Week 9 Session: Psychological mapping: the ideal fridge and the anxious fridge

This week’s question: to what extent is consumer behaviour the purchase of emotional value rather than use value?

Inherited from week 8: the waste is structural and costed. This week asks why it is comfortable.

Before the session#

Nothing to collect. Read Evans on anxiety and provisioning, and the distributed papers on hoarding psychology.

Come willing to be honest. This is the tutorial people find most exposing, because the material is not a fridge — it is you.

In the session#

Paper and pens supplied. Two drawings, and drawing badly is expected; nobody is being assessed on draughtsmanship.

• The ideal fridge (15 min). Draw the inside of the fridge you would like to have. Not the one you think you should want — the one that would feel good to open. Label what is in it and how full it is.
• The anxious fridge (15 min). Now draw your fridge in a specific bad circumstance: while ill, during exam period, after a breakup, when broke, when the week has got away from you. Pick a real one and label it.
• Sharing (35 min). In groups of four. Two patterns come up almost every year, and it is better if you find them yourselves than if I list them here — but look carefully at fullness in both drawings, and at what kind of food each one contains.
• Emotional value (25 min). Working from the drawings: what were you buying? A stocked fridge as a defence against a sense of lost control; prepper psychology and pandemic panic buying as the same behaviour amplified; the empty fridge as an existential rather than a nutritional problem. Where did your personal threshold for “enough food in the house” come from, and have you ever revised it against your actual circumstances?

Afterwards#

If either drawing raised something heavier than coursework, the university’s counselling service is free and confidential, and either of us will help you contact them. Say so and we will not make it a discussion.

The Critical Essay is due Friday 30 April — this Friday. Module 3 is its territory, and this week is the one people write about least carefully, because writing about it means writing about themselves. If you use somebody else’s drawing or account, you need their agreement and you anonymise them.

Next week: what the appliance has started asking for in return.