When Objects Fail: Unconcealing Things in Design Writing and Criticism

While most of us understand what is meant by an object — a teaspoon, hammer, cup, chair or lamp — no one is quite sure what is meant by a thing. The word holds within it an “audacious ambiguity” (Brown 2001, 4), referring to not just a loss of words (Q: “where did you put the thing? A: “It’s behind the thing in the thing”), but all the things (ideas, interests, materials, decisions) that come together to form the object — including the ones about which we do not know. Despite a longstanding philosophical discussion on the discrepancy between the object and the thing, popular design discourse—in magazines, books and exhibitions—is still in a state of denial. The currency of design discourse remains, for the most part, the photograph of the object frozen in time or exhibited in a gallery in eye-popping color on a white pedestal against a white background. Drawing terms from Brown and the philosophers Bruno Latour, Michel Serres and Martin Heidegger, this essay argues, that one way to put Thing Theory to use in design criticism is by analyzing objects that have failed.