Collecting Ourselves

Abstract

Collecting Ourselves is a practice led investigation into how furniture can support personal memory and identity by containing treasured possessions and by eliciting the stories linked to these objects. I propose that a focal point within the home can provide a concentrated experience of the self (either private or shared) through the ongoing curation of personally significant possessions; personal furniture is proposed as a way of encapsulating what Jennifer Gonzalez calls an autotopography: an "array of physical signs in a spatial representation of identity." I argue that furniture comprises a boundary layer between people and things, and between occupants and architecture. Conventional placement of storage and display furniture at the periphery of rooms, and the formal barriers of cupboard doors and drawers, disperses possessions and separates us from them. Additionally, the negotiated space shared by household members means that locating one's discrete set of treasures can be difficult. Scattering objects throughout a home and into attics, garages, or off-site storage lockers may lead to a crisis of dispossession if catastrophe, illness or downsizing necessitate the sudden abandoning or dissolution of a home. The narrative link between person and possession will likely be broken. Collecting Ourselves develops compact "person scaled" furniture as an alternative to bulky bookcases, curio cabinets, and sideboards that often can't be retained when downsizing. Furniture's boundary layer is also embedded with aesthetic qualities communicating taste, social status, values, and cultural heritage; it is a means for representing one's self. Collecting Ourselves links clothing concepts with furniture, encouraging the envelopment of possessions using fabrics with colours and motifs that resonate with one's personal and cultural identity. I also investigate the fabric bag as a human-scaled form for carrying possessions, evidenced historically in peripatetic practices of soldiers, hobos, migrants and foragers, anyone who must gather things together and carry them. The research culminates in a series of finished furniture propositions, Arks I through VI, each demonstrating a different strategy of textile and timber containment. The arks were given to different households to own in perpetuity in exchange for three months of participant feedback accompanied by images of the furniture in use. Participant engagement is framed conceptually as affording a window into everyday practices within the home, with the arks acting as post-design "probes" to illuminate how people place furniture, memorialise loved ones, store and display their objects. Drawing on ideas from practice theory and the emergent field of Practice-Oriented Design, this phase focussed on how furniture can be a mediating artefact at the nexus of homes, people, their possessions and the cultural patterns that ordinary use reinforces, resists, or reinterprets. Using unconventional formal elements and containment strategies, the Collecting Ourselves trial phase inserts an unfamiliar piece of furniture into homes. Through this novel mediating artefact, Collecting Ourselves has yet to provoke significant changes in how participants store their treasured possessions; nonetheless, participants demonstrated imaginative alternative uses for the furniture. This result corroborates Michel de Certeau's assertion that consumers, as "non producers," are creative producers through their use of things they acquire. Thus, the personal furniture from Collecting Ourselves demonstrates a method for fostering the practice of everyday creativity within the home, which may in time engender personal attachment to the furniture while simultaneously producing a stronger sense of self.