Every Thing We Touch: A 24-Hour Inventory of Our Lives
„I’m an ethnographer who works in design, so I’ve spent most of my career traveling around the world looking at one specific subject at a time. For three months, I’d be totally occupied by TV remote controls or how people listen to music. Then I’d be thinking about how people consume mayonnaise, then deodorant, or banking. I would be traveling to different pockets of the world and just seeing a little portion of life; I’d interview someone and it would be exclusively about their banking services. One day I thought, “What if I looked at everything one person does in a day? What else would I learn? How can I see everything in context?” I wanted to look at life by people, instead of by topic. […] There was also a bit of nostalgia for the industrial design world. I’d noticed that my clients weren’t asking product questions anymore. Everyone seemed a little afraid to even say what they wanted to design. Clients who in 2003 or 2004 were saying “We need a strategy and information on user behavior to inform the design of a TV with a remote control,” were now asking me “What’s the future of entertainment?” Or my clients in the cosmetics industry would ask “What’s the future of beauty?” Obviously they’re doing the right thing by future proofing, but it seems like a big shift from knowing what you want to not being able to imagine everyday interactions with things. On top of that, so many products were being replaced by apps and becoming obsolete. So I asked myself: “Which ones are likely to disappear and which are likely to stay with us?“
Mehr zu dem Buchprojekt „Every Thing We Touch“ auf der Website von Paula Zuccotti.