Inspiration Brew

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This is what it looks like to be colorblind

Pro tip: when you meet a colorblind person, don’t repeatedly point to things and ask what color they are.

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The 6 Worst Chairs You’ll Find in Restaurants

Ranking the impracticable, the inhospitable, and the just plain-uncomfortable in the seating hall of infamy

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Food for thought...

[the-devil-wears-zara]

@tinchenwaldkindlissi

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[dzajn]

Creative packaging concept for Good Hair Day pasta by Nikita.

[broadpalate]

Crepes with Nutella

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Check out my food blog http://broadpalate.tumblr.com/

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The Sun by me

More at https://www.etsy.com/shop/EccentricInk

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[thekhooll-deactivated20210705]

HuskMitNavn

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My Thesis Direction and Why I Chose It

Growing up, I was never interested in food or cooking. When it was time to make dinner, my mother would call all of my siblings and I into the kitchen to go help, and I often was the only one sitting in the living room watching TV when everyone else was helping out in some way. Even when I made it into the kitchen, I did not stay long. When relatives would ask me what I was going to do when I got married, I would say, "My husband will cook for me." For some reason I was never asked what I was going to do when I would be living alone and have to feed myself.

Ironically, my sophomore year in college I anticipated living in an apartment and not in the dorms anymore, so I developed a strong interest in cooking. I started collecting recipes online and asking my mother how to make all the Cameroonian dishes that I would have known how to cook if I helped out in the kitchen more when I was younger. My mother would have never dreamed of seeing the day when I would get excited about cooking. With that I started to also become curious about the make up of my food. I started counting calories and learning more about the nutrients that were in different foods. This habit started to become a little obsessive.

When I finally moved into my apartment and was cooking for myself, I could have fooled anyone into thinking that I was one of those children who watched their parents very closely when they cooked. But with food it was more than just enjoying to cook, I also started to buy into all the talks from the dieting industry about good and bad foods, so I began to classify my food choices as good or bad. Food became my gift and my thorn; I became a really good cook who didn't need to follow recipes but I also began to go on a roller coaster of depriving myself from foods I loved then over indulging later.

Throughout the years, my gift for cooking grew but so did my struggles with food, and I have learned so much about not only cooking but also human behavior around those areas. There is so much more to be learned and to be understood. For this reason, my thesis direction this year is all around food. I am looking into three areas of interest and I will eventually pick one or taylor them in order to come up with one main direction. First off, I am very interested in unhealthy relationships with food and eating disorders. I feel like apart from people who struggle with eating disorders, many people in general have bizarre behavior around food. I would like to explore what some of these behaviors are, where they stem from and ways in which people can regain a normal and healthy relationship with food.

Secondly, another direction I am interested in is in using cuisine as a way to learn about different cultures. I have received my share of ignorant questions about Africa in my days, and I have my own share of ignorance about other places in the world. I figured that since everyone loves food or at least has to eat, what better way of getting people to learn? I do not know what this might even begin to look like, but I believe getting people to learn about different places in the world through their cuisine will be an interesting project to take on.

Finally, my third area of interest is in learning about real food; "evolving from the de-evolotion of food" is what I am calling it for now. Through out time, our food has changed because of several reasons. As a result, there have been a lot of odd methods developed to process and conserve food and people have become more detached from the source of their food. I remember my sister telling me how one of her friends walked into her apartment while she was frying potatoes and after tasting some he said, "this tastes very similar to french fries." It might have been common knowledge to her that french fries are fried potatoes, but it may not be common to everyone. I begin to wonder when people started to become so detached from their food. If I was to choose this thesis direction, my goal would be to help people better understand what they eat and teach them how to go back to eating whole and recognizable foods in a way that is not burdensome.

Again, my thesis areas of interests are really broad at the moment, but I will continue to refine them into topics that sound do-able and interesting to me. In the mean time, I will continue to gather more information on these areas to help me decide what exactly my thesis will be and I will continue to write about my progress.

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[thekhooll-deactivated20210705]

Unhappily Ever After

Jeff Hong, an animation storyboard artist living in NYC, creates these images of Disney characters as if they existed in the real world. Some of them are funny and heartbreaking at the same time. Some of them are just plain sad.

Check out this tumblr!

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Photos of African hairstyles by late photographer J.D. Okhai Ojeikere

I remember getting my hair done with thread as a child, not even close to as intricate as these though.

More here:

http://www.yagazieemezi.com/2014/02/03/j-d-okhai-ojeikere-1930-2014-in-memoriam/

http://www.gallery51.com/index.php?navigatieid=9&fotograafid=12

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FastFWD Design Orientation

Our program's Fall and Spring design studio classes are usually similar but this Spring semester is different because we are participating in a program called FastFWD. It is an acceleration program that consists of entrepreneurial innovation around urban challenges. Their focus area is Public Safety. As students from UArts' Masters of Industrial Design / Design for Social Impact and other programs, our role in FastFWD is to be design consultants for the entrepreneurs involved in the program. We were put in pairs and each of us were assigned to 4 entrepreneurs, two of which we are lead designers and the other two, support designers. Each entrepreneur also has a Wharton MBA student assigned to them.

