Feel more with food

An interactive experience to destabilise and reimagine our relationships with food, inspiring us to reconsider our own ontologies for a less-extractive future

The age of the Anthropocene has prompted designers and scholars to rethink our current dominant relationship with nature based on human superiority. Relationality and posthuman philosophy challenge a human-centred way of being and instead emphasise the connections between people and the other-than-human as relational and without hierarchy.

This project explores the human-nature relationship within the context of food.

The westernised global food industry has developed ways of separating humans from food as part of nature; having repositioned it as a human commodity. We have become more disconnected from growing and making food, impacting our experience and relationship with food, manifesting in our interactions with it.

Extendable fork of disconnection

Initial concepts

The stomach - 'playing' with the food system

Initial concepts explored provoking discussion on human disconnection from food as part of nature

Sketch ideation

Exploring power dynamics between the human and food, howe we might ‘nurture’ food during eating, and how we can provoke discussion on human-centric relations with food through uncomfortable object interactions.

An experience which challenges a human-centric mindset of how we relate to food

A human-food interactive workshop…

Operating in the Critical Design space, this project investigates initiation of a discussion on human connection with food through the design of a human-food interaction scenario mediated by a system of designed objects.

In the final workshop, through creating a visceral sensory experience, participants are encouraged to destabilise their intrinsic human-centric ideologies and decentre their perspectives on human-food-nature relationships. Each activity is designed to reveal different hierarchies in how we interact with food. These challenge our conceptions of human-food relations. The effect being that the workshop provides a platform to open our minds to the idea of humans and food as collaborators in a relational network.