BoConcept & Multifunctionality

I wrote the following paper for one of my English courses in spring 2012. The course was called "Interpretive Approaches," and it fulfilled my "Critical Theory" requirement (English Literature is my primary major). The assignment was to apply the work of Roland Barthes in his book Mythologies (1957) -- what we might formally denote semiotics -- to an advertisement (not of our choosing, I might add!). Mine focuses on the multifunctional furniture offered by the Danish company BoConcept. Rereading this paper, the very idea of "multifunctionality" strikes me as a strangely contemporary problem, or at least an explicit contemporary problem. Anyway, if you are working through Barthes yourself, or even doing contemporary furniture analysis (who knows?), this paper may prove useful. It is rather short (between 500-750 words, or thereabouts), so it's not a burden to read.


Also, the edition of Barthes' book is published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux and translated by Annette Lavers.


(Note: I did my best to locate the advertisement online, but what I found only reprints 2/3 of it. Keep this in mind as you tread through the first paragraph.)

- - - - -

We're staring at a triad of adjacent prison cells. Two of these cells, the ones on the left and the right, play host to all of the familiar prison sights—sink, toilet, shelf, and table, all trapped behind closed bars, dull and lifeless. Their primary function reveals itself through juxtaposition, for it is the third prison cell, the one in the center decorated with three compact pieces of stylish BoConcept brand furniture—sofa, bookshelf, and hanging lamps—that focuses our attention through contrast.

This is an advertisement about limited space—how to optimize it and maximize it—a myth that is signified by the 5x9 jail cell trying to pass itself off as a standard living room.

More important, this focus on limited space gives historical meaning to the small, white caption in the upper-right hand corner of the advertisement informing us that we are at the well-known, former federal prison on Alcatraz Island in San Francisco. For, located at what is nearly the westernmost point of the continental United States, it dawns on us that we, Americans, have run out space (or, at least, desirable space). The frontier, as Frederick Jackson Turner argued, no longer exists. Limits, it seems, have at last been discovered. And with this realization, the myth of westward expansion can be no more.

Yet this news will serve as no impasse for BoConcept, a global company based in Denmark that specializes in "urban design." Adopting the motto "no limits in small spaces," BoConcept here provides consumers with a practical solution to this problem of space: multifunctionality.

Thus, the image below the three prison cells of a sofa that co-opts as an air mattress and a coffee table that serves as both a storage unit and a place where you can eat your meals. These products and others like them draw their power from what Barthes would call their ability to turn themselves into "a multitude of more and more startling objects" (97) that ultimately become "a spectacle to be deciphered" (97): they are life-size puzzle pieces. And unlike plastic, which demands a machine for its "transmutation of matter" (97), this time the consumer himself assumes the place of the machine.

Pay no attention to their exorbitant—although here discounted—cost: this is the price we must pay to function in a world with rapidly diminishing Lebensraum. This is a universal problem, and BoConcept provides a universal solution.

But hasn't this always been a world of "anything can be"? In other words, is multifunctionality anything but an always-has-been concept? The buffalo, for instance, provided almost everything that the Plains Indians needed to stay alive, including food, tools, and clothes—that is, before we Americans began our westward expansion. And this is just one example of our natural tendencies as humans to look for multifunctional uses.

BoConcept has simply taken this natural process and turned it on its head by commodifying it. Will they soon be asking us to defecate into the same object that we use to brush our teeth and wash our face, all for the sake of multifunctionality? But perhaps this is a line of inquiry not worth pursuing, because at the system of signs, BoConcept's multifunctional furniture amounts to nothing more than a tautology in a world where everything already is and always has been multifunctional.