I was really excited about this project. Before the launching of the program, we spent a couple of weeks preparing for it by trying to understand our roles, familiarizing ourselves with the material planned for the program and getting ready to receive the entrepreneurs. In preparation for the orientation of the program, we had put together a brief workshop to help the entrepreneurs get to know each other and to give them a glimpse into our design process. After some tests and tweaks we were pretty confident in our activity and I was looking forward to the launching of the program.

Right before the day of the FastFWD orientation, we received warnings of a snowstorm and sure enough there was a snowstorm on the day it was suppose to take place. This pushed the beginning of the program back by a couple of days and we ended up not being able to attend the official orientation of the program. It was disappointing to have put all that work in preparation for it and not be able to attend it but fortunately, we were still able to do our design activity with them.

For our workshop, we invited the entrepreneurs into our department. On the day of the orientation, we prepared the necessary tools and the space we were using then we waited patiently for the entrepreneurs to arrive. Since I had stalked almost alll of them the night before, I could recognize some faces and those who I was going to be working with. It was a little funny to see our interactions, or lack there of, at the beginning of the workshop. It reminded me of one of those parties, boys and girls separate and socializing among themselves. We, the students, could have done a better job at welcoming the entrepreneurs especially since we were the ones hosting them and we are "social impact" designers. I was guilty for staying in my comfort zone, hopefully I can push myself more during the next event.

When most of the entrepreneurs were present, we began the activity. They were each given a cutout of a body and a sheet of paper with instructions, questions and different colored post its for recording answers. They were paired up and they had to take turns interviewing each other then mapping out their answers on the body. It was nice observing the atmosphere in the room. Though it was really hot and the space was pretty tight, the entrepreneurs were engaged; people were laughing, sharing stories and many of them even drew representations of themselves on their cutout body. Overall, they looked like they were enjoying the activity. After concluding the workshop, we got to meet some of them and then head over to the mayor's office for a welcoming reception.

The workshop was a great experience and a great way for us to start off with the entrepreneurs. This activity made me eager to start learning more about their projects and working with them. Everything seemed so fancy and swell! Little did I know about what awaited further down the path...

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Whattt!! This is so clever!

This seems like a great tool for those who like to know what is in their food, it even tells you the ingredients that the packaging doesn't list. It can be especially useful for those with food allergies.

http://tellspec.com/

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My Fox Design Challenge Experience

Last week, our MiD program took part in the Fox Design Challenge. This year, the theme was "talking trash." This sounded like a great opportunity for me because I am bothered by the level of trash in Philly and I sometimes wonder why some people simply don't care about where they throw or leave their trash. At the challenge, we were put in groups that were made up of students from different disciplines so my group was pretty diverse.

Right off the bat, we started sharing what we had learned from our own personal research about trash and all of a sudden ideas started getting tossed back and forth all around the table. No one was recording any of their ideas though someone had passed out post-it notes and writing materials were right before us. After posting some ideas myself and suggesting several times that people record their ideas, others finally started to do so and post them on our board. My team had some interesting ideas and somehow, we started to lean towards incorporating all these ideas into one final product. It seemed like everyone wanted a tangible product, even the idea of an app was quickly eliminated.

I personally felt uneasy. After saying I was an industrial designer, there was already an expectation from me and the graphic designer to make an attractive product. Later on I felt inclined to re-explain what I do. I can imagine myself immediately jumping on the idea of designing a product if I still had a traditional industrial design mindset but since being in Uarts Mid program, that mindset has changed. There is nothing wrong with designing a product but I wanted us to start from the root of the problem and ask why people litter in the first place. In my opinion if we had started with taking a stab at understanding and seeing how to possibly change the way people think, we would probably not have needed a new product. I just felt like we jumped on the idea of a product being the solution too quickly.

Our final idea was a trash can. Not just any trash can but one that was "sexy." It was animated, solar powered, it gave rewards to people and no one had to touch it. On a more serious note, our driving points were that no one likes to touch something that contains trash so people don't always put away their trash in the Bigbelly trashcans that re all over Philadelphia, people do not know what to recycle or not, people do not realize how they personally affect the environment by littering and people like rewards. Our final product, iCan, was not only a trashcan, it was a movement (we did put a lot of emphasis on the trashcan though). The idea of iCan is a better version of the Bigbellys and the Unlitter Us movement because it focuses on making people more aware, educating them and using role models and celebrities to reach the community. The iCan trashcan was able to encourage people to not litter by giving them positive reinforcement such as thanking them for caring for their environment and by randomly giving rewards/vouchers to people who throw away their trash.

