Cuisine

Storytelling and food making are interconnected places for inquiry, for investigation, for innovation. Design, Narrative and Cuisine are the zones of connection we are focusing on here. Food and food systems are places for thinking and tooling our making: we look at cuisine and food design as terrains to investigate complex problems, often wicked.

Conversation. Emergence. Food for thought.

• Cuisine, is French for ‘kitchen’ and first meant that or ‘a culinary establishment’;
• Cuisine, culinary art or the practice or manner of preparing food or the food so prepared;
• Cuisine, kitchen available with varying levels of equipment;
• Food, material that contains or consists of essential body nutrients, and is ingested and assimilated by an organism to produce energy.
• Design, let us have a conversation at a Design Brunch or on Food Mood or at Design Open Table.

Hundreds of years ago, the Hindu scriptures Upanishads were already mentioning ‘You are what you eat’, and more closely in Europe, in 1826, Anthelme Brillat-Savarin wrote, in Physiologie du Goût, ou Méditations de Gastronomie Transcendante: ‘Dis-moi ce que tu manges, je te dirai ce que tu es.’ Tell me what you eat and I will tell you what you are.

“Cooking is a language, through which society unconsciously reveals its structure.” – Claude Lévi-Strauss ~ The Origin of Table Manners: Mythologiques, Vol. 3, 1968

Isn’t this user-centered design in order to design product-service systems?
If design allows ‘transformation of existing conditions into preferred ones’ (Herbert Simon), ‘cuisine’ is interesting to put next to it, close to it, into it, or vice-versa. Especially as a process but also as a space (and a non-space), it might ensure that thinking and talking about ‘design as cuisine’ or vice-versa results into reframing making and consuming.
How would Cuisine allow to enhance the design envelope, the design thinking, the design attitude, the design doing? Let’s talk.