Active engineers of atmosphere
We are beginning to see that the new model of the home-dweller looks like: ‘man the interior designer’ is neither an owner nor a mere user - rather he is an active engineer of atmosphere. Space is at his disposal like a kind of distributed system, and by controlling this space he holds sway over all possible reciprocal relations between the objects therein, and hence over all the roles they are capable of assuming. (It follows that he must be ‘functional’ himself: he and the space in question must be homogeneous if his messages of design are to leave him and return to him successfully.) What matters to him is neither possession nor enjoyment but responsibility, in the strict sense which implies that it is at all times possible for him to determine ‘responses’. His praxis is exclusively external, This modern home-dweller does not ‘consume’ his objects […] Instead of consuming objects, he dominates, controls and orders them. He discovers himself in the manipulation and tactical equilibrium of a system. (Jean Baudrillard, The System of Objects, 1968)