Fandom communities adopt diverse consumption practices to cope with an overwhelmingly commodified football. Drawing upon literature on consumer communities, this paper examines a local football fandom community in multifarious relations with its broader fandom through divergent consumption practices, which create tensions and ambivalences in terms of the former’s autonomy from and loyalty to the latter. Based on observations and interviews with community members, the paper describes how the community’s production and consumption of its own products are experienced as matters of autonomy within and difference from broader communities, whilst the consumption of merchandise is regulated and performed as expression of loyalty to broader fandom. Findings demonstrate how a community can use multiple consumption practices to manage, mitigate and sustain its community-within-community tensions.

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The article discusses material semiotics as a valuable framework for the analysis of design processes, and focuses on form giving practices. For this purpose, the design processes of electric Turkish coffee pots are studied through interviews and document analyses. It is argued that neither form giving nor product form can be considered to be singular or stable throughout a design process, and that semantic and material relations that are built and maintained around the product form need to be traced for a fuller understanding.

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