Why I Teach Research & Writing
by Akiko Busch
The study of design shows us that nothing is ever as ordinary as it seems. Tin cans, for example, are actually made today of steel, aluminum, or metal alloys. The cylindrical ribbed metal beneath the paper label is stamped with a series of numbers that signal contents, place and time of manufacture, and date of distribution, information that right away upends our expectations that each of these ubiquitous, mass-produced objects is identical.
But uniformity does seem to be the case with those cans in Tiffany & Co.’s Everyday Objects Collection, described in promotional copy as “a take on modern life, where we look at luxury through a new lens by infusing the finest materials with creativity and wit.” Along with sterling silver paper plates, band aid boxes, and paper clips, the company sells a sterling silver and vermeil can for $1025. It was purported to be an upgrade on the supermarket classic, but a class outing to the 5th Avenue mothership of luxury goods raised questions as to whether this was standard issue fetishization of the ordinary. We all have the compulsion to subvert the ordinary, but what happens when this impulse is commodified by a luxury concern? And who decides what makes for an everyday object anyway? Or is the collection simply a caricature collection of American disposable goods designed for a foreign market? And if so, maybe even a satirical riff on American garbage that is sold overseas?
Norwegian mega-memoirist Karl Ove Knausgaard had darker thoughts about the tin can. In his 2015 book, Autumn, a series of letters written to his yet unborn daughter describing the world she will soon enter, he writes that the purpose of this commonplace object “is to reject life.” Nothing can live in airtight space, he tells us, and “therefore nothing can die in it either.” It isn’t something “anyone would opt for if they had a choice.”
But drawing on their own range of memories, experiences, and references, the design research students did choose to look upon the commonplace object more favorably. And with, in fact, genuine creativity and wit. For one student, the can evoked that idiosyncratic quality of human desire that embraces seeming opposites: her grandmother had a simultaneous and inexplicable enthusiasm for canned green beans and tomatoes picked fresh from the garden. Sometimes people want two things at once! For another, the tin can was an emblem of security, sufficiency, preservation. For another, it recalled charity food drives from elementary school and an introduction to ideas of social welfare. Another wrote of cherishing “the feeling of rinsing out a tin can to put in recycling.” And another recalled that as a child she had used a tin can to melt crayons over an open flame, making for a small stovetop lake of boundless, swirling color. Such, then, are the dimensions the inanimate world can bring to our lives, and such are the multiple perspectives on the everyday things we look to in this class.
Faculty Bio
Akiko Busch is the author of Geography of Home, The Uncommon Life of Common Objects, Nine Ways to Cross a River, and The Incidental Steward. She was a contributing editor at Metropolis magazine for twenty years, and her essays about design, culture, and nature have appeared in numerous national magazines, newspapers, and exhibition catalogues. She has taught at the University of Hartford and Bennington College as well as SVA, and her work has been recognized by grants from the Furthermore Foundation, NYFA, and Civitella Ranieri. She lives in the Hudson Valley. Her collection of essays, How to Disappear: notes on invisibility in a time of transparency will be published by Penguin Press in spring 2019.
About SVA MA Design Research, Writing and Criticism
The SVA MA in Design Research, Writing and Criticism is a one-year, intensive MA program well suited to the circumstances of established professionals, in addition to graduates wishing to continue their studies at an advanced level. In providing the research tools and journalistic techniques for researching, analyzing, and critically interpreting design, the program amply prepares its graduates for future-facing careers in research-driven design practices and institutions, in journalism and publishing, or for continued studies in a design-related subject.
We are now accepting applications on a rolling basis. Our next application review will be February 15, 2020. Successful candidates will be granted significant scholarships. Apply here.
Please contact us for more information at designresearch@sva.edu.
