“The Apple Way”: Foucault, Design, Consumerism, and the Shaping of Apple Subjects

Abstract

The contribution Michel Foucault’s thoughts on power, in particular his ideas of subjectivity, freedom, and action, might have to the study of design’s ontological shaping of people is an emerging field of inquiry in the academy. Using a Foucauldian lens, this paper presents findings from semi-structured interviews with iPhone® users that speak to the ways Apple consumers are constituted into Apple subjects by what I refer to as “the Apple Way.” The ineradicable relationship between discourses of design and consumerism and their imperative to “better” human life is presented as a starting point. The iPhone as a technological device that “makes life better” for Apple consumers is critiqued; data reveals an uneasy reliance people have on the iPhone for their everyday life.

Keywords:

• design
• Apple Inc.
• iPhone
• consumerism
• Foucault
• power

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank Dr Kathleen Connellan and Associate Professor Veronika Kelly for their academic guidance, expertise, and unwavering support throughout the project from which this paper stems. Thank you to Professor Chris Smith for his critique of drafts of this paper. Finally, thank you to the peer reviewers for their generous feedback on my original submission of this paper to Design and Culture.

Disclosure Statement

No financial interest or benefit that has arisen from the direct applications of this research.

Notes

1 The influence of Dieter Rams, Braun’s industrial designer and author of the well-known list “Ten principles of good design” (The Design Museum, n.d) on Apple’s ex-Chief Design Officer, Sir Jonathan Ive’s, design practice is well documented (Kosner 2017; Kahney 2014). I argue there is a strong relationship between Apple and discourse on what constitutes “Good Design,” especially when read through the lens of Rams’s principles. Engagement with this discussion and the ways in which it might politically configure design and designing is outside of the remit of this paper and will be explored in future publications.

2 The idea that “design designs us” is also biopolitical. Thomas Lemke’s book, Biopolitics: An Advanced Introduction (2011), succinctly reviews scholarship on biopolitics since the beginning of the twentieth century. Lemke introduces Foucault’s concept of biopolitics, which explores how human life itself is intrinsically political (33–54), shaped and controlled by the things that are brought into, and surround, it (33–52). Foucault also refers to biopolitics as “biopower.” He suggests that biopower operates in two ways, through “the disciplining of the individual body and the regulatory control of the population” (Foucault 1980, 139).

3 A discussion of design, power, and aesthetics via the visual dimensions of Apple, e.g. Apple’s advertising and product design, is outside the remit of this paper and will be explored in future publications. For literature on the application of Foucauldian ideas on power to graphic design specifically, see Marcus Leis Allion’s (2008) master’s thesis and Katherine Hepworth (2016). For a preliminary discussion on design, Apple, and aesthetics, see Melinda Gaughwin (2015).

4 Foucault elucidates his thesis on power in Discipline and Punish, analysing Jeremy Bentham’s late eighteenth-century architectural model for prisons, the “Panopticon.” The primary function of this style of prison was that prisoners were aware they were being observed without physically witnessing their observation; they were incapable of moving to a place where they would be able to do so. The incorporeal nature of this act created a state of awareness of perpetual surveillance. As a result, prisoners’ behavior was constrained, with the prisoners themselves becoming their own controller. It is also important to note that the guards of the Panopticon were in the same position as the prisoners; they were aware that they were being observed without witnessing or knowing at what times or from where they were being observed. Thus, the structure of the Panopticon subjugated all people contained in it, not just the prisoners.

5 To “jailbreak” an Apple device means removing Apple’s iOS inbuilt software restrictions. This enables root access to the iOS file system and allows the download and installation of data unavailable on the Apple App Store.

6 This research project was approved by the University of South Australia Human Research Ethics Committee and was conducted according to the ethical code of conduct as stipulated by The Australian Code for the Responsible Conduct of Research. Participants were given an information sheet that outlined the study parameters. They signed (or verbally agreed) to a consent form through which they were informed that their participation in the research was voluntary and that they were free to withdraw at any time they chose or request for information not to be used. By doing so, they would not be compromised at any time, currently or in the future.

7 Two major themes emerged from analysis of the entire data corpus – Theme 1: Life Functions and Theme 2: Why iPhone – which is divided into five subthemes: Subtheme 1: Apple People, Subtheme 2: Status and Identity, Subtheme 3: Aesthetics, Subtheme 4: Want and Desire, and Subtheme 5: Institutional Promotion.

8 It is beyond the scope of this study to explore the comparison and relations between Apple, Android devices and systems, and Silicon Valley in appropriate depth; there is also not room to unpack the relationship between Apple and wider systems of neoliberalism. As indicated in the conclusion of this paper, further research on the role of power, consumerism, and design ontological shaping of human subjects could seek a better understanding of the different players that come together give Apple its force within the particular social and economic operations that are dominant in the contemporary globalized world.

9 In “The Idea of Comfort,” Tomas Maldonado (1991) discusses comfort as a concept that was part of modernization and bourgeois society in the early twentieth century. In a way that recalls Foucault’s ideas on power and control, Maldonaldo also states that “comfort” facilitates social control. He argues that “comfort serves to structure daily life, to ritualize conduct, especially the attitudes and the postures of the body in relation to furniture and objects of domestic use” (1991, 36).

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by the Australian Government and the University of South Australia in the form of an Australian Government Research Training Program Scholarship (RTP).

Notes on contributors

Melinda Gaughwin

Melinda Gaughwin is an Academic Fellow in the Design Lab, located in School of Architecture, Design and Planning at The University of Sydney. She holds a Ph.D. in Design Studies, a Bachelor of Design (Honors) (Communication Design) and a Bachelor of Arts (Film). Melinda’s research investigates Apple’s shaping of contemporary consumer culture by design, through the lens provided by Foucauldian thoughts on power. She is especially interested in the ways in which design politically shapes people’s material and immaterial everyday lives, and how critiques of design can uncover this shaping. [email protected]