Defamiliarising Everyday Things – Rethinking The Materiality of Tables through Design Remakes

Licentiate thesis, 2024

We are surrounded by everyday things – ordinary, unassuming, and deeply familiar. Tables, for example, quietly anchor our lives, holding our mugs, hosting dinner parties, or providing a quiet space for work. Yet, their familiarity often fades into the background, taken for granted and unnoticed. As everyday things become increasingly computational, their materiality changes – blending the physical with the digital. This thesis examines how tables, as a case study, can be defamiliarised through practice-based design research to disrupt habitual interactions, provoke critical reflection, and inspire new possibilities for design and meaning-making through actuation and immaterial materials.

Grounded in two research questions, this work investigates (1) how everyday things can be remade through defamiliarisation and (2) what lessons are learned from changing the materiality of tables. Across four papers, the thesis reviews current actuated table designs, explores shadows as a design material, and presents a series of counterfactual artifacts culminating in the Undertable: an actuated table that provides an excuse for the playful exploration of bare-skin touch between people. By balancing familiarity and strangeness, the Undertable transforms a seemingly mundane table into a social icebreaker, inviting reflection on the meaning of touch.

This thesis proposes generative strategies for defamiliarisation and positions design remakes as a methodological contribution to design research. Future directions include formalising methods for defamiliarising everyday things, exploring actuation’s potential for accessibility, design explorations of tables that grow with people over time, and revisiting frameworks of materiality to encompass computational, immaterial, and living materials.