What do you think?
Rate this book
Wild Things: The Material Culture of Everyday Life
Shortlisted for the Design History Society Scholarship Prize 2001-2002 What do things mean? What does the life of everyday objects after the check-out reveal about people and their material worlds? Has the quest for the real thing become so important because the high tech world of total virtuality threatens to engulf us? This pioneering book bridges design theory and anthropology to offer a new and challenging way of understanding the changing meanings of contemporary human-object relations. The act of consumption is only the starting point in objects lives. Thereafter they are transformed and invested with new meanings that reflect and assert who we are. Defining design as things with attitude differentiates the highly visible fashionable object from ordinary artefacts that are taken for granted. Through case studies ranging from reproduction furniture to fashion and textiles to clutter, the author traces the connection between objects and authenticity, ephemerality and self-identity. But beyond this, she shows the materiality of the everyday in terms of space, time and the body and suggests a transition with the passing of time from embodiment to disembodiment.
336 pages, Paperback
First published December 1, 2000
4 people are currently reading
91 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
March 24, 2008
Attfield weds design history (which has tended to focus on "good design" as a way of raising standards in a consumerist society) with material culture (which takes a broader view of consumption and is less hierarchical in its judgments). Nice introduction to contemporary historiography of design; the book reflects the British context in which it was written.
January 11, 2026
“Design can be defined much more broadly as ‘things with attitude’ …” (p. 10)
“…that disreputable wild and dangerous rabble of ‘objects that talk back’…” (p. 26)
“Once objects escape the boundaries of categorization they become wild.” (p. 57)
Judy Attfield (1937–2006) argues that everyday objects are not merely background scenery—neither passive nor neutral—but active cultural agents that participate in the production of meaning, the shaping of identity, and the organization of social power relations.
A key concept in her work is “things with attitude.” Designed objects have attitude, of course—but so do the everyday, banal, unaesthetic, or DIY things that usually fall into the blind spots of the designer’s gaze, and they can have especially strong attitude. Attfield calls these “wild things”. They don’t fit the usual frames of good taste or functionality; they can provoke bewilderment or even embarrassment—and precisely for that reason they are often personally and emotionally valuable, and irreplaceable.
What interests me is that, because the book was written at the end of the last century, it sits just before the new-materialist turn—or seems to foreshadow it. Several themes that now feel self-evidently current in design (everyday life, emotional and creative consumption, “soft” and domestic materialities) receive their academic genealogy here.
This is Judy Attfield’s only monograph, published relatively late in her life. It has that quality of a wise elder speaking: dense, gripping, and free-flowing yet calm—an argument that doesn’t try too hard to prove or persuade, doesn’t even try to please, but simply aims to convey.
After reading, I look at the floordrobe on my floor with a more appreciative eye: a wild thing that talks back.
“…that disreputable wild and dangerous rabble of ‘objects that talk back’…” (p. 26)
“Once objects escape the boundaries of categorization they become wild.” (p. 57)
Judy Attfield (1937–2006) argues that everyday objects are not merely background scenery—neither passive nor neutral—but active cultural agents that participate in the production of meaning, the shaping of identity, and the organization of social power relations.
A key concept in her work is “things with attitude.” Designed objects have attitude, of course—but so do the everyday, banal, unaesthetic, or DIY things that usually fall into the blind spots of the designer’s gaze, and they can have especially strong attitude. Attfield calls these “wild things”. They don’t fit the usual frames of good taste or functionality; they can provoke bewilderment or even embarrassment—and precisely for that reason they are often personally and emotionally valuable, and irreplaceable.
What interests me is that, because the book was written at the end of the last century, it sits just before the new-materialist turn—or seems to foreshadow it. Several themes that now feel self-evidently current in design (everyday life, emotional and creative consumption, “soft” and domestic materialities) receive their academic genealogy here.
This is Judy Attfield’s only monograph, published relatively late in her life. It has that quality of a wise elder speaking: dense, gripping, and free-flowing yet calm—an argument that doesn’t try too hard to prove or persuade, doesn’t even try to please, but simply aims to convey.
After reading, I look at the floordrobe on my floor with a more appreciative eye: a wild thing that talks back.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews