The Uncommon Life of Common Objects:
Essays on Design and the Everyday

 

What makes us love our things? Why do we attach certain sentiments to certain items? How is it that sometimes objects can tell stories more eloquently than people? These are questions explored and answered in The Uncommon Life of Common Objects. Author Akiko Busch devotes a chapter to each of 12 common objects, and discusses her and others’ experiences that give everyday things their significance. Through her examination of: a video camera, a cellular phone, a vegetable peeler, a snowboard, a baby carriage, a chair, a refrigerator, a mailbox, a medicine cabinet, a cereal box, a backpack and a desk, Busch illuminates the social and personal issues that shape our lives and the ownership of our things. Lovingly illustrated, always touching, sometimes nostalgic and often hilarious, The Uncommon Life of Common Objects, is a topical reader that is at once a personal manifesto, a look at how design influences and responds to our changing lives, and a study of society and its values and the infusion of meaning into inanimate objects.

  • “There is nothing common about Akiko Busch’s observations.... One senses that if everyday things could respond to the questions we put to them it would be in Busch’s gentle voice. This book packs the emotional power of a message in a bottle, conveying how design is our childlike intuition that the objects around us are, in fact, listening to us.”

    John Hockenberry

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We seem to accept the idea that things have a life of their own. And that acceptance is the beginning of having an emotional relationship with inanimate objects.