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The Uncommon Life Of Common Objects: Essays on Design and the Everyday
What makes us love our things? Why do we attach certain sentiments to certain items? How is it that sometimes objects can tell stories more eloquently than people? These are questions explored and answered in The Uncommon Life of Common Objects. Author Akiko Busch devotes a chapter to each of 12 common objects, and discusses her and others' experiences that give everyday things their significance. Through her examination a video camera, a cellular phone, a vegetable peeler, a snowboard, a baby carriage, a chair, a refrigerator, a mailbox, a medicine cabinet, a cereal box, a backpack and a desk, Busch illuminates the social and personal issues that shape our lives and the ownership of our things. Lovingly illustrated, always touching, sometimes nostalgic and often hilarious, The Uncommon Life of Common Objects , is a topical reader that is at once a personal manifesto, a look at how design influences and responds to our changing lives, and a study of society and its values and the infusion of meaning into inanimate objects. Each of the 12 chapters is accompanied by a four-color drawing.
- GenresDesignNonfictionEssays
160 pages, Hardcover
First published July 15, 2005
6 people are currently reading
183 people want to read
About the author
Akiko Busch
52 books46 followersAkiko Busch has written about design and culture since 1979. She is the author of Geography of Home: Writings on Where We Live and The Uncommon Life of Common Objects: Essays on Design an the Everyday. Her most recent book of essays, Nine Ways to Cross a River, a collection of essays about swimming across American Rivers, was published in 2007 by Bloomsbury/USA. She was a contributing editor at Metropolis magazine for 20 years. Her essays have appeared in numerous exhibition catalogues, and she has written articles for Architectural Record, Elle, Home, House & Garden, Metropolitan Home, London Financial Times, The New York Times, Traditional Home, Travel & Leisure and Wallpaper*, among other publications. In Fall, 2005 she served as a Richard Koopman Distinguished Chair for the Visual Arts at the Hartford Art School at the University of Hartford. She has lectured widely on architecture and design and has appeared on public radio in the U.S. and Canada. Currently, she is a regular contributor to The New York Times Sunday regional section.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
March 6, 2024
The cover of Akiko Busch’s interesting book has a sketch of an Adirondack chair, a celebrated piece of outdoor furniture owing its existence to the early twentieth century notion that fresh air was curative of tuberculosis. A comfortable chair was needed for sitting outside for long periods. It certainly would have helped.
The author's aim is to provide a philosophical slant, a cultural background for everyday items we take for granted. She delves into garden furniture, letterboxes, the telephone, desks, the vegetable peeler, cereal boxes, back packs and baby strollers, each of which have their points of interest, although snowboards are not in my view fascinating. The book would have been served better if the writing had been less pedestrian, less replete with the word ‘surely’, begging the question and most telling of all, if there were more and better illustrations, especially showing how some objects have transitioned over time.
It’s good that we are prompted to think about artefacts we use and their place in our lives: the vegetable peeler was, for example, the result of the inventor wanting to help the work of his wife in the kitchen. My favourite pieces concern the baby stroller and its development as a status symbol and the telephone. I was recently asked, because I have lived a long time, which technological development has been most significant in my life. I had to think about this a lot because the choice is a wide one, but for me I think it is the telephone.
The telephone has evolved more than most common objects and continues to do so. When I was a young lad, the telephone sat on top of a filing cabinet in ‘the study’. It had a rotary dial and my parents had to book a long distance call. Later we had Subscriber Trunk Dialling (STD) to phone interstate, but the calls had to be short because of the additional, timed, cost. At university in the seventies, I lived with 230 other students at Toad Hall, ANU, where we had two phones down stairs. If one rang, the protocol was for anyone walking by to answer, find out who the call was for and then go and find the person. Sometimes took a while.
With the installation of A and B phones in public phone booths it didn’t take long for human ingenuity to subvert them. By inserting one end of a straightened paper clip into the B slot and the other end into the handset you could short the STD bar, and talk for hours to your girlfriend in a distant city, or so I believe to be the case… Public phones have all but disappeared. Mobiles themselves have evolved to the extent that they now are the most important device we own. They tell the time, pay for purchases, locate us on the face of the Earth, give us our daily feeds, keep us connected with the world, including Goodread’s friends, obey our oral commands, time the BBQ, and if you are really desperate, you can make a phone call.
The author's aim is to provide a philosophical slant, a cultural background for everyday items we take for granted. She delves into garden furniture, letterboxes, the telephone, desks, the vegetable peeler, cereal boxes, back packs and baby strollers, each of which have their points of interest, although snowboards are not in my view fascinating. The book would have been served better if the writing had been less pedestrian, less replete with the word ‘surely’, begging the question and most telling of all, if there were more and better illustrations, especially showing how some objects have transitioned over time.
It’s good that we are prompted to think about artefacts we use and their place in our lives: the vegetable peeler was, for example, the result of the inventor wanting to help the work of his wife in the kitchen. My favourite pieces concern the baby stroller and its development as a status symbol and the telephone. I was recently asked, because I have lived a long time, which technological development has been most significant in my life. I had to think about this a lot because the choice is a wide one, but for me I think it is the telephone.
The telephone has evolved more than most common objects and continues to do so. When I was a young lad, the telephone sat on top of a filing cabinet in ‘the study’. It had a rotary dial and my parents had to book a long distance call. Later we had Subscriber Trunk Dialling (STD) to phone interstate, but the calls had to be short because of the additional, timed, cost. At university in the seventies, I lived with 230 other students at Toad Hall, ANU, where we had two phones down stairs. If one rang, the protocol was for anyone walking by to answer, find out who the call was for and then go and find the person. Sometimes took a while.
With the installation of A and B phones in public phone booths it didn’t take long for human ingenuity to subvert them. By inserting one end of a straightened paper clip into the B slot and the other end into the handset you could short the STD bar, and talk for hours to your girlfriend in a distant city, or so I believe to be the case… Public phones have all but disappeared. Mobiles themselves have evolved to the extent that they now are the most important device we own. They tell the time, pay for purchases, locate us on the face of the Earth, give us our daily feeds, keep us connected with the world, including Goodread’s friends, obey our oral commands, time the BBQ, and if you are really desperate, you can make a phone call.
January 14, 2026
A small time capsule of turn-of-century suburban lifestyle as seen through ‘essential’ belongings. Captured a few intriguing perspectives on how and why we invest so much in inanimate things.
April 10, 2014
Ms. Akiko Busch made me fall in love with language again. She uses words exceedingly well without being too wordy or descriptive and while she may put too much stock in the philosophical interpretation of everyday objects like a backpack, the book did "make me nostalgic for the present" as one reviewer said. Definitely worth a read for anyone who wants to begin to understand what "material culture" means by starting with a study of the things we own today. I think the book is a triumph in language and understanding of how the physical objects in our life reflect on our priorities and our cultures.
July 5, 2011
A series of little essays on the history and personal meaning of various types of objects. Interesting essay on the Adirondack Chair.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews