Moving Objects: A Cultural History of Emotive Design

In his 1936 essay ‘La Crise de l’Objet’, André Breton identifies a volonté d’objectivisation; an unprecedented drive toward the concrete in contemporary art and science that underlies the surrealist endeavor to bring about ‘a total revolution of the object’.1 With reference to diverse artifacts displayed in the first Surrealist Exhibition of Objects,2 he elaborates on this new conception of the object and lists some of the strategies adopted by the surrealists to transcend an object’s ‘manifest life’ and liberate it from the ‘mad beast of conventional use [usage]’. Under such modes of engagement, Breton explains: […] this object, as complete as it is, reverts to an uninterrupted succession of latencies, not specifically bound to it and calling for its transformation. This object’s conventional value disappears behind its representational value and, by this means, brings to prominence its picturesque aspect, its evocative power3. In Moving Objects, Damon Taylor likewise identifies a notable tendency in our relationship to the material culture of everyday life, a particular understanding of domestic objects specifically, that is bringing about what he refers to as an ‘affective turn in design’ (p. 7). In this book, he assembles a compelling collection of objects under the banner of ‘emotive design’, artifacts that ‘operate in the realm of emotion for its own ends, because feeling is valuable in itself’ (p. 9). As with the objects considered by Breton, the emphasis is placed on their evocative power, and one of Taylor’s key aims is to examine the ways in which they are ‘manipulated [by designers] in an exploration of our emotional relationship to the physical matter of life’ (p. 10). By focusing his study on furniture and furnishings, the ‘intimate’ objects of everyday life that constitute ‘the landscape we inhabit’ (p. 10), he further aims to highlight ‘the affective space of the domestic as a site of expression and experimentation’ (pp. 11–12) and points toward its subversive potential.