"Making Do": Uses and Tactics by Michel de Certeau

2. Work and leisure flow together. It is very hard to draw a line
between them. They are overlapping.
"La Perruque" can be described "the worker’s own work
disguised as work for his employer".
Introduction

3. Strategies and Tactics
Types of operations can be suggested as strategies and tactics.
"As in management, every ‘strategic’ rationalization seeks first of
all to distinguish its ‘own’ place, that is, the place of its own
power and will, from an ‘environment’." They are instutions
which define laws, rules and conventions. They constitute finite
ideas. Moreover, they make consumers understand what the
place is like to be.

4. Tactics on the other hand, De Certeau explicitly states that “tactic
is the art of weak”. It can be an immediate action or aims short-
term reseults. Tactics use the advantages spontaneously and
improvisations. There is no specific location. They are the
“creative opportunity” that occurs in the gaps and conventional
habits of patterns of everyday life.
Strategies and Tactics

5. De Certeau claims that consumer is not a passive receiver. He
states that, users perform operations and practices in their own
way. Consumers of cultural images and discourse silently re-
appropriate and re-negotiate through memory. Throughout this
process, consumption emerges as a “different kind of
production”.
Use, or Consumption

6. ‘’Use must be analyzed in itself.’’
‘’In the case of consumption, one could almost say that
production furnishes the capital and that users, like
renters, acquire the right to operate on and with this fund
without owning it.’’
Use, or Consumption

7. Within the different areas of tactics and strategy where is the
designers’ place? What is the role of users? Is the line between
user and designer getting blurry in relation to connection
between consumption and production?
Discussion

8. References
de Certeau, Michel ‘Making Do: Uses and Tactics’ in Martyn J. Lee (ed.) The Consumer Society Reader, Oxford, UK ;
Malden, Mass., USA: Blackwell, 2000, pp.: 162-174.

9. Thank you for your time.