My desk is my castle : exploring personalisation cultures / Uta Brandes & Michael Erlhoff (eds.) ; authors, Nadine Adrian [and others] ; [translation from German into English, Susanne Dickel and Tim Danaher]
About This Book; Action Space'Office'; Research Methodology; The Places; Four Representative Business Sectors; The Clusters; Little Number Games; Intercultural Comparison; Object Worlds as Gender Staging; Comparative Analysis of the Business Sectors; The Desk as a Thriller; Personal Office Upgrades; The Desk as a Geodesic Space; The Desk as a Miniature World of Events and Identities: Musings from Hong Kong; Gobalised Desktop Skirmishes? Reporting from the Colonies; Visions; The Concepts of 'Public' and 'Private'; Reflections on Anthropology and Design; From Chessboards to Monopoly Games
The New York ExperiencePotential Practical Design Implications; Bibliography; Authors
Summary
The desk is a place of work and of action, but it also serves as a place to exhibit personal things and preferences. Thus it always characterizes in two ways a material and symbolic unity. The desk is not only very informative in itself, but also must always be studied and understood in the context of its cultural, gender-specific, and field-related surroundings. The focus of this study is a comparative analysis of the use of desks. Desks in insurance companies, banks, administrative authorities, call centers, and design studios in twelve countries on all continents were studied. This publicat
