes that material agency plays a role in the design process. It is the point in which the individual realizes the wildness of what is being used to design and how that will affect the results of the practice. Jane Bennett describes this moment when things talk back to illustrate her idea of “Thing Power,” or when an object is no longer taken for granted but becomes Other and is recognized for its ability to produced desired or perhaps surprising effects.21 Professional design practice happens in gradual movements and considerations which produce consequences the designer will respond to. Schön attempts to highlight an undercurrent of baseline similarities between all design professions by engaging with a study of how the design practitioner reflects on the design process in The Reflective Practitioner. If we extend Schön’s analysis to the everyday, we are able to see that this

19

Ibid.

20

Schön, Reflective Practitioner, 79.

21

Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 2, 5.

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critical reflection happens in all instances where thinking and making are dependent on one another. In the chapters on makeup and cooking, the role of the senses is intimately tied to the everyday designer’s decisions of what to do next. And though Malafouris claims that creative thinging happens in the moment—not outside or beyond the making of the object—22 in order for the things we make (whether at home or in the studio) to be considered design as opposed to art (and thus the outcome of pure expression that does not need to answer to anyone but the artist),23 we cannot deny that unlike art, the home cook does not sit with his or her eyes closed and lets whatever ingredients do the talking as an extension of himself. The ingredients, as Schön would say, talk back. Attfield calls this agency on the part of things. Indeed, for a conversation to work, both sides need to converse. Therefore, there needs to be agency in both material and the maker in order to carry out this conversation.

Albena Yaneva describes the architects at the Office for Metropolitan Architecture’s relationship with the modeling material blue foam as essential to the design process to the point that Bennett would qualify it as having Thing-Power in relationship to the designers’ agency. The power is so great that during an experiment in which the office tried to implement one month without models in order “to substitute making with thinking and to force people to first think what they want to do instead of

22 23

Malafouris, “Creative thinging,” 153.

This line of thinking which separates Art and Design comes from the philosophy of R.G. Collingwood who argues that the human activity of craft making (what we can today call design) is often colloquially called art but fundamentally differs from “art proper,” in the planning and execution that allows for raw material to be transformed into a finished product. The pure artist does not differentiate between planning and execution, according to Collingwood. This may be mistaken for the concurrence of thinking and making which I argue for design in the everyday, but this concurrence occurs after an initial plan or idea of what it is we want to make and what its function will be. R.G. Collingwood, The Principles of Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1938).

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producing some rough quantities of trials and slowly find something that would work,”24 such an endeavor never took off. As Yaneva’s ethnography uncovered, thinking and making were inseparable, not merely parallel as Schön implied. By restricting the material engagement in favor of “alternative schemes of design thinking,”25 Yaneva questioned the “everyday practice”26 of the design happening within this office. Her elegant analysis brings to light spatial considerations, and expands the everyday to different spaces other than the home, which my thesis has focused on. Rather than looking at the office as an extraordinary site of thinking and making, such as a laboratory, the model of ethnography illuminates the everydayness of the office and reveals how design happens gradually and is spatially informed. As she wrote, “The architects at OMA think by making and rescaling models, by packing models in boxes and moving them to the ground floor, by staging models for presentations, by circulating them within networks of design. OMA architects cannot substitute making with pure thinking.”27 While Yaneva engages in participant observation at an architecture firm, Malafouris claims that the craftsperson’s attention and commitment to practice via extended material engagement is no different than participant observation with materials, claiming that the potter, in his example, “often resembles an ethnographer of clay.” When the everyday is brought into design, different scales of thinking about design are

24

Albena Yaneva, Made by the Office for Metropolitan Architecture: An Ethnography of Design (Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2009), 45. This quote is taken from an interview with former OMA partner Ole Scheeren in response to Yaneva’s question “How many models are usually generated in the course of a project?” He begins to describe that anywhere from 30–50 models can be designed for one project before mentioning the initiative Rem Koolhaas wanted to implement of working one month without models.

25

Ibid., 45.

26

Ibid., 46.

27

Ibid., 47.

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introduced, thus highlighting the immediate role of materiality. Doing so has traditionally taken an elemental understanding of design further and further away from ideas that position design as a means to an end of achieving the final building which has “real” consequences and which other people will interact with.

