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org/ at University of Michigan on June 17, 2015
Design Your Life: The Pleasures and Perils
of Everyday Things
Ellen and Julia Lupton, St Martin’s Griffin, 2009.
192pp., 150 col. illus, paper, £16.99/$23.95.
ISBN: 9780312532734
This book is an attempt by two sisters—one a pro-
fessor of English at the University of California
at Irvine and the other a curator of contemporary
design at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design
Museum—to bring together their respective areas
of expertise and produce a scholarly take on design
studies which will also reach a readership beyond
academia [1]. It focuses particularly on objects and
phenomena we use in our daily routines, such as
potted plants, bras, curtains and corporate fonts. It
is divided into short, pithily titled chapters such as
‘Are toasters necessary?’ and ‘Garage Branding’. Its
focus is pointedly on the mundane, on subjects
such as the way toilet paper hangs on its rod or the
baby-cut carrots sold in supermarkets. It is illus-
trated throughout by Ellen Lupton and is itself an
attractively designed object.
The book is American in both its subject matter—
not all the design case studies, such as the semiot-
ics of front porches, translate well for a non-US
readership—and its tone, which is determinedly
conversational and reader-friendly. Different ar-
rangements of window curtains, for example, are
described as ‘classic center part’, ‘comb-over’ and
‘Elvis’ (p. 25), while the JL90 toaster has a ‘two-slice
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playlist’ (p. 42). Choosing pillows is ‘a momentous
endeavour . . . What will your pillows say to you
each night when you climb into bed with them? And
how will you feel about them in the morning?’ (p.
57). This style can be engaging and funny but the
overall impression is of a book that is unwilling to
frighten off the non-specialist reader with anything
too heavy or incisive.
The book is not always clear about what it is trying
to do. It is an eclectic combination of style advice
(‘never arrange art in a step pattern except over
stairs’ (p. 27)), popular anthropology (‘Like iPods
and Blackberries, roller bags wrap their users in a
cocoon of oblivion’ (p. 51)) and cultural analysis. By
far the most valuable parts of the book are taken up
with the latter. For example, there is an interesting
discussion of the save-the-planet cards left in ho-
tels—‘our hotel is conserving resources and keeping
costs down by laundering the sheets every third
day’—which the authors identify as a form of ‘mar-
ket-based environmentalism’ aimed more at cutting
costs than ecological benefits (p. 62). Similarly, there
is an excellent discussion of boneless breast of
chicken as ‘the abstraction of flesh from fowl, of ani-
mal protein from its origins as a living creature. “The
very phrase white meat” evokes the purity of an an-
gel, forever divorced from prior scenes of life or
death’. The authors suggest that, attuned to the
Book Reviews

Fig 1. The Lupton sisters. © Ruby Miller. From Design Your
Life: The Pleasures and Perils of Everyday Things by Ellen and
Julia Lupton.
plight of penguins and polar bears by wildlife televi-
sion, young people will now ‘eat meat only under
conditions of extreme mystification’ (p. 152). More of
Book Reviews
this type of historical and cultural analysis, like the
kind in Ellen Lupton’s brief but illuminating
Mechanical Brides: Women and Machines from
Home to Office (1997), would have added weight to
the book.
Because it clearly does not want to distract its
reader with the paying of scholarly dues—although
it does have a very helpful final section on further
reading—this book sometimes gives the impres-
sion of being the first word on the subject. Its de-
clared aim is to show that ‘“design” is more than
the stuff you buy at high-end stores or the modern
look that moves products at Target and IKEA’ (p. 7).
But can there be anyone familiar with books such
as Donald Norman’s The Psychology of Everyday
Downloaded from http://jdh.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of Michigan on June 17, 2015
Things (1988), Henry Petroski’s The Evolution of
Useful Things (1992) or Harvey Molotch’s Where
Stuff Comes From (2003), who still thinks other-
wise? The recent shift in emphasis from design his-
tory to the study of material culture, usefully
summarized in Judy Attfield’s Wild Things: The
Material Culture of Everyday Life (2000), reflects a
declining interest in the aesthetically pleasing or
‘designed’ object. Scholars of material culture tend
to focus on the afterlife of things, once they are
no longer state-of-the-art commodities. For all its
emphasis on the everyday, however, Design Your
Life is still quite centred on the voguish, rather than
how these much-used objects assume unpredict-
able meanings and functions once they outlast their
status as commodities and become part of the ran-
dom clutter of everyday life.
The book originated as a blog, which its authors have
used ‘to test ideas and to draft the seedlings of chap-
ters in 300 word bursts’ (p. 176). The bite-sized and
always readable quality to the entries means that al-
most everyone will find something of interest in this
book, but many may hanker after something more
meaty and substantial.
Joe Moran doi:10.1093/jdh/epp059
Reader in Cultural History
School of Media, Critical and Creative Arts
Liverpool John Moores University, UK
E-mail: J.Moran@ljmu.ac.uk
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