Social Practice Theory in Design
There’s no question that people born rich are different from those who became rich. To set the scene, I’ll use HBO’s new series ‘The Gilded Age’ as an example. The Russell’s, the new family in town, have just acquired a huge mansion in booming 5th Ave, also known as Vanderbilt Row in New York City. They are eager to join the elite with their new-found money, but have found that fitting in is not as simple as they might’ve thought. Their neighbors are unwelcoming and refuse to invite them to any social gathering. The servants are often hostile, and view the family as “lesser than”. Why? Because the Russell’s are a new-money family. They might have financial capital, but accoriding to their neighbors, they lack social and cultural capital.
Pierre Bordieu identified the behaviours illustrated in The Gilded Age as Social Practice Theory. The theory seeks to understand and explain the social and cultural world by analyzing the repetitive practices in daily life. Bordieu questioned the power, hierarchy, and tastes of people, claiming that the rich do things differently from the middle class, and the middle class did things differently from the lower class. Cameron Tonkinwise did a great job at explaining this concept by explaining that social practices are shared in groups of people: if you look at society from the outside, you should be stunned by how many people do things the same way.
Elizabeth Shove takes Social Practice Theory a step further by thinking about it in relation to design. She explains that social practices are really all the components of everyday life. Practices are routinely and regular, but not static. Take for example making scrambled eggs for breakfast. Based on how you grew up, you might’ve picked up a couple of tricks on how to make eggs. Maybe you first heat up the pan, then melt the butter, and finally, add the eggs. Maybe you don’t use butter, but instead prefer oil, and you scramble the eggs in a separate bowl before adding them to the pan. Whatever your method, you probably picked it up by observing a role model, and as the years go by, you probably discovered new tricks to make your scrambled eggs even better. To make scrambled eggs, you need 3 social components: materials, skills, and meanings. The materials are eggs, butter, and pan, the skills are the techniques you learned from your superiors, and the meanings are what make you feel connected to the activity of making scrambled eggs.
In class, I created the chart above as part of an exercise to categorize what items in my life were of high/low utility and of high/low meaning. I was surprised to find that my most precious items, the ones that held the most value to me, were also of most utility. My MacBook Pro, my rollerskates and ice skates, my Nintendo switch. There are items in the other quadrants, however the ones in the high utility / high meaning quadrant are of most importance to me. Perhaps it is because they all have strong social practice components, or maybe it is because I am part of a group whose financial, social, and cultural capital values technology and entertainment. Whatever the reason, I am sure that I chose these items because of my taste and my privilege to have these items.