By taking a more processual view of design and acknowledging the banal backand-forth conversation between maker and material, the differences between making in the everyday and making in an architecture firm are practically nonexistent. Looking at design “from the inside,” as Yaneva claims to do with ethnography,28 (or in my case, the interiority of the everyday) rather than the object which is distanced from its making proves that the actual practice of designing is quite elemental to a material and cognitive relationship and can happen anywhere with anyone.

The results of my autoethnography of cooking or ethnography of makeup with Lindsey and YouTubers is no different than the actual activity of architects working at OMA. When I chose to add tofu to a batch of my vegan flan recipe in order to achieve a more voluminous flan akin to the texture achieved when making a flan with condensed milk and evaporated milk, I am engaging with the thingness of flan and trying to find a material solution to achieve the desired results. When Lindsey adds a bit of glitter to the inner corner of her eye in a specific shade of light pink that won’t detract from a graphic cat-eye, then comes back on camera with entirely new makeup with blue on one eye and green on the other, working from the base she already created because “that look was a little too simple for me,” noting the steps in her thinking she took to update the original look, she is also in conversation with the materials of a situation, tinkering with an

28

Ibid., 26.

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ephemeral prototype and building on top of that. These examples are no different than the trajectories found in Yaneva’s ethnography which show that design is actually more of a “slow and gradual painstaking operations of scaling, choosing a texture, testing an old foam model, fine-tuning the colors, retouching a photo, simulating shapes.”29 Both in cooking and makeup, two practices contingent on ephemeral materiality, the senses perform this back-and-forth conversation. Seeing, feeling, tasting, and smelling is thinking at the moment of making. Malafouris’ description of the “feeling of and for clay” can be replaced with the taste of and for custard, the feeling of and for glitter—a type of bodily knowledge that is first and foremost answered in the everyday.

Ethnography is able to dig into the everydayness of design in order to separate objects and material culture from practice, and participant observation with ephemeral materiality requires us to look at design from other avenues than the object as an entry point. The prototype, as a half-baked form one continually goes back to, exists in the everyday as well but through the process of mētis, which responds to situations tactically calling on memory and time to create alternative scenarios in the moment—which way a recipe can go, how much pigment is too much. In the way we think about capital-d Design today, there is a lack of recognition of processes such as mētis, or what Yaneva calls a designer’s “ou-u-u-p-p-p” moment—an onomatopoeia taken from designer Olga Aleksakova who describes a moment when “you stop thinking, you just look at the piece of foam and try to make it beautiful, you cut. Sometimes you slice something, and then another thing, and ou-u-u-p-p-p something is there. And you think: ‘Oh, that’s interesting’; it’s there.”30

29 30

Ibid.

Ibid., 57.

120 This “ou-u-u-p-p-p” moment can be likened to the “aha” which connects the

processual, gradual, and banal everyday with the productive, focused, and solutionsoriented realm of the professional. Design thinking may be called “intuitive,” to which Nigel Cross agrees to an extent because it is not based “upon conventional forms of logical interferences,”31 however this term can confuse the actual activity of design and specialize it away from the activity that occurs in the everyday. The everyday and the imaginative capacities of the home are important sites to recognize in a larger design process. Rather than the aha! moment appearing as defined object, it emerges out of process, which in the relaxed order of the everyday can be teased out.

Looking at the everyday makeup wearer or the home cook, we find that the design activity and type of engagement that goes into daily rituals, habits, and practices is not so different than Design with a capital-D. Without an “object,” that can neatly fall into the parameters of craft, design thinkers are forced to think about design as more of a general practice that involves the reconstitution of thinking and making. To that I add sensing because its role is heightened when dealing with ephemerality. The intimate knowledge gleaned from this conversation between maker and material extends to a design knowledge that is practiced on the self.

Design permeates everyday life, but our role in a designed world is not limited to that of the consumer. Recognizing that we create various designed worlds through everyday practices allows for an elemental definition of design to emerge from activity that incorporates thinking, sensing, and making within the body and beyond it to include various forms of wildness in conversation. This not only expands the range of human

31

Nigel Cross, Design Thinking, 10.

activity that can be considered design, but also acknowledges what the everyday can contribute to design thinking.

121

122

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