In some of Manhattan's better Japanese-staffed bars, like Tribeca's underground B-Flat, ice cubes are noticeably absent; ordering your scotch on the rocks gets you a large ice sphere. With less surface area than the same amount of ice rendered in cubes, a globe of ice will melt more slowly, keeping your drink cold without making it watery.
As an industrial designer, your correspondent couldn't help but notice the parting line on B-Flat's ice spheres; after all, it has to come out of a mold. But now a company called Taisin has come up with a clever device for making a perfect ice sphere with no parting line.
How does it work? You sandwich a large chunk of ice in between the two metal pieces pictured above. As the ice slowly melts, gravity brings the top half to close over the bottom half, enclosing what ice remains in its spherical cavity. Because the ice is in the process of melting into its new shape as the top closes, there's no parting line. Clever!
Enologix makes software that predicts how a wine will rate in reviews even before it is made. It claims that wine quality can be measured chemically, and a score assessed, much like a wine critic. In order to achieve the high rating, winemakers invest in processes rooted not in agriculture but in biochemical information. Wine making becomes an information science. Care for a nice norisoprenoid anthocyanin blend?
Chocolate-pencils is a collaboration with patissier Tsujiguchi Hironobu, the mastermind behind popular dessert shops like Mont St. Claire and Le Chocolat de H. Tsujiguchi created a new dessert based on his impression of Nendo after conversations with us, and we designed new tableware for them.
We wanted our plates to show off the beauty of meals and desserts like a painting on a canvas. Based on this idea, our “chocolate pencils” come in a number of cocoa blends that vary in intensity, and chocophiles can use the special “pencil sharpener” that comes with our plate to grate chocolate onto their dessert.
Pencil filings are usually the unwanted remains of sharpening a pencil but in this case they’re the star!
These cake was designed by Jamie Fobert, an architect, for the London bakeries Konditor & Cook. He was inspired by the work of the sculpture Barbara Hepworth. 4 more British design talents did some other designs, they will all become available in course of the year at the London stores.
Japanese designer Nobuhiko Arikawa of Rice-Design has created edible tableware for Orto Cafe in Japan. The plates, bowls and chopsticks are intended to replace disposable paper tableware. The pieces are made from hardtack, a biscuit dough made from flour, water and salt which was traditionally used as dry emergency rations at sea.
It's for kitchen junkies, for half-portions, for insatiables, for dieters, for the undecided.It's a necessity for everybody. Whereas formerly you had to estimate and manually portion the cake The clever housewife now bakes with this new silicon form. built-in portioning sections and differently high levels magically produce piece by piece 15 different portions.
After having eggs one morning, the residue left in the mixing cup hardened, leaving a fractal like history of energy dispersion. The simple everyday artifacts of a morning breakfast, transform into a muse.
In 1997 a number of architects were invited to participate in the production of macaroni. The exhibition showcased their macaroni models--fifty times larger than ordinary macaroni--along with their production intent and original recipe for cooking macaroni, as well as the participants' profiles and master works. As macaroni is made of ground grain, it can basically take any shape. However, macaroni is an architecture that guarantees conditions much harder to fulfill than is first imagined. Working conditions include "a shape that can be evenly heated", "an ample area that can be coated with sauce", "a shape easily mass-produced" and "appealing to the sense of taste". The operation exerted in this project can be expressed as "architecture for food". The participating architects thus competed with each other in the architectural design of food. As a result, the philosophy of each one is revealed practically as "macaroni". Thus, the creative ideas of architects, which often seem too heavy for the general public to understand, have now manifested themselves as plain, practical media. Production by Kenya Hara.
Mleak : "These are my testers for a project I'm working on using processed lunch meats etched with a laser cutter. Ultimately, I would like to show the entire process from animal to ambiguous pink slice of meat over the course of a package of lunch meat, beginning here with bologna. This neat packaged disc of food has always seemed so far removed from its source."
In a world where technologies become more exciting by the day, sometimes it may be nice to relax and be cuddled by tradition. But then, when a design studio and a historic confectionery company join forces to create something new, it may happen that even tradition may spur new stimuli.
Since the XVII century, Turin is a city that has been considered one of the Italian realms of chocolate. It is here that, at the end of the XVIII century, Mr. Doret invented a revolutionary machine that could solidify chocolate, allowing it to be moulded in shapes. It is also here that architects Sergio Viotti and Giuliana Succo were born and graduated in architecture.
