Bringing Modernity Home offers a retrospective view of the development of popular taste and the beginnings of a new phase in the rise of the consumer society in the post second world war period through a series of thought-provoking accounts of developments in modern design history. It traces the change to consumer-led design after a time of grim austerity and recovery from the war while the state and production considerations held sway at a time when consumers 'couldn't afford taste'. The case studies of so-called frivolous items like the cocktail cabinet, the tufted carpet, and the rise of DIY in the working class homes of the 'new towns' gives a flavour of the excitement and thrill they afforded designers, makers and consumers after the harsh deprivations of the war. Collection of key essays.

What do things mean? What does the life of everyday objects reveal about people and their material worlds? Has the quest for 'the real thing' become so important because the high-tech world of total virtuality threatens to engulf us? This pioneering book bridges design theory and anthropology to offer a new and challenging way of understanding the changing meanings of contemporary human-object relations. The act of consumption is only the starting point of object's "lives". Thereafter they are transformed and invested with new meanings and associations that reflect and assert who we are. Defining designed things as "things with attitude" differentiates the highly visible fashionable object from ordinary aretefacts that are too easily taken for granted. Through case studies ranging from reproduction furniture to fashion and textiles to 'clutter', the author traces the connection between objects and authenticity, ephemerality and self-identity. Beyond this, she shows the materiality of the everyday in terms of space, time and the body and suggests a transition with the passing of time from embodiment to disembodiment.