Stephanie Goh

Department: Contextual Design
Website: www.stephaniegoh.com

REKINDLING THE ROMANCE

This is a snaking enquiry into the house: its rooms, and the kitchen.
This inquiry into the realm of domesticity simultaneously wonders and reflects on the domestic appliances that we live with, and how we live with them. Bearing on the relationship between object and lifestyle, this introspective investigation meanders along by uncovering often overlooked lines of connection.

The awe inspired by these handy machines in our houses has plateaued and stagnated. They now generally appear trivial and trite, a phenomenon exacerbated by the inundation of significantly more complex technologies. We no longer receive new technologies with the scepticism of our ancestors, and thus hardly think to stop and consider the implications of our electronically mediated lives.

The work reconsiders the centrality of domestic appliances; spatially, within our domestic spaces, as well as within the hierarchy of value we ascribe to our possessions. The boundaries between the living room, dining room and kitchen, as well as the typologies of objects we associate with these spaces, are blurred. The appliances, which we have relegated to the shadows of the kitchen, are repositioned to the core of the house, where they might begin to gain a more pronounced presence.

In recalibrating our perception of these domestic appliances that have become a commonplace in our private lives, this act of defamiliarization enacts a metaphorical lifting of hemlines, a way of re-construction and seeing afresh.

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