Pillows are ever-present, transcultural objects. Every household in the world has many. You can find them in trains and planes, some of them have been incorporated to the traveler’s seat, confirming that a pillow is an object of need rather than luxury. As an object, a pillow is brilliant in its simplicity: a rectangular bag filled with down, feathers, felt or foam. Its form is customized to the user’s need to provide a transition between body and supporting surface. Is the pillow about health, or about comfort? Is it a piece of furniture, a personal item, an accessory? Modern consumerism has developed dozens of pillow types. Many are marketed around the promise of improving your body health, or at least arresting its deterioration. Others are highly specialized: pillows for children, pregnant women, couch-potatoes, travelers and sybarites; pillows for cushioning, relieving neck stiffness, improving sleep or relaxing cervical muscles; pillows with names: The Sound Asleep memory pillow promises to eliminate snoring; the Festo Sleep pillow is an inflatable cushion for at-work cat-napping; the UltraFoam memory pillow, originally developed by NASA and made out of hypoallergenic polyurethane foam –also called memory foam- adapts to your head or body like a mold, and then returns to its original shape; the Mediflow water pillow is designed to absorb the 50-plus head shifts and turns we average during a night’s sleep so that we can get up well rested. That is ultimately what comfort is all about.
