Week 7 Lecture: Experience design
In this week’s lecture Andy touched on experience design in relation to food. He showed us several examples of how the experience of consuming food with others can be a very valuable and memorable experience.
British artist Damien Hirst’s Pharmacy Restaurant is particularly intriguing, featuring clinical-themed interiors that use images of pills and tablets embedded into the marble floor and embroidered onto leather banquettes. The seats are also in the shape of tablets and walls are covered with charts of pills and pharmaceutical products.
I love the futuristic and “space” aesthetic of the restaurant with all its colour. The design of the interior creates a fun, quirky yet scientific vibe to the space, and I can only imagine the anticipation and enjoyment of eating in there. This is a good example of how art and food can be combined together to create a unique and memorable experience for the consumer.
Mai Ueda’s “have tea not water” tea gathering is another example of experience design, where guests are asked to wear a panda costume to ensure that they are feeling content and peaceful inside in order to take part in the tea ceremony. The ceremony itself is traditional in its practice, but at the same time includes an element of design to it such as the Memphis styled boxing ring, spherical lamps and bright-coloured pillows.
The calm and gentle aura of the ceremony is a completely different experience to sitting in the stimulating environment of Hirst’s pharmacy restaurant. The peace and tranquillity of the ceremony is what I want to include within my own video seeing as I am exploring matcha latte, another beverage that is said to relax and soothe.
In order to make up for the deficiencies of city life in Tokyo with its lack of open spaces to gather, Tokyo Picnic Club insists the “Picnic Right” as a basic right for urban dwellers. As stated on their website, “We just want the places to have our picnic. We need neither benches nor worthless waterworks. We simply want the spacious lawn”.
The group dedicates itself to re-defining picnic activities within an urban context, such as this space at Gateshead Quays that was transformed into a picnic area with hundreds of airplane picnic mats. I like how this group emphasises how valuable a experience coming together and sharing a meal can be among busy city life.
Overall, these examples have taught me how the experience (environment and company) of eating food is just as valuable as the consumption of eating the food itself. There is a clear correlation among all these examples in that each of the designs focus on taking the consumer into another reality and to uplift their experience of eating the food rather than focusing on the food itself. It is all about enjoyment and comfort within the space among company, and forgetting about the stresses of everyday life.
In terms of how this ties into my project, these examples of food experience design have further confirmed my design need to really encapsulate the mood and environment of drinking Matcha Latte. Ideally the viewers should be able to enjoy the experience or journey that is presented to them visually as they cannot taste the latte themselves. This is something that I need to take into account and work more on going further into the project.
