Sipping a big mug of coffee on a fine April morning, this logically organized coffee station at the diner got me wondering about all the many decisions that came before this corner came to take this particular arrangement of colors, shapes, price points, functionality and performance parameters frozen in time by the click of the camera (app) shutter. Thinking like an archeologist in search of factors that contribute to the deposition, there is in this scene a culmination of so many technological and company budget years and personal tastes encoded, too.
Leaving aside the siting of this former neighborhood grocery store, now popular breakfast and lunch diner and the considerations that went into structural materials used back in the 1940s and updated for the current food services and products, and also sidestepping the architectural design decisions to fit budget and interior appearance, we can start the wondering by looking at what is visible in the photo. Hot and cold running water for the duty sink has history going back at least as far as the ancient Roman society, although PVC pipes and chrome-plated fixtures, much less stainless steel were unimagined back then. The technology of plastic in soft, hard, and semi-rigid to form all sorts of things in the photo also did not occur to the ancients. Decisions about painted surfaces, though, goes back to playing with pigments on the cave walls of Neanderthal kindred in many parts of the European continent. And tools for cutting planks of wood, shaping them into smooth pieces that fit neatly together come from furniture-making traditions after the Iron Age.
Beyond the experiments and the inventors of tools, methods of applying them in creative technique, and the general tide of rising technologies for controlling heat and cold, shapes and achieving target engineering specifications, there is also the intersection of many decisions at the individual user or owner or practitioner level (using judgement, experience, and intention) along with the organizational level (companies or guilds the support and guide and restrict certain standards and licenses). In this photo are the “fingerprints” of people who established quality level, production recipes, and offerings for sale in paints, flooring, lighting, countertops, hand-sanitizer and its touchless dispenser (partly motivated by Covid-19 transmission concerns), carry-out (to-go) boxes, coffee urns, coffee roasters, coffee growers and distributors, and so on. Nothing in the photo (apart from air, perhaps) is straight from nature, taken from its original form and moved into its proper place in this scene. Instead, at the macro and micro level each thing present has been shaped, measured, priced, modified, and then placed in the desired location to suit reasons of efficiency, propriety, or personal ideas of order and beauty, possibly going from memories or from imaginary aspirations known only to the person making the final arrangement decision. A few things may take their current position as an afterthought (left-over counter or cupboard space available) or even with little deliberation. In other words, while nothing in the photo is self-organizing or is found “as is” there are some decisions that are made incidentally and on a temporary, ad hoc basis while other decisions are longer-lasting commitments (to color, floor material, brand/capacity of coffee urns) that are the visible result of more careful reasoning or are made in reaction to options available around the time of decision.
Looking at something as ordinary as the coffee station behind the restaurant counter shows that the cultural spaces indoors or outside are composed of many threads. By unwraveling one or two, soon there are even more things to wonder about. For while everything is wound up together at first glance, by applying a little scrutiny and reflecting on what comes into sight, the complicated mix of modern and ancient stories can be glimpsed. The longer you look, the more there is to see. What begins as an unremarkable scene that routinely is taken for granted and overlooked, now becomes a treasure trove to study; something as densely packed with information and implication as a room excavated from the A.D. 79 eruption of Mt. Vesuvius and burial of ancient Pompeii.
