November 24 - 25, 2005
Royal College of Art, London

The intimate objects and transactions of the home, its visual, material and sensory cultures, have come under increasing scrutiny from academics, practitioners and market researchers over the past few years. While empirical, academic and practice-based researchers, designers and artists share a long-standing interest in the meanings, rituals and makings of the interior, communication and collaboration across different disciplines and research traditions remains minimal.

Interior Insights, a two-day symposium, generates a radically interdisciplinary discussion around the state and ethics of contemporary design and ethnography in the domestic sphere. How, for example, do the techniques of video ethnographers from marketing research, filming the minutiae of everyday lives from the squeezing of toothpaste to the selection of a DVD movie, intersect with those of interaction designers or social anthropologists? Have ideas about the home interior as a sensual phenomenon, as opposed to a purely visual one, changed the concept of design for domestic retail or social need? Have a new generation of designers become pseudo-applied anthropologists? And what are the ethical issues of turning interior worlds ‘inside-out’ as corporations attempt to research everything, from our personal hygiene practices to the ways in which we try to protect our cherished memories?

Featuring a range of international speakers from social anthropology, technology and telecommunication industries, design, marketing, sociology, art practice and visual culture the event will provoke timely debate around the confluence and contradictions of contemporary research into the home and its objects.

Organisers
Alison Clarke and Inge Daniels

Participating Institutions
Royal College of Art, Victoria & Albert Museum, and the Bedford Centre, Royal Holloway, University of London