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[waitingzhou-blog]

Food Culture Project

Drinking tea is a part of our life in my family, the tea bags were made by resin and glasses. It is showing the moment when tea leaves are put in boiling water, from dry to wet, from fold to unfold, from compressed to blooming, from clear to colored… Now, this moment is frozen in these tea bags, and that’s the reason I named it “Inside of tea”. The teaspoon is used as a handle here, the box is covered by a bamboo curtain splint, both of them are the representative of traditional tea culture in China.

I chose Chinese tea for my project topic, as tea has a long history in China, and my family is engaged in selling Chinese tea for many years so I get to know tea since I was young. We drink tea during many parts of the day such as at meals for good health or simply for pleasure. In other words, Chinese tea is meaningful for me and my family, Tea is very popular in China, particularly in the south of China.

[iamtaylar-blog1]

I love the ideas. It is new experience for me 

[jaclyncorallo-blog]

Essentials Final. Overall, I believe that the Essentials project was a very valuable and beneficial experience. I gained useful knowledge regarding the business side of the design world, and learnt important information that will be beneficial for me in the future. The course gave me a basic understanding of how the design industry works, how to work with clients as a professional and what information must be provided to clients when discussing a design project.The Essential classes covered a list of topics with valuable information provided. Prior to this course, i had little experience with the business side of the industry. It was nice to learn about budgeting, researching, project proposals and how to converse with clients professionally, as i feel although these are vital skills i will need to develop in the near future. The Essentials course also highlighted to me the need to schedule and plan. Although i knew this was an important aspect prior to the course, it was further proven and explained in a way that was clear and easy to understand. Although i do not know everything there is to know regarding Project Proposals, Project Management and Project Production, Ultimately, i feel as though the classes have set me up on the right track.The layout of the course was also very beneficial. I enjoyed changing topics every four weeks as it broke up the semester into manageable and controllable sections. Although the classes as a whole were not heavily design based, they were a nice change from the other classes in the course and the knowledge i have gained will be just as useful in the future.

[xieshay-blog]

Apart from the sense of achievement of finishing the effort- consuming work, a big lesson I learned from this assignment is the need of time management at the beginning phase. A better schedule can really help with the surprising interruption at the later part during the designing, like inappropriate selected material and so on.

The variety of Chinese food has also impressed me when I spent time on gathering featuring food for every part of China. Food can be a really good factor showing in designs, because of the history and characteristics contained in each food.

[tksteve-blog]

Very interesting project, well done! Wondering if you can make a series of these map based on different countries and cultures, that will be cool LOL.

[anastasiaskl]

This is such an interesting concept! Love the design!

[ericadesign-blog]

I love this idea and how you incorporated the cuisine into the shape of the country!

[kyliesuyeon7]

Essentials Reflection

Through this project, I have learn a lot of stuff. From the Production process, I know about how to design an application from begin to the end, like every step gets connection with each others and there is a timeline as well, it can be remind me about the time management need to be reasonable. When I doing this program, I met many problems as well because I have never done something like this before. The first problem that I faced is I have no idea about how to create a flow chart at start, I don’t know the process and how it works as a successful designer, but then I discuss with classmates and  listen carefully to Carlo, ideas just came out and I didn’t met any problem for this project production anymore, everything just going smoothly.

But for the project proposal which is I met the most troubles with. I found there are many things need to write whem out, it is quite hard for me as an international student, but I tried my best to write them down and present it to teachers. Another trouble for proposal is the same as the production, I don’t know how to create it professionally but then I solved it.

The second hardest program is the project management, I spent a lot ot time on it and always keep discussing with classmate.

After I doing this project, I think that I need to get more feedback from teachers, I have to consult with teachers as much as possible in order to get more advises. So I will talk to teachers more in the further project and try my best to achieve the high grade.

[kyliesuyeon7]

Xiaoyan Chen INTERNATIONAL BREAKFAST FESTIVAL: My brand idea for this festival is I would like everyone to have a good experience to enjoy breakfast from other countries and this will be a cultural integration as well. “Breakfast is important”, but somebody just can’t get up that early, just come here which prepare all kinds of breakfast for you. As I said my festival is about international festival, so my idea for this is create a circle and put people who come from different countries around the circle, I want to make the circle be a earth at first, to emphasize that “international “ but then I change it to a plate cause I think it will be more relatable to FOOD. The second piece of festival design of my choice is Stickers! Everyone can grabs one and stick it on their arms or somewhere, it’s like a entrance ticket.

[kyliesuyeon7]

Lovely dinner at Kisumè, it’s a Japanese restaurant along Flinders Lane. Very good tasting and nice environment.

