Speculative (food) design histories
Speculative design / exhibition
My Master’s thesis, Speculative (food) design histories, re-imagines what the world of food could have looked like and speculates about the future of food. This project is currently on exhibit at the Cube Design Museum in Kerkrade, Netherlands.
There is a collective helplessness about the way food looks today. In this project I created alternate food realities - 3 historical and 1 in the future - to illuminate the agency we have to create a desirable future. My goal was to provoke museum visitors to reflect on their own food practices and behaviors.
The outcome of this project was four sets of artifacts, fictional stories and videos - set at four different points in time. Each artifacts suggests a world where a higher baseline understanding of science impacts food practices. The artifacts are a microbial terrarium, cellulase, blood posters and Evolufood.
All the artifacts reflect the technology and design language of their periods.
Microbial terrariums (c. 1703) would have been used in early 1700s to visually monitor peoples’ microbiomes and make appropriate food choices.
Cellulase (c. 1856), an enzyme harvested from cow stomachs, would be available for purchase to give humans the ability to digest cellulose as cows.
Evolufood (c. 2038) suggests food in the future exists in a deconstructed state, giving humans the freedom to combine flavors and textures in unimaginable ways.
Click for complete stories for each of the artifacts.
The three historical artifacts were presented to museum visitors as parafiction, or historical reality. When the truth was revealed at the end of the exhibit, we learned that ~90% of museum visitors bought into the fiction and wondered, why didn’t history run this course?
PROCESS
I kicked the project off with primary and secondary research to identify major milestones in food, philosophy and science.
I sliced and diced history into four human eras I wanted to create alternate realities for. I began by mapping out the key facets of each and for each speculated, “if not this, then what?” generating ~70 “what if” scenarios.
To build my alternate realities, I facilitated six worldbuilding workshops, each designed to take participants through a series of exercises to build entire worlds around a single premise, e.g. What if humans respected animals more? or What if the human body was viewed as a vessel for other organisms? I pitched each workshop as a "Hero's Journey" to encourage participants to enter an alternate reality with new rules.
