In Small Things Designed:
Value, Form, and the Everyday World in Sweden
Keith Murphy
April 18, 4pm
Julius Glickman Conference Center (Patton Hall. RLP 1.302D)
In this presentation I will discuss several different attempts to use design to render Sweden and Swedish values in mundane forms. I’ll start with an analysis of how design — especially furniture design and industrial design — and social democratic politics are complexly linked in Sweden. I’ll then turn to explore this process as it has played out in the design of typography, that is, fonts and typefaces. In particular I’ll examine how the Swedish cultural concept of “lagom”—just enough, sufficient, balanced—mediates relations between the details of typographic form and function, on the one hand, and a broader set of moralized principles (of, for example, rationality and equity) that both reflect and order contemporary Swedish society, on the other. In particular I’ll focus on the font Sweden Sans, which was commissioned in 2014 by the Swedish state for use in documentation by government agencies and ministries. The designers of Sweden Sans have described it as “the lagom typeface,” due to its contextual flexibility and demure formal geometry. My analysis will focus on how the minute qualities of these specific typefaces are meticulously wrought (by designers) and dismantled (by consumers) through a framework that evaluates their status as icons of Sweden and Swedish values, which has the effect of ambiently “formalizing” Sweden in everyday objects.
Keith Murphy is associate professor of anthropology at UC Irvine.
This talk is sponsored by UT Austin’s Center for European Studies and the Department of Anthropology. With logistical support from the Intermedia Workshop.