[seokhwa-me-blog]

Design Your Own Vegetables

Imagine a future where you can design your own vegetables. Say goodbye to growing boring baby sprouts on your windowsill and welcome a climate-controlled cultivation system to your kitchen top. Simply change the parameters of your crops with a touchscreen interface and you’ll be on your way. Sounds good, does it? This growing scenario does not exist yet, but food designer and NNN fellow Chloé Rutzerveld is looking for innovative methods to turn this fantasy into a reality. Introducing the Future Food Formula, a formula for success.

Consider this, humans are technological by nature. You would be surprised to hear that cooking is the first technology humans ever conceived. This invention allowed our ancestors to pre-digest food before eating it, which led to bigger brains and basically let evolution do its part by turning them into the modern human beings we are today. This would explain our constant need to search for smarter, more efficient and more sustainable ways to produce our food (remember Bistro In Vitro?). After all, a population of 7.5 billion people is not easy to feed.

With this in mind, Chloé Rutzerveld explored the process of growing – or to be more precise, designing – crops, based on scientific facts, to model the outcome into an interactive installation: Future Food Formula. While doing so, she teamed up with researchers from the University of Wageningen and the Association for Vertical Farming, and payed a visit to leading tech company Phillips. Every time she visited a researchers, she asked this simple question: what exactly influences crops? And how can we manipulate this without using GMO’s?

“It’s about education” the designer says. “It’s important for us to understand to which extent natural processes affect our crops; these processes keep the vegetation stable”. Chloé single-handedly created charts to map the parameters that determine crops outcome and wondered what would happen if she could convert that knowledge into new crop variations:

“I looked into the growth processes of crops and considered their functionalities: how do crops respond to light? Or to warmth? Having obtained this information, I discovered that I was able to adjust the nutritional values of our crops, but also the taste, color, size etc. It was exciting to discover the endless possibilities to create new crops by simply using nature – and technology enabled me to cope with these factors. This is not a new thing, when modern farmers grow crops in laboratories, efficiency stands first. It’s no a coincidence if tomatoes have that specific red-warm color!”.

Chloé transformed the crop data into 2D drawings, then she collaborated with RNDR to animate them. This way the visitors of the installation gain a playful understanding of the growing processes of vegetables. “Imagine a future where everyone has his own cultivation system on his kitchen top, this would turn consumers into operating green-keepers” the designer explains. “Downloading and upvoting such recipes to a certain database, would give producers an insight into consumers’ demands”.

Partial speculation, partial science, Chloé’s vision promises an exciting future for our diet and cooking appliances. It may as well be a matter of time before her growing methods would available in a kitchen near you. Until then, we advise you to visit Future Food Formula and discover what does it mean to have vegetables on your fingertips.

You can visit Future Food Formula at RAUM in Utrecht, The Netherlands, where Chloé Rutzerveld has been artist-in-residence over the last few months. The installation will be open until October 17, every Wednesday afternoon (15:00 – 18:00) and Sunday (12:00 – 18:00). After this exhibition, the installation will travel to the Dutch Design Week as part of the Embassy of Food exhibition at the Ketelhuisplein in Eindhoven. DDW runs from October 21 until October 29.

Photography: Bram Saeys. Cover image: Stef Arends

Do you want to stay up to date about the NNN fellows and other NNN news? Make sure to join Next Nature Network and never miss a thing!

                                                                               Article by Ruben Baart

[kyliesuyeon7]

Food Event

[lukesikora-blog]

Week 13:

Food Event 🥕🌶🍕🌭🍔🍟🌮🥘

During this I got to see all the awesome work which was displayed just off the one topic which was set for us in the beginning (food!). Its great to see all the different things the other classes had to produce and the challenges in which they overcame. 

[fvourite-wrst-nghtmare]

What happens when an architectural designer likes to bake? Dinara Kasko is what happens.

The Ukranian pastry chef is the master of combining baking with geometric figures and architectural designs. She approaches her desserts as if they were buildings, and creates the most unique edible structures ever. “I have many unrealized ideas and a great desire to experiment. I don’t want to imitate others; I want to create something new,” Kasko told So Good Magazine. And she sure does! The only question now is, how do you eat something so beautiful?!

[kyliesuyeon7]

Food event in week13 There were lots of beautiful stuff on event which from all studio 1 students. Videos, postcards and many interesting designs, they’re all looking great and I was pretty enjoy. Such a nice experience!