As a result of an intense professional experience, they felt the need to embrace a unique challenge: making the cultural heritage of their hometown join forces with the trends of the contemporary design, and produce a new line of innovative products. So they proposed to their long time friend Max Gertosio, heir of what since 1890 was the artisan shop of another great chocolatier, Pietro Viola, to collaborate on the manufacture of a new line of chocolate bars called Lagrange 34 - just like the address of the confectionery shop, named after the mathematician Luigi Lagrange.
Pappilan is a project from 2004 encompassing innovation and tradition based on inviting international designers to create a new biscuit that will have an innovative taste and appearance without losing the old tradition of the Christmas biscuit made in the region. Both concepts above are from Paolo Ulian.
Forget about wandering through an art gallery and wondering if you’re the only one who has no idea what anything means. Hannes Broecker has brilliantly invited the cultural elite to grab a glass at an exhibition in Dresden, Germany, and drink away the art.
Regardless of what we do or do not understand about art, we can all agree, it stimulates our senses. Broecker has aroused our sense of taste (not to mention eliminated the need of elbowing our way to the bar) by hanging flat, glass containers with a variety of cocktails in the exhibition space. As the night progressed, the levels of the multi-coloured infusions diminished. By the end of the event, the art, itself, ran dry, and empty drinking glasses were returned to where they were originally placed.
Made in Transit is a supply chain concept working towards the development of packaging that operates on the paradigm of enabling growth rather than preserving freshness, a shift from ‘best before’ to ‘ready by’ for fresh perishable goods. The aim is to enable growth throughout the entire supply chain so that the consumer harvests the product when he’s ready to consume it, resulting in a higher quality fresh good.
The concept is applied to a new system of mushroom cultivation imbedded within the distribution network, shifting the role of distribution from slowing down the process of post-harvest deterioration to enabling growth and involving the consumer for harvest at the point of consumption.
In partnership with Sodexho, the Dutch University of Wageningen's opened a new €3 million research center-slash-restaurant, the "restaurant of the future," that is focused on the study of its patrons' eating habits by way of dozens of unobtrusive (but still totally creepy) cameras and close monitoring. Ultimately, these studies will "help the Center for Innovative Consumer Studies 'find out what influences people: colors, taste, personnel. We try to focus on one stimulus, like light,'said Rene Koster, head of the center, as overhead bulbs switched through green, red, orange and blue."
From a hidden control room, researchers maneuver the hidden cameras to zoom in and spy on diners and what and how they munch--everything from how someone walks with a tray of food, what food they choose to jam on, where they sit, and what they waste.
Similar visually to the mandala images, these are cups of coffee vibrating at (top) and near (bottom) a normal mode frequency - coffee a la mode.
The resonance phenomenon shown in these coffee cup images is similar to Cymatics and Chladni patterns on a circular plate. Although the lines in Chaladni figures are nodes, the bright areas in the coffee images are anti-nodes. (The coffee cups are vibrating at approximately 20Hz). Is it time for the first cymatics latte art? We think so, let us experiment!
No one's even sure what to call it. "Claytronics," "synthetic reality" and "programmable matter" have been proposed. "Dynamic physical rendering" is the label Intel uses. Its an emerging field of engineering concerning reconfigurable nanoscale robots ('claytronic atoms', or catoms) designed to form much larger scale machines or mechanisms. Also known as "programmable matter", the catoms are said to eventually have the ability to morph into nearly any object, even replicas of human beings for virtual meetings.
Cameras would capture the movement of an object or person and then this data would be fed to the atoms, which would then assemble themselves to make up an exact likeness of the object.
Professors Todd Mowry and Seth Goldstein of Carnegie Mellon University came up with the idea based on "claytronics," the animation technique which involves slightly moving a model per frame to animate it.
"We thought that a good analogy for what we were going to do was claymation - something like the Wallace and Gromit shows," Dr Mowry told BBC World Service's Outlook programme.
"When you watch something created by claymation, it is a real object and it looks like it's moving itself. That's something like the idea we're doing... in our case, the idea is that you have computation in the 'clay', as though the clay can move itself.
"So if it was a dog, and you want the dog to move, it will actually move itself. But it is a physical object in front of you - it's not just a picture or hologram or something like that."
Ok, the nanokrispies idea is merely a sketch but maybe a small step closer towards a new world of "programmable food" concepts. So lets dream and just add "imilk" to our krispiesbowl and watch robotic characters grow out. Once they've finished assembling, get exercise and nutrition by hunting and eating them.
Scientists are already manufacturing nano-sized vitamins that are easier for our bodies to absorb. In the future they hope to create 'interactive' food - food and drink that could change colour, flavour or nutrients on demand. Meanwhile, top chef Heston Blumenthal is dreaming of Willy Wonka style sweets, with three different tastes in one. Supported by the University of Nottingham, he's even employed a research student who will investigate how nanotechnology could improve foods' flavour.
