State of the art: Design, democracy, and the production of style in Sweden

This dissertation is focused on the ideological continuity between the design of everyday things and social democratic politics in Sweden, a nation widely recognized as an icon of modernity's moral achievements. In Sweden design is not considered socially or politically neutral, but is often described by scholars, critics and even ordinary Swedes as "responsible," "democratic," and "ethical." Within this framework, common objects like furniture and other household goods are treated by many classes of social actors as a significant, experience-near means for managing people's psychological, physical, and material well-being. Just as the social democratic welfare state is in large part organized to "take care" of its citizens, design in Sweden is supposed to "take care" of its users. In order to investigate this deep complementarity between state morality and the form and function of Swedish consumer goods, I analyze the language of politics and the language of design at two levels. First, I examine top-down institutional forces that consciously use particular tropes and other linguistic formulations to manipulate the political valence of design discourse for specific ideological ends. Second, as part of an in-depth ethnographic study of a design collective in Stockholm, I take a bottom-up approach in exploring where Swedish design comes from, in a very literal sense, by closely analyzing the complex language-based practices in which designers shape how objects look and work. It is between these two linguistic forces, I argue --- one institutional, one interactional --- that Swedish design emerges as a potent symbolic resource whose form affords a collective imagining of the Swedish moral order, and whose function reproduces that order in everyday life. This project has implications for understanding more generally the social and linguistic processes through which abstract ideologies come to penetrate the rhythms of daily life through the semiotic affordances of common cultural objects.