WK6 Material Culture: Everyday Life

 

WEEK 6 – MATERIAL CULTURE, EVERYDAY LIFE


In an age where the market is increasingly oversaturated with alternatives upon alternatives of products pertaining to all aspects of living, the fight for the consumers’ time, attention and, ultimately, money is seldom won solely on the merits of the practical characteristics of a product. In fact, practicality may be just about completely overlooked, if the larger aesthetic the product plays into is attractive and engaging enough. When Laura Oswald talks about consumers shopping for meaning, not for stuff, this is the idea she is referring to – the battle for market share is, in actuality, a battle for the mind of the consumers. We connect to things more easily when we perceive that there is something additional and meaningful to be gained, other than the things themselves – an experience of sorts, an perception of quality or even a sense of identity.

Personally, I try to steer clear of impulsively buying something just because I like the packaging or the commercial and, in general, I try to resist being marketed to, but, over time, I’ve noticed that a few particular food items got under my skin. These are things I don’t believe I even particularly prefer the taste of over other similar products, but I still feel, in a sense, connected to them, and so I tend to have them in my kitchen or pantry most of the time.

For example, I very much like VODAVODA.
Not the water itself, I think that it’s terrible. It’s like drinking water from a radiator.
But I do really very much like how the VODAVODA 500ml plastic bottle looks. I think it’s objectively better than all the other plastic water bottles. An incredibly tedious claim - I agree. However, I really appreciate that someone had the (perhaps, pretty obvious) idea to have a minimalist brand name (i.e. “VODAVODA”) have an appropriately minimalist bottle design - a white-capped greyish cuboid shape, that’s just the right size to grip comfortably and the most practical shape to pack together to save space, with a simple one-sided sticker where the negative space plays a role in revealing the name. I even like how the proportions are balanced out with the slightly impractical wider mouth of that bottle.

So, as a fan of the design, but an opponent of the taste, I force myself to use the terrible original VODAVODA in teas and coffees (because I am not wasteful) which I consequently serve to friends and family members (because I am not drinking that murk) so that I can then refill the brilliant bottles with just regular, and far more acceptable, tap water.

There is something else (actually, two separate things which I inseparably paired up in my childhood) that I have around the kitchen somewhere, almost always – Frikom’s fish fingers and Marbo’s instant mashed potatoes. This unremarkable combination was a staple in my, and many other children’s diets, and rightly so: the fish fingers were fun for kids to eat and the mashed potatoes were quick for mom to make. I vividly remember being told to sit at the table and wait for dinner and then getting my four-year-old hands on an empty box of fish fingers and drawing the same little red hat on the same little polar bear waving from the packaging for a hundredth time - this would be a huge attraction in my mind, one I would keep alive for years. And I would have kept it up for longer, had life not intervened - because as soon as that bear stopped wearing that hat, everything went south. Suddenly I had to carry a backpack and deal with things like responsibilities and other people and dressing myself.

I have long since fully realized that I don’t, in fact, really like the taste of either ingredient of this really rather unhealthy and generic meal as I once did. However, it was a part of a simpler, more innocent time that I occasionally enjoy looking back on. So every so often, when I’m not bothered to make something “proper” for dinner, I disguise laziness as being sentimental and I draw a hat on a polar bear while I wait the pan to warm up.



I suppose that forming more meaningful bonds that one would expect with the most trivial elements of the material world is inescapable and an innately human thing to do. I seem to have a soft spot for aesthetic design of commercial everyday things and a fondness for what someone with more life experience would call nostalgia, and it comes as a surprise to me that the objects that revealed that were, at the time they left their impact, more or less, selected with just by judging them “by their cover.”


O.K.