Michael Shanks
Beer
cans and bottles
a
study in design
1983
A
comprehensive study of the design, marketing and certain aspects of the cultures
of consumption of beer in northern England and Sweden in 1983.
The cans from both countries are remarkably different (colour set, iconography,
text). On the one hand systematic differences in material culture were related
to different histories of drinking and health cultures in England and Sweden.
On the other hand the study revealed the indeterminacy of a category such
as beer can, its immediate dispersal, as soon as we tried to analytically
pin it down in our social scientific approach. To understand this very simple
matter of production, consumption, style and design involved exploring a centrifugal
network of connections through breweries, their design and marketing strategies,
histories of commercial packaging, economics of the drinks industry, alcohol
consumption – legislation and health issues, cultural signification.
Contact with the sociology of technology (Hughes, Mackenzie, Lemonnier, Norman)
in Paris in 1992 helped me see how to deal with this matter of field (rather
than object), and a disciplinary space between sciences, social sciences,
arts, humanities. I took up the implications of this heterogeneous networking
(concept after John Law) in a lecture course on design in Leiden (1993),
relating it to notions of lifecycle and biography. Theoretical background – from
post positivist social science through semiotics to new sociologies of technology
and their close links with constructivist science studies.
publication
Re-constructing Archaeology: Theory and Practice
with Christopher Tilley
Cambridge University Press, 1987, Second edition: Routledge, 1992
The life of an artifact
Fennoscandia Archeologica 15:15–42 (1998)
(originally delivered as two lectures in Leiden in 1993)
