Commodification

Commodification is defined as the link between domestication and design.

During the commodification process, objects and technologies ”emerge in a public space of exchange values and in a market-place of competing images and functional claims and counterclaims” (p. 46).

Commodification is defined as consisting of two components:

first, the design and marketing of a product, ”the industrial and commercial processes that create both material and symbolic artefacts and turn them into commodities for sale in the formal market economy” (p. 63);

second, the ‘construction’ of the product by its potential or actual consumers (as they imagine it, desire it, weigh its potential utility, etc.).