Output details
34 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
Nottingham Trent University
A World of Colour and Bright Shining Surfaces: Experiences of Plastics after the Second World War
This article develops the historical dimension of Fisher’s work on plastics in consumption experiences, drawing from new empirical work in the Hagley Museum, Wilmington Delaware and using advertisements for specific plastic products in Ideal Homes and Gardens between 1945 and 1973. The article draws on ideas from sensory anthropology to put in the foreground the ‘sensory identity’ that the materials acquired in this period, concentrating particularly on the qualities of plastic surfaces. It contains a new reading of some early texts about plastics that were directed at the general reader through which the article identifies the origin of this characteristically plastic ‘shine’, and its early positive meanings. It traces these through Ideal Home up to the arrival in the 1970s of a more equivocal view of the materials informed by environmental concern. The article is original in its reading of the history of plastics from this sensory/ material perspective, bringing to this concepts from work in the social sciences, particularly ‘sensory anthropology’, that has attended to the materiality of experiences of the designed world and the emergence and ‘stabilisation’ of technologies in their social settings. The article appeared as part of a special issue of JDH, ‘Shininess: Bringing Meaning to Light in Design’, to which Fisher contributed a co-authored article-length introduction:
Maffei, N. and Tom Fisher (2013), ‘Historicizing Shininess in Design: Finding Meaning in an Unstable Phenomenon’, Journal of Design History, 26: 231-240, DOI:10.1093/jdh/ept025, available at http://jdh.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/reprint/ept025?ijkey=cO64oIBTz4lJvKX&keytype=ref
The historical approach to plastics and their sensory consequences present in this article articulates with Fisher’s focus on the materiality of contemporary consumption experiences, and the role that plastics play in them, represented in Outputs 1 and 4 and in previous publications.
