Foodmood

The concept: cuisine and food design as terrain to investigate complex wicked problems.
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, an activity to shape stuff, to shape well-being, to shape meaningful change.

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.

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.
Why would Cuisine allow to enhance the design envelope, the design thinking, the design attitude?