Fernandez Guardado / Home: Things & Bodies

Home: Things & Bodies A thing-based exploration into personal space

Author: Marta Fernandez Guardado, HCU Hamburg

Supervisor: Matthias Ballestrem, Prof. Dr., HCU Hamburg; Ignacio Borrego Gómez-Pallete, Prof. Dr., TU Berlin

Research stage: final doctoral stage

Category: Extended abstract

Abstract

We live among, together and through things. They live with us at home and create a home where to live, allow us to construct our identities and participate in society. As we spend time with objects, they embed in our everyday, melt in our routines and disappear, becoming hard to perceive and evaluate. It is only when an object breaks that it asserts itself as ‘thing’, as a material and social entity with relational and performative qualities that can collaboratively transform the experience of home.

Through design work that combines phenomenological approaches to more-than-human experience and new materialist perspectives on the entities at work in a phenomenon, my proposal aims to formulate a thing-based conceptual and methodological tool for the identification and consolidation of the personal experience of inhabiting, so it can be celebrated and shared.

Keywords: personal space, experience of inhabitation, domestic objects