Designing bread, workshop avec Alexis Georgacopoulos exhibited in ECAL. Won the price of best school presentation.A baker of St-Etienne produced a serie of 200 of our parisian bread.
Participants: Isabelle Schwager, Abdelaziz Bousetta, Cédric Decroux, Yves Fidalgo, Cédric Fontana, Axel Jaccard, Philippe Michelot, Mohammed Nadini.
The next Doors conference (New Delhi) is right around the corner (Feb. 28 - March 4), so if you haven't booked your tix yet, get moving. The theme is "Juice: Food, Energy, Design" and here's the pitch:
Global food systems are not sustainable. Industrialised food consumes ten times more energy in production and distribution than enters our bodies as nutrition. In 'developed' countries, the food consumption of a single family generates eight tonnes of CO2 emissions a year.
People in industrialised countries - that probably includes you and me - eat between six and seven kilogrammes of food additives every year.
This madness is enabled by non renewable fossil fuel. But what to do? Doors 9 breaks the food systems issue into bite-sized design chunks. "If food production efficiency is measured by the ratio between the amount of energy required to produce a given amount of food, and the energy congtained in that food, then industrial agriculture is by far the least efficient form of food production ever practised. From farm to plate, depending on the degree to which it has been processed, a typical food item may embody input energy between four and several hundred times its food energy". Fact: In the USA, food traves an average oif 1,300 miles from farm to plate.
[Richard Heinberg, The Party's Over: Oil, War, And the Fate of Industrial Societies. Clairview, 2005].
Fab@Home is a website dedicated to making and using fabbers - machines that can make almost anything, right on your desktop. This website provides an open source kit that lets you make your own simple fabber, and use it to print three dimensional objects. You can download and print various items, try out new materials, or upload and share your own projects. Advanced users can modify and improve the fabber itself.
Fabbers (a.k.a 3D Printers or rapid prototyping machines) are a relatively new form of manufacturing that builds 3D objects by carefuly depositing materials drop by drop, layer by layer. Slowly but surely, with the right set of materials and a geometric blueprint, you can fabricate complex objects that would normally take special resources, tools and skills if produced using conventional manufacturing techniques. A fabber can allow you explore new designs, email physical objects to other fabber owners, and most importantly - set your ideas free. Just like MP3s, iPods and the Internet have freed musical talent, we hope that blueprints and fabbers will democratize innovation.
While several commercial systems are available, their price range - tens of thousands, to hundreds of thousands of dollars - is typically well beyond what an average home user can afford. Furthermore, commercial systems do not usually allow or encourage experimentation with new materials and processes. But more importantly, most - if not all - commercial system are geared towards making passive parts out of a single material. Our goal is to explore the potential of universal fabrication: Machines that can use multiple materials to fabricate complete, active systems.
Food for design wants to be an open source for design, food and science cross-over. We are not interested in creating hypes, but in long term co-operations, where everyone benefits. Promoting quality and collective creativity are the things that count... So please take a seat and have a bite! Best view [res: 1024 x 768] x [browser: firefox]
_ random newsletter
_news
_m[eat]ing 003
17.03.2007::MATERIALS ::
Food for design was invited by the Meat & Fresh expo and will install a creative food laboratory at the rambla during the fair,
where people can find inspiration towards form and taste.
[+ more]
_m[eat]ing 002
18.11.2006::MATERIALS ::
A feast of surfaces, textures, colors and other sensorial elements, using a large palette of food materials.
The objective is to inspire new uses for food materials and provoke new applications within a design context.
[+ more]
_seminar
20.09.2006::MG SEMINAR IN BELGIUM ::
This seminar [ 20 november 2006 ] is organised by the innovation and knowledge centre of food for every one who is interested in food science, technology and cooking processes. This can be chefs, scientists, recipe developers, foodies,...
The guest speakers tell and demonstrate how food science and technology can inspire gastronomy...
[+ english][+ dutch]
_manifesto 001
03.02.2006::FOOD for design::
The first aim of this project is to explore and understand the physicochemical properties of materials / ingredients and apply this under-standing when designing.
_manifesto 002
28.01.2006::food for DESIGN::
A different way of thinking : abandoning the role of "creator" and "descending" to the role of a participant playing within the rules of an experimental process.
All experiments come into being as a result of self-formation processes.
_manifesto 001
22.01.2006::food FOR design::
In exploring the materials the main focus lays on the food as in exploring the structure the primary focus lays on the process.
The goal of this cross-fertilisation project is to add more senses / experience to design, it is a way of sustainable, random, natural thinking to in-spire others, giving food for the future.
