Tireless servants

About technology

The STEAD Project aims at providing an understanding of the impact that science and technology may have on the daily life of European citizens.
Since household machines (the good geniuses of domestic life, as Raymond Guidot called them in an exhibition held at the Centre Pompidou in October 2000) occupy a place of their own among all the technologies that pervade society, STEAD chose to address the general theme of electrical household products.

People's living conditions are transformed every day by the various technologies, which thus create, implement and densify what Georges FRIEDMANN calls the technical environment. (cf. Sept études sur l’homme et la technique (Seven Studies on Man and Technology), G.Friedmann, Denoël/Gonthier, 1966).

Observable in diversely structured societies, this environment shows common features and constitutes what is known as the technological civilisation. Stemming from the "second twentieth century", this technological civilisation implies a predominantly technical, i.e. scientific, environment.

From this technological environment emerges the world of electrical household appliances, which equally blends the worlds of science and technology, as well as social and human sciences and, of course, design.

The STEAD Project challenge
The STEAD project is an invitation to put into perspective the technological developments and social transformations brought about by scientific progress through the prism of industrial creation.

Beyond a historical account of the evolution of technological objects, the project makes it possible to imagine the near future in the light of the latest developments in science and technology, particularly in the field of Artificial Intelligence.
Through thematic workshops aimed at exploring the everyday culture, the project intends to acquaint children with the proliferation of inventions that have marked 150 years of Domestic Arts.

From simple to complex
Electrical household products – whose base components were mechanical at first, then electro-mechanical and are now electronic – cover the whole range of household needs.
From the washing of clothes and the preservation and cooking of food, through household duties and diversion, to the spread of culture and entertainment, household objects range from the most simple to the most complex, from stand-alone to network dependent products, from those traditionally used for household chores to others, such as the personal computer, that provide access to a shared culture and allow working from home (telework).

Because they are silent and constantly available servants, they make people's life easier by sparing them physical effort, and allow them to dedicate their time to more enriching activities.
Found throughout the house, they are lifetime companions from the time we are born. As such, they are among the most appropriate vehicles to illustrate the interactions between science and society.

Electrical Household Appliances: A Changing Universe
Industrial production presents consumers with complex technical utilitarian objects that have an important impact on daily life. Through their various applications, these mass-produced objects contribute to the evolution of lifestyles.

The structure, as well as the conception and production processes of these appliances, make them the perfect vehicles to explain how design works. Their long evolution process, from household utensils used in past societies to today's processors, reveals their ubiquity, their versatility and the signs of an interconnection between practicality and aesthetics, science and technology, customs and lifestyles.

Electric Household Products and their Environment
Electrical household goods include all appliances found in a house or an apartment, either those used for household chores or the world of image and sound receivers, transmitters and/or reproducers.

However, with the advent of mobile phones, laptop computers and other organisers, these devices leave the home to expand into the public space and throughout the human environment. By extension and considering the areas in which they play a role, household appliances therefore include all devices that are related in one way or another to the living environment and its extensions (cf. the car, the train and the plane may, in certain conditions, be considered as extensions of living environments.)
This fundamental change from a strictly limited space to an open universe coincides with an increase in computer use. This brings about a miniaturisation, and even in certain cases, a physical disappearance, in favour of spatially distributed functions, giving way to what Andréa BRANZI calls functional areas. (cf. Nouvelles de la métropole froide, Andrea Branzi, Centre Georges Pompidou, 1991), of which the automobile, the "smart home" and interconnected workplaces, among others, are an integral part.

In fact, household appliances are an integral part of a newly emerging environment, which entails appreciable changes that affect society as a whole in our ways of production, living, working and communicating.
It does not have to do with style or practicality, but rather with something deeper that influences the way we organise space and the equipment it contains.

Project Organisation / The Workshops
Under the general theme of "electrical household goods", the STEAD Project addresses four topics, each of which corresponds to a workshop.
The aim of these workshops is to bring the children to observe societal changes resulting from scientific and technological evolution in the field of electrical household products, with a view to draw conclusions that may be used for new proposals:

• in terms of management of living spaces,
• in terms of new functions,
• in terms of disappearing functions, etc.

These are the elements presented to the fifth grade (CM2) students from participating schools.