STUFFED is a site-specific installation designed by Professor Jan Jennings’graduate seminar (DEA 668: Design Theory and Criticism) for Mann Library in conjunction with the History of Home Economics and Human Nutrition Fellowship lecture on April 23, 2007.
STUFFED is a design commentary on the remaking and discarding of industrial objects through time, often under the name of technology-sponsored sustainability.
The architectural column is stuffed, and largely obliterated, inside a larger (cardboard) column. This column is stuffed with objects that were once necessary to research and teaching. Discarded-slide carousels, film reels, metal and paper slide boxes, and unidentified photographs-become scrap. Though they were once valuable, now they are worthless. A wire cage rings the two columns, deepening the multi-dimensional layers, and inviting
viewers to see the objects in a new light, as beautiful and worth
retaining, not as litter for the land fill.
The designers reassembled the objects under six domestic storage principles (accessibility, consolidation, safeguarding, disclosure, elasticity, portability) that professor Mary Anne Beecher names in her research about the impact of early home economics education and outreach.