FRS 002P— Sec. 001 — (2 unit) — CRN 55916— W 10:00-11:50am — 2120 Hart
Consumer Designs: Product Packaging and American Culture

Instructor: Carolyn de la Pena, Department of American Studies, College of Letters and Science

Description: This course will explore the ways in which products, particularly food products, have been packaged and promoted within the American mass market place. We will study the reasons why package designs and branding originally emerged at the end of the nineteenth century and how package designs have evolved to today. We will pay special attention to issues such as 1) the environmental cost of packaging techniques 2) current innovations in packaging technology here at UCD 3) labeling and design techniques in products and the cultural assumptions they reveal 4) interest in how things are packaged as expressed by shows like the Food Network’s “Unwrapped.” The goal of the course is to enable students to see how products shape and are shaped by culture. As a class we will move beyond discussing product packaging as “good or bad,” exploring it instead as a physical manifestation of particular values about products, consumers, and identity. We will learn to integrate the study of culture with studies of business and science by understanding that the form products take when they reach our shelf is created by a confluence of all three agents. Students will work on their ability to make connections across disciplines, understand the dynamic process of culture, and communicate effectively to their peers. Specific goals also include improved written and oral communication, research techniques, and the ability to connect textual with visual sources.

Format: The course will meet for two hours a week for six weeks and will have a final four-hour field trip to the Jelly Belly Factory in Vacaville. There will be two course texts: Thomas Hine, The Total Package: The Evolution and Secret Meanings of Boxes, Bottles, Cans, and Tubes and Ruth Ozeki, My Year of Meat. Our meeting location will vary: typically the course will take place in a seminar room. Occasionally, however, the course will meet off campus in field sites, including but not limited to, the Davis Co-op and Cost Plus Farmer’s Market. We will also meet occasionally in laboratories within the Food Technology department. Each week’s meeting, when held in the seminar room, will be driven by student presentations on the week’s readings, followed by class discussion and product analysis. When we meet at a field site, the meeting will begin with a description of the fieldwork to be undertaken, and will then allow for data collection and observation within small groups, ending with brief presentations on each group’s conclusions. Grading: 20% product presentation, 20% reading connections, 20% class discussion, 15% field research and 25% final project.

About the Instructor: Carolyn Thomas de la Peña is an assistant professor of American Studies. She has written a book on popular body technologies in the early twentieth century and teaches classes on consumer culture, objects and everyday life, corporate culture, and technology and the body. She is currently working on a book about popular food technologies of the last century.