The aim of the course is to provide students with concepts, categories, models and methods in order to observe, describe and compare everyday practices related to consumption of media as well as of ordinary goods.
In order to do so, the course will privilege methodology over theory.
Theory will be addressed mainly in order to reconsider, reformulate and rearticulate the main concepts defining the course: culture, communication, media and consumption.
Such reconsideration, reformulation and rearticulation is needed because these concepts, inherited from the 19th and 20th century social sciences and humanities, are perceived as more and more inadequate in order to account for today’s social phenomena and practices, especially those related to design and to the new art forms.
In this first part, particular attention will be given to distinguishing among mediation, mediazation and mediatization.
In the second part of the course, the “domestication” approach (see bibliography) to media and technologies will be introduced, together with ethnography as main research method.
Through the concept of “domestication” students will learn how to take into account and how to account for everyday practices of exchange, appropriation, use, enjoyment, disposal of artifacts.
Students will thus be sensitize to what happens to artifacts once they leave the hands of their designers, creators, producers.
The course will end with a reflection on everyday life, which will allow exploring the tensions between art and design from the point of view of “consumers’” practices.
- Instructor: Alvise Mattozzi