As for team effort, my team worked really well together especially in putting together a presentation. One of the guys on my team was really good at helping us emphasize our role in the project and why iCan is important. In the end, we got third place and I honestly did not expect us to go as far as we did in the challenge. I expected us to be out in the first round but apparently most of the judges liked our idea. Getting third place in the whole challenge was an accomplishment and I was pretty proud of my team.

Being in this design challenge made me remember how product oriented human beings can be. We have gotten used to creating things to solve problems that sometimes we go further and further away from the root of the issues. In our attempts to solve our challenges, we sometimes take a band-aid approach and tend to focus on finding a solution in material things instead of focusing on the people behind the issues. I hope we can all grow in the way we address problems.

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I Ate Bugs.

Last Sunday, the 9th of February, I did something pretty adventurous. A friend of mine, Katharina, asked me for some help coming up with some recipes. Since I love cooking and creating new recipes, I very easily accepted to help. What was different is that we were coming up with recipes incorporating soldier fly larvae. Katharina had previously done a project where she designed a small scale soldier fly farm for home use. Her project got published in a newspaper and since then, she has received a lot of publicity from it and she is pretty active in the entomophagy (eating of insects) community. Here is her website to check out more of what she does www.kunger.at She needed recipes specifically for an upcoming show in Texas called Future Food Salon where a lot of people will be showcasing foods that incorporate insects.

We started out by brainstorming on some ideas. We had considered making a variety of larvae salsas which will be more easily welcomed in Texas. Though we liked this idea, she wanted something low maintenance and she wanted to avoid having to cook there. We finally decided on granola as something easy to make and almost non-perishable. Along with that, we decided on having a few other options of the larvae on their own in different seasonings so people could get a better idea of what they taste like. Instead of cooking them fresh, we figured drying them will be the best option.

On Sunday, I went to her place not knowing exactly what I had gotten myself into. When we were ready to cook, she encouraged me to try them so I know what they will go with. After some hesitation, I tried them. They tasted like not much. Since the ones I tried were dried in cornmeal, they had a cornmeal flavor. They were lightly crunchy and grainy, their texture kind of reminded me of gluten free cookies, I am guessing because of the graininess. But apart from that, they were mainly texture and little taste. In my opinion, soldier fly larvae are pretty much a blank canvas and they can easily pick up flavors.

We started with granola. The recipe that I often use asks for nuts and dried fruit but we omitted those and used fresh larvae only. While those were in the oven, we proceeded to making different variations. For the sweet ones, we put honey on some and both honey and cinnamon some others. Then we melted some chocolate, made some chocolate drops, topped them with some dried larvae and some sea salt then put them in the freezer to harden. For the savory variations, we tried mixing some of the dried ones in some salt and pepper then to some we added wasabi (which we weren't crazy about) and to some others paprika. We agreed that they needed to be seasoned before being cooked to better pick up flavors so we tried some with salt and pepper and some with paprika in a fresh batch and put them in the oven.

Among all the variations, my favorite was the granola followed by the paprika ones. The larvae in the granola went well with the oats aesthetically, in texture and in taste giving the granola a nutty flavor. The paprika ones were really spicy but the seasoning helped to bring out the flavor of the larvae and they actually tasted pretty good. The other variations were not bad either, the salt and pepper ones were simple, the chocolate ones just tasted like the larvae could have been Rice Krispies and I was not crazy about the honey or cinnamon ones, they seemed like they needed something more.

Overall, this was an interesting experience. This was not the first time I had eaten bugs willingly; as a kid, I remember trying fried locusts a few times. It took some self denial at first but they were not bad. That was a long time ago though and I had never really thought of eating bugs again. The hardest part about eating the larvae was knowing that I was eating larvae. I simply had to get past that idea because there are actually a lot of benefits from eating insects. Lauren Alix Brown, an editor for Quartz, gives us five reasons in her article, "Five Reasons We Should All Be Eating Insects." These are her reasons: 1) they provide necessary nutrients (they have similar levels of protein to other meats or fish), 2) they release fewer greenhouse gases than traditional livestock, 3) it makes sense economically (they are cheaper to feed and gather), 4) they are less likely to make us sick since they are less likely to transmit diseases and 5) they are everywhere. And for me personally, I hate bugs; what better way to get rid of them than to eat them?

So in the future will I adopt entomophagy as part of my lifestyle? I don't really see that happening any time soon but I am also not objecting the idea. But as for trying some different types of bugs, if there are opportunities to do so, I most likely will.

Brown, Lauren A. "Five Reasons We Should All Be Eating Insects." Quartz. N.p., 13 May 2013. Web. 17 Feb. 2014. <http://qz.com/84127/five-reasons-we-should-all-be-eating-insects/>.