on designing

In July 2009 Tim Brown gives an inspiring speech at TED.

Tim Brown says the design profession is preoccupied with creating nifty, fashionable objects. He calls for a shift to local, collaborative, participatory "design thinking."

Food and Emotions

Think about surprise...

or the surprise of an unexpected memory...

or passion...

Other ideas?

Alinea and the silicone plate

Click here to watch the best video!

Where does the plate start?
Is this design? Is it Food Design?

Merry Coca-Cola Christmas

Merry Christmas everybody!

Imagining Food Experience

Created by Chong Boon Pok, Imagining Food Experience is an experimental art event organised and conceptualized in responds to the 1st International Symposium of Food Experience Design that examines the “emerging discipline of Food Experience Design”. The event seeks to connect two key features from the symposium: firstly, the manifestation of food designed for our eating experience.
Secondly, a speaker panel and attendees from different nationalities and diverse cultural background that are interested in the development of food.

In advance to the symposium, the registered attendees were asked: ‘What is the food ingredient that you think most represents yourself and/or your culture?’ Using recipe from my own culture, creation and experience, a selection of the suggested food ingredients, as the result of the question,
are cooked into a few experimental dishes to serve as the conference’s lunch. A long communal table is custom made for the attendees to enjoy their lunch together and exchange conversation.
Apart from advance food design using modern technology, cultural crossover in food is becoming a prominent feature in contemporary everyday life.

Imagining Food Experience engages the idea of globalization and cultural plurality in food, cooking and eating. The piece observes, blends and plays with food ingredients and recipes from different countries
and cultures to create new forms. It provides an opportunity for the dinners to expand their conversation about this environment. The piece also embraces the spirit of sharing and exchanging through engaging people to share a meal by sitting together in a communal table. It also allows them to enter and expand work of art by tasting it and taking it away to share with others. 

this is me and Andrew Pok.

More pictures here

Food Design 6

Exhibition Food Design 6.
London Metropolitan University, in collaboration with Studio One Off, the International Food Design Society and Chamber of Commerce of Turin, present Food Design® 6, the celebrated international design exhibition taking place in London for the first time November 2010. The exhibition presented a collection of the best projects submitted to the 6th Food Design® competition as well as the ‘cream’ of winners from previous years.

Experiencing, not eating. More

After studying at the Design Academy Eindhoven Katja Gruijters specialized in designing food and drinks. After professional experience gained in design studios and in industry (Li Edelkoort, DSM, RBV Leaf, Heinz, Bolletje), she has been developing concepts and products at Katja Gruijters Studio in Amsterdam since 2001. In addition, Gruijters taught food design at Agricultural College (HAS) in the Netherlands and was actively involved in setting up this course in 2003. In daily practice she develops design concepts and products.
Katja Gruijters

Experiencing, not eating.

She calls herself “eating designer”, and not Food Designer because she thinks that food is already perfectly and beautifully designed by nature. She designs from the verb ‘to eat’. She is for example inspired by the origin of food, the preparation, etiquette, history or the culture of food:
Marije Vogelzang.

In the Onion Cellar

The pushing in the Onion Cellar brought meagre results until Schmuh appeared in his special shawl. Having been welcomed with a joyful 'Ah!' for which he thanked his kind guests, he vanished for a few minutes behind a curtain at the end of the Onion Cellar, where the toilets and the storeroom were situated.
[...]
Schmuh came back with a little basket on his arm and moved among the guests. The basket was covered with a blue-and-yellow- checked napkin. On the cloth lay a considerable number of little wooden boards, shaped like pigs or fish. [...]
Then - and every heart was waiting - he removed the napkin, very much in the manner of magician: beneath it lay still another napkin, upon which, almost unrecognizable at first glance, lay the paring knives.
These too he proceeded to hand out. [...] 'On your mark, get set,' he shouted. At 'Go' he tore the napkin off the basket, reached into the basket, and handed out, dispensed, distributed among the multitude... onions - onions such were represented, golden-yellow and slightly stylized, on his shawl, plain ordinary onions, not tulip bulbs, but onions such as women buy at the market, [...]
For the grand distribution of onions was followed by silence. Into which Ferdinand Schmuh cried: 'Ladies and gentlemen, help yourselves.' And he tossed one end of his shawl over his left shoulder like skier just before the start. This was the signal.
The guests peeled the onions. Onions are said to have seven skins. The ladies and gentlemen peeled the onions with the paring knives. They removed the first, third, blond, golden-yellow, rust-brown, or better still, onion-coloured skin, they peeled until the onion became glassy, green, whitish, damp, and watery-sticky, until it smelled, smelled like onions. [...]
Schmuh's guests had stopped looking, they could see nothing more, because their eyes were running over and not because their hearts were full. [...] What did the onion juice do? It did what the world and the sorrow of the world could not do: it brought forth a round, human tear. It made them cry. At last they were able to cry again. To cry properly, without restraint, to cry like mad. The tears flowed and washed everything away. [...]

After this cataclysm at twelve marks eighty, human being who have had a good cry open their mouth to speak. Still hesitant, startled by the nakedness of their own words, the weepers poured out their hearts to their neighbours on the uncomfortable, burlap-covered crates, submitted to questioning, let themselves be turned inside-out like overcoats.

Gunter Grass. The Tin Drum. 1959