Inquiry #20

How Can Artifactual Meanings Be Changed?

In addition to the meanings embedded in an artifact’s designed features during its production, artifacts accrue situated meanings specific to a place. For example, a new toy that everyone wants to play with in a classroom represents a kind of capital and brings an enhanced status for its owner within the social histories in peer culture. Institutional cultures (e.g., schools and classrooms) also circulate behavior expectations for how, when, or whether particular artifacts are to be used through policies and regulations. These social histories and institutional expectations may or may not mesh with one another or with the expectations of small groups within a place (e.g., interest groups, cliques). Additionally, inequalities among the situated identities and their relative power relations are circulated and justified by a mix of discourses activated in a place—in this case by gender, media, and educational discourses.

Improvising on Artifacts in Place

1. Observe participants as they engage the artifact that you analyzed in the previous exploration, watching to see how or if participants respond to its designed identity texts (e.g., who should use it or how it should be wielded in this situation).

2. In other words, are the artifact’s embedded expectations for historical bodies actually realized in participants’ mediated actions?

3. If not, what other expectations are made available in this setting and do such alternate expectations offer different pathways? For example, toys are often used in unauthorized ways as children invent new roles or new uses that differ from the manufacturer’s stated purpose. Similarly, other artifacts can also inspire improvisation and redesign, two pathways for change that will be explored in more depth in the next and last chapters in this book.