Products as Media: Towards a practice of design that takes products into account as mediating entities

One of the most important characteristics of designed objects as products is that they are part of our everyday life. For an art piece to be experienced you need to visit a museum or a gallery. Many designer movements such as Radical Design and anti design worked on the intersection of design and art. At the beginning of 2000’s this approach has gained popularity again (Dunne and Raby, 2013). One of their forerunners Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby state that “I kind of feel that art exists because design has failed. In an ideal, utopian world, everyday life would be so rich, meaningful and challenging that we wouldn’t need this separate category called art.” (Puolakka & Sutela, 2010) and underline the importance of design for being critical. Those designers on the other hand forget the strong advantage of the products that they could invade the daily life and exhibit their objects at galleries or through visual media. In order to spread a particular message or experience designers use objects as containers of message but when they omit the materialistic-reproduction part of the objects. Bennett (2007) for example claims that objects can control people, although people think they control the objects. Products as material entities are far more stronger than their visual representations or a single object in a gallery. Therefore this paper suggests that designers who want to work on critical usage of design object should be aware of the products’ ability to invade our daily life by being produced in thousands of physical copies. A theoretical background for such an approach could be that we could see products as a media and apply theories of media to these products. Bennett, J. (2007). Edible matter. New Left Review, 45, 133. Dunne, A. & Raby, F. (2013). Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction and Social Dreaming, MIT Press, Cambridge, UK. Puolakka, A., & Sutela, J. (2010). Science Poems. Helsinki & Paris: OK Do