ABSTRACT
The cinematic typology of everyday life and architecture can only provide an initial framework, a context from within which designers might operate, or find inspiration. Kitchen Stories could be read as a metaphor. Set in the 1950s, it is the story of Swedish efficiency researchers coming to Norway for a study of Norwegian men, with a view to optimizing the use of their kitchens. Folke Nilsson is assigned to study the habits of Isak Bjørvik. By the rules of the research institute, Folke has to sit in what looks like a tennis umpire's chair in the corner of Isak's kitchen – and from there observe him. Isak pretty much stops. Typologies have been construed as a way of supplementing traditional intuitive methods of design, favoured by the modernists, providing tools of analysis and classification, to help designers not to 'fall back on previous examples for the solution of new problems'.
