The Hearth’s Persistence
photo by Galena Alyson Canada
It’s snowing in Brooklyn today, and I was thinking about the indoors. I’m interested in products that could retain their functionality if made portable, but are specifically designed to stay inside. Clocks are the most common example- a watch does exactly the same thing as a wall clock or grandfather clock, but people still love these larger objects. Even now that the watch’s function has completely dissolved into the cell phone, many people still wear them.
Hulger has based its entire product line on our desire for home-specific objects. They describe their handsets as ergonomic and radiation-free in comparison to cell phones, but it’s clear that their value comes from making the phone less portable again, tying it to the user’s cognitive picture of his or her home.
I think this goes back to the concept of the hearth as a mediated instance of fire. The home reflects things that exist outside its walls, on a smaller scale and in a form that the owner can control. I think that people strive to make their homes feel different from the largely uncontrollable outside world. Products that say “I belong at home, and I make your home your home” will always be critically important to the house trope, and thus desirable – even if their functions are replicated by smaller, portable devices.
1 Comment
January 7th, 2008 at 1:56 am
Hey Joey, thanks for the photo credit, I appreciate the courtesy. Would you be willing to give me a back-link to the source?
http://galenaalysoncanada.blogspot.com/2007/05/gallery-this-morning-at-my-comadres.html
I’m glad the pic grabbed you!
‘Lena