[ericadesign-blog]

Week 11 Lecture: Design futures

In today’s lecture we explored the design futures and speculative design- “design that is used as a tool to create not only things but ideas. For them, design is a means of speculating about how things could be—to imagine possible futures”

We were shown many examples of speculative design, a few that particularly stand out to me include Marti Guixe’s idea of a future you can call up and pay for food on your phone and have it arrive at a bench in the park. This was a concept imagined well before Ubereats, and t’s interesting that we are indeed living in the future now that we have such convenient phone apps that let us order food from restaurants and have it arrive at our doors.

Also by Guixe, “Oranienbaum Lollipop” (1999) is a lollipop with an orange seed inside. Once you finish the lollipop you spit out the seed into the ground, encouraging spontaneous reforestation. The wooden stick is used to mark the spot in which the seed has been planted. This is such a clever idea as Guixe has broken down the idea of food into a system/process within a future scenario that can benefit us.

Meanwhile, Daniera TerHhaar and Christoph Brach’s work “Raw Color 3” uses photography of genetically modified food. These designers cleverly think about the ways in which food can transform through photography.

La sala vincon prints the faces of famous 20th century women on organic 20th century green peas. It’s interesting how this designer envisions a  future where you can brand food. Perhaps one day there will be luxury, branded foods like Coco Chanel?

Perhaps the most interesting concept of speculative design is Johanna Schmeer’s “Bioplastic Fantastic”. “Bioplastic Fantastic investigates new types of products and interactions which might emerge from these material innovations in the fields of bio- and nanotechnology…Halfway between products and organisms, seven “biological devices” produce all food and energy needed for humans to survive simply by being exposed to light (through artificial photosynthesis). They produce water, vitamins, fibre, sugar, fat, protein and minerals through biological processes, allowing for a more self-sufficient lifestyle.”  

I especially like the idea of the product that produces airborne vitamins, as I’m sure that many people could benefit from this. I also love the overall aesthetic of the products which are not machine-like or lab-like, but rather organic and somewhat sensual. Although Schmeer’s concept is not a proposal or solution, the project provokes us to think about what type of bio and nano technology we would like to include in our lives and benefit from in the future.

 Overall, these examples of speculative design have got me thinking and questioning about alternative futures of design and trying to think outside of the box. As Andy said in the lecture, “We need to imagine futures to design differently”.

[mayahan]

‘Mosaic Sushi’ Trend From Japan Turns Lunch Into Edible Works Of Art

[ericadesign-blog]

‘Pretty sweet design’

Sushi turned into a form of art by setting the blocks into a mosaic pattern. Almost looks too pretty to eat!

[mmmmarley-blog1]

Week. 7. Toilet Paper Magazine by Maurizio Cattelan and Pierpaolo Ferrari

[kersersoze-blog]

Week 9- Open Design & Creative Commons

This week we looked at the notion of “open” design, in other words, design where the information is open for the public to use and adapt upon as long as the user complies with the artist’s policy. All licenses require proper attribution, and the least restrictive license only requires attribution.  The different types of creative commons are:

Attribution CC BY: This is the golden child of CC. It lets you tweak, remix, and distribute even for commercial use, so long as there is attribution.

Attribution-ShareAlike CC BY-SA: As long as you credit the original poster and license it under identical terms if you have made modifications, you are good to go. Wikipedia uses this form.

Attribution-NoDerivs CC BY-ND: This license allows for redistribution, commercial and non-commercial, as long as it is passed along unchanged and with proper attribution.

Attribution-NonCommercial CC BY-NC: You can tweak, modify and distribute as long as it is done non-commercially.

Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike CC BY-NC-SA: This license lets you remix, tweak, and build upon the original work non-commercially, as long as you license your new creation under identical terms and credit them.

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs CC BY-NC-ND: The most restrictive of the licenses, you can only download and share the work non-commercially while giving credit.

A great exaple of Open Design that we have all been using at RMIT for our publications is unsplash. Where we use all of the beautiful images for free!

Here’s an image of us trying to figure out a front cover for our “100 questions” booklet! 

[retroreverbs]

Food For Thought by Sonia Allison (1967).

[indiaahourihan]

Experiencial design

Week 7, lecture 5

In this week’s lecture, we looked at food and design as an experience. Amongst the various work of artists and designers Andy showed us, I particularly liked that of Afghan-American artist Behnaz Babazadeh in her ‘Candy Burqa’ series. In the photographic work, Babazadeh creates burqas out of confectionary items to relate the work back to her own memories of arriving in America mixed with her own religion.

“This series explores the use of materials found in the candy aisle as a means connect the viewer with a memory that the food inspires, rather than the over used symbol of women’s oppression in Afghanistan, the Burka.”