Book Talk with Akiko Busch

Very few writings on design could be called “evocative.” This is sad, for the simple reason that our physical environment is intimately linked to our emotional connections to the world and design writers could help us understand our relationships with the things around us. Akiko Busch provides one of those rare evocative voices. In The Uncommon Life of Common Objects, published this fall by Metropolis Books, Busch’s humorous and sad, reasoned and opinionated essays have inspired high praise. From O, The Oprah Magazine comes the promise that “You’ll be inspired to look closely at where and how you live.” And the San Francisco Examiner enthuses, “Finally a design writer more interested in the relationship between people and their rooms than in the number of springs in the chair cushions or the cut of a curtain.” Busch is interviewed here by Metropolis editor in chief Susan S. Szenasy, who wrote the book’s foreword.

SSS: With home decorating culture enjoying unprecedented popularity—just think of all the TV shows we watch today on where to put the couch—your book is seen by many as an essential guide to connecting to our immediate environments. You show us that our objects have deeper meaning than the color of the upholstery. What is the central message of The Uncommon Life of Common Objects that you’d like everyone to get?

AB: What I find interesting about design is the way people are emotionally engaged with the inanimate world. It’s a little absurd. It seems to defy some kind of basic logic, but we all do it. And I’m interested in how formal design considerations can intersect with that. I just read in the paper about a smart quilt that is embedded with sensors so it can turn on the lights and coffee machine when you move in a certain way. And pillows with speakers in them that produce the sound of ocean waves. These in a culture that is plagued by sleeping disorders! Do we want to take such multi-tasking things to bed with us? And will such wired bedding really help people find rest? Possibly. But I think one of the central questions facing designers today is how technology can help or hinder our emotional engagement with the world around us.

SSS: You discuss in evocative detail a dozen or so objects, from strollers to lawn chairs. Now, after the book has been published, is there an object that you feel should also have been part of your exploration?

AB: Cars. My boys are learning to drive now. And I don’t think that there is anything in our culture that people get more emotionally involved with than their cars. We all have pretty strong feelings about the car. For them, a beat-up old green Subaru represents tremendous independence and pride. It’s all about autonomy and freedom. But of course, for me it represents a certain level of fear, because it is hard not to think of a car as a lethal weapon. Like so many of these things, it resonates with ambivalence.

SSS: Readers love the way you include your twin boys and their relationships to the physical objects they use every day. Is there, in your estimation, a divide between the boys’ relationships to their objects and your own relationships? And if there is, what is it and how do you feel about that?

AB: There may be a divide when it comes to the kinds of things we value the most. For the boys, it is the car, their snowboards, a video camera, iPods. As teenagers, they seem to constantly be in a state of moving, morphing, making things, processing material. I find myself more engaged with things that reflect some sort of permanence, things that reflect a sense of endurance, maybe an old piece of furniture or a watch I inherited. But in other areas there is little divide. My favorite acquisition of the last year is my wet suit. It’s called Hydroskin and I can swim in really cold water with it. And right now my sons are gearing up for snowboarding. One of them has just gotten new pants and a jacket which have these very elegant pinstripes. Why would someone want to wear a pinstripe suit on a snow covered mountain? I can’t guess, but I think it’s charming. That’s the kind of mix they’re into that I love. All of which is to say that we have adopted new skins in our family to get to new places, and that’s good.

SSS: Your parents played a huge role in shaping your sensitivity to the designed environment, though they probably didn’t call it that (in fact, one of the most touching pieces in your book centers around your mother). Could you talk about how they influenced your life of writing about design?

AB: I was born in Japan and then spent the next four years in Thailand. When my family came back to this country and finally settled in New York’s Hudson Valley, my mother filled our house, an old shingled farmhouse, with the Asian art she had collected from her years there—Thai temple paintings, Chinese ceramics, Japanese screens, Balinese textiles. The house was also full of a lot of very basic seventeenth and eighteenth-century dark English oak furniture that had belonged to my father’s mother. Oddly enough, it all made sense, and it was all kind of magical. A little carved Buddha can settle in comfortably on an old English blanket chest. And so I realized early on that these diverse sensibilities could converge, and the more things get mixed up the better. And to this day I think that’s true, whether you are talking about objects or art or people.

Click here to order a copy of The Uncommon Life of Common Objects.