The social shelves project

About

The social shelf project inquires how shifted perspectives in relation to materiality can produce alternative relationship between users/makers and small objects. In the context of social design, reciprocity between human and non-human actors is key. This bubble action uses the mundane space of a shelf as a material and conceptual constraint to initiate conversations with people and their direct surroundings, engaging them in new material processes.

excerpt from Social Shelves: an Itstory

'The social shelf project is a two-fold investigation. First it aims to re-visit the mundane space most individuals interact with on a daily basis: the shelf. In turn, with a new acquired understanding of that space, it invites, you, the reader, to re-think your relationship to objects both as potential users and makers.
N.B. This object is purposely referred to as social shelf and not simply "bookshelf" or "shelf", as the object under study does not only function as a space for books or other artefacts, but also as a physical trope for social structures and community building.

This project is a world-building experiment. Using non-human perspectives it attempts to redefine what material thinking—broadly understood as the encounter of practice and theory in artistic and design fields—can mean to anyone in and outside of those fields. We, social shelves will talk to you, the reader, directly. Together we will investigate the following question: How can a better understanding of socialised objects¹ create opportunities to affect the social design of tomorrow?

As part of the original case study for this theoretical investigation, material experiments take place in parallel to the writing process. One month after the other, between 2022 and 2023 five social shelves have been prototyped, built, and trialled across different locations in Amsterdam and Rotterdam, the Netherlands.'

¹ The identification ‘socialised objects’ is a self-assigned term for artefacts that fulfil their true nature in relation to others. A term that could be compared in a human-field-theory to what Bruno Latour referred to as the anthropomorphism of an object, ‘which has human shape or that which gives shape to humans.’ (Latour, 1992, p.235).

Five social shelves

flatview all shelves illustration

J. Halen