A Rhetoric of Ornament: Decorating Mobile Devices in the Aesthetic Economy

How and why do users decorate their laptops’ enclosures? In this study of wireless hardware ornamentation at Midwestern Institute of Technology, 52% of males and 57% of females customized the enclosures of their institute-issued laptops. Employing a hedonic taxonomy to classify the types of pleasure afforded by ornamentation into macro- and micro-level motivations, the author finds that participants most often decorate in expected ways (e.g., identity construction). These inherently public rhetorics, however, sometimes act to stimulate change within the institution at which they operate. By expanding wireless research to include mobile devices’ exteriors, this study redefines laptops as objects of inscription. This work affords the field a new discursive artifact for consideration, challenges the consensus in the literature that hardware decoration is the purview of females, and offers us a better hold on the opportunities wireless technologies can open up for aesthetic communication.