Situated Products: Making Do in the Public Spaces of Istanbul

Abstract

On the streets of Istanbul, inhabitants generate situated solutions to their daily problems with the limited means they have ready at hand. Objects are repaired, adapted, or modified, and everyday life brings palliative articulations and situated solutions to seemingly complex problems. With the conviction that design, especially the field of product design, can benefit from paying closer attention to such production, we have developed a growing inventory of situated and transformed products and materials, focusing on the surrounding culture we have labeled as halletmek. Conducting this research from within the design field was crucial for us. This, we believe, is the way to incorporate these products into the discourse of design, and thus to position the sample of sixty-seven objects, out of the many we examined, as design products. Through this inventory, we discuss how to position and make visible these site-specific design/production practices and the culture from which such situated products emerge.