The Social Object: In conversation with author Dr Soumitri Varadarajan

In the book The Social Object, methods of design history, material culture studies and the social construction of technology are used to analyse the domestic spaces and objects in the homes of the middle class in India.

The book opens with the biography of a project dealing with waste, leading the reader to a very particular kind of object, the bads. This object is illicit, handled by criminals, and in the writing by the author serves to invert the dominant discourse of objects as commodities. This book makes the case that the programme of design is better seen as a democratic community, where the householders, the zeitgeist, technology and all manner of hidden agents collide to allow unforeseen periodic objects to emerge.

Hear from its author Dr Soumitri Varadarajan as he discusses how people make meaning of the objects they buy, own and gift. The projects in the book serve as bookends to a detailed and affectionate account of the biographies of objects within the homes of the not-so-rich.

About the speaker

Soumitri Varadarajan is a professor at the School of Design at RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia, and writes on material culture, the environment and the human body.

He is an Asia scholar focusing on China and India. His current work Unhiding China draws on 20 years of research and field work in China.

Soumitri teaches an atelier-focused studio at RMIT. His teaching introduces students to the metaphorical in creative practice.

This event is an initiative by the Postgraduate Culture Group.