Introduction: The perception of the user–producer

Borden’s discusses of the relation between skateboarders and architecture is a useful illustration: A handrail is a highly functional object; both the time and nature of its use are fully programmed. Considering the time it takes to both design and use things, there is considerable tension between the temporal complexity and how design ever so often is communicated through images. Seminal studies such as Csikszentmihalyi and Rochberg-Halton and Attfield challenged earlier views about our everyday life with objects. The image is not necessarily problematic in itself. Archaeologists draw to better understand the things that are there in front of them, what it is they see, but in that process the drawing depicts more than the archaeologists own designed intentions: It becomes the medium of an original design and so looks like the intentions of someone else. The development of advertising has enabled the economists to become quite conscious of the ideal nature of consumer goods.