Food Design Nation
Basic information
Project Title
Full project title
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Project Description
A young community of transdisciplinary creatives collaborating to redefine our food systems. Our international presence ensures physical impact, centred around European culture, history and its relationship with food, arts and design. By providing spaces for reflection and dialogue, we feed intellectual beauty by documenting proposals and activities through our periodical publications. We use food as a language without borders to integrate planet-driven values at our core practises.
Project Region
EU Programme or fund
Description of the project
Summary
We are actively working to mobilize a growing community of young creative professionals dedicated to transforming our food systems. Currently based in the online world, leveraging digital media enables us to bridge our physical distances in a defining moment for our generation and reduces our footprint while encouraging mindful action.
Through constant engagement and collaborative opportunities, we continue to foster a global community based on trust and transparency, bonded by shared purpose. Through creative open calls, networking opportunities and multi-format events, we are committed to introducing a design approach to the current global complex socio-economic decision processes.
The vast expertise of the complementary profiles joining us fosters a growth mindset while promoting rich exchange of skills, perspectives and solutions. Our international presence is rooted in mutual respect, promotes inclusivity and multiculturalism. We are focused on using food as a tool to move beyond boundaries, borders and barriers. With Europe at the focal center, we wish to bring real change through dialogues, conferences, publications and practice-based projects.
We are working to showcase the power of transdisciplinary and multicultural collaboration in sparking actionable impact at the intersection of food, design, and sustainability. To track our global efforts, proposals and activities, we envision creating a periodical publication, the FDzeeN.
The theme of our first issue (slated for release in June 2021) was voted by the community during our launch event in January 2021. Issue 01 Battling Inequity: Democratizing Food is based on United Nation’s Food Systems Summit 2021’s Action Track - Ensuring Access to Safe and Nutritious Food For All.
Our aim is to mobilize, define and formalize the broad, misunderstood industry of food design and showcase its potentiality by shaping the context of food.
Key objectives for sustainability
We wish to address sustainability holistically, considering the planet in our focal themes, people through inclusivity, and profit by creating endless, exciting opportunities. An e-version of FDzeeN Issue 01 Battling Inequity: Democratizing Food (based on UNFSS 2021’s Action Track - Ensuring Access to Safe and Nutritious Food For All) will be available online globally, with a print on demand option: ensuring minimal resource consumption and no unsold stock.
Our creative open calls, events and activities are based on a variety of planet-centred themes with a lens on quality education and critical thinking. We envision leveraging the power of our community’s vast transdisciplinary expertise to formulate multisensory communication that will create a lasting impact on the minds of our growing audience.
Rooted in inclusivity and accessibility, we envision offering opportunities to our diverse community, many of whom suffer from loneliness working in isolation, unable to find like-minded people practising where they may be located. Building meaningful connections that might lead to professional opportunities, we wish to foster empathy towards other cultures and provide spaces to celebrate our nuanced differences though traditions and rituals, connected through the act of eating. We also envision securing large and impactful projects from the (currently) unapproachable big food players.
By offering opportunities across borders, we envision creating expertise-based ad-hoc teams for client commissioned projects, promoting the value of the collective act of working together. By bringing together scientists, entrepreneurs and creative professionals, we envision supporting viable and useful opportunities through skill-based matching. These actions will not only help the young individuals earn a living through their creative practises but also the economy and society as a whole.
Key objectives for aesthetics and quality
Our citizens range from chefs and caterers to nutritionists, from food scientists to researchers, from experiential and multisensory event producers to illustrators, artists and architects working with food. Of course, a wide variety of designers are represented - with specialisations in graphics, product, service and systems design. We bring together policy makers, tech geeks, entrepreneurs and gastronomes with expertise in writing, communication, and blogging. We also count on members of our community working with anthropology, education, sustainability and innovation.
We believe that creativity is a mindset, nourished by our environment and social interactions. We are creating the frameworks to foment creativity and inspire values of solidarity. By bringing together complementary backgrounds of our tribe, we are leveraging the power of ‘aesthetics’ to be shared. For example, when a scientist connects with a graphic designer or experience designer through Food Design Nation, we enable their valuable research to be communicated more effectively to a wider audience outside an academic context.
Each of our creatives applies aesthetics in the form of formal beauty in the intended outcome. By encouraging better practises and shared values, we simultaneously add value to their individual practices. We strive to combine this formal beauty with intellectual beauty by making an emotional connection with relevant topics. There are multiple areas that need to be tackled in our interconnected food systems. We approach them by releasing challenges for designers to implement innovative solutions for users in local economies.
The outcomes are rich, educational and beautiful - documented comprehensively in the FDzeeN. By designing frameworks, curating events and editing publications, we are generating personalised connections that bridge our physical distances.
Key objectives for inclusion
There's more phones than humans in the world. We want to be accessible to all those people running or seeking for inspiration to implement in their local ecosystems. We strive to democratise knowledge and provide tools to activate citizens for better practices in food production, consumption and waste management. We are committed to preserving diversity and wish to drive empathy through sharing and celebrating our differences. Inclusion is implicit in the way we operate, communicate and envision the outcomes of our efforts.
Here is a sample of an invitation to FDN Roundtable, an ongoing series of interactive dialogues welcoming an intimate group of participants, who share their experiences and opinions to provide valuable insights in the form of cultural narratives, key takeaways of which feature in FDzeeN:
“The food you choose to bring should be effortlessly available to cook/buy/eat wherever you are. We encourage you to follow your own traditional eating rituals irrespective of social norms. Keep an open mind to other participants’ ways so that everyone is comfortable.You are welcome to join in from anywhere."
All the information will be collected and documented in the form of a comprehensively edited and engaging periodical publication, FDzeeN. Issue 01 is schedule for a June 2021 release.
Our goal is to showcase the power of co-creation. We wish to empower the transdisciplinary creatives from our community to have decision making power over our food systems. We defend that a cluster of creatives can add value to the regenerative systems we need to implement.
We are actively working to be the reference space for (1) reflection, (2) discussion, (3) action around food. We envision fomenting better practices through our members thereby boosting economies around food design by promoting collaboration.
Innovative character
We are leveraging a defining moment in time, where all of us were stuck at home, unable to act, but hungry to connect. By creating a Nation without borders, we have a chance to do it right this time, learning from all our mistakes. By putting people, planet and health first, we can demonstrate a model world we aspire to live in.
Food Design is an emerging discipline with potential to help existing businesses create and implement more efficient systems. Our global network of transdisciplinary agents