What Happens in a Contemporary House Kitchen? About the Possibilities of a Design Anthropology

The aim of this writing is to indicate the possibility of cooperation between anthropologists who are interested in researching everyday life of a human with specialists on design based on house space design. The author refers to a strand of design anthropology whose aim is to demonstrate diversity and complexity of life of people in different social contexts to designers. Thanks to that they can design objects and services which meet customers’ needs better. In this writing, the author presents the results of ethnographic researches related to a contemporary kitchen space. Those researches were inspired by design anthropology and revealed detailed ways of using kitchen spaces, descriptions of their arrangements and equipment as well as everyday activities that happened in therein. Research results show a contemporary kitchen as a place with a potential, as a profusely equipped multitasking workshop which is open to many creative activities, not only culinary ones. They provide the knowledge about behaviours of so-called ordinary people which are a resultant of a tradition, current identity choices and a wide range of grassroots – individual and group – preferences and habits which can be useful not only for settlement culture researchers as well as for designers and producers of various objects and services.