Physical Products and Their Digital Representations: Social Media Interaction via School Bags

This study explores the role of digital representations of products with respect to reproduction mechanisms of designed objects, including doings with objects – practices – and the user subjects. To understand these relationships, practice theory that explains objects, subjects and practices as co-constituted is instrumental. The study builds on the concept of digital habitus, an appropriation of Bourdieu’s habitus that includes digital technologies within the reproduction patterns of social practices and so designed objects. Focusing on school bags as physical objects and their digital representations on social media, data is collected by social media harvesting and interviewing 23 high school students. The ways in which designed objects, digital environments, and the user reproduce one another is analysed. It is found that in some cases digital representations are actively utilised to interfere with the real world and in some cases the effect of digital representations on the real world is rather obscure and passive. What catches attention is that these moments of interactions are not designed into these products, rather they are enacted as users live in the digital habitus. Hence, the study aims to provide insights to guide product designers in contemporary product ecosystem that includes digitalized circulation of meaning, by pointing out the ways in which digital representations circulate in the physical realm of our interaction with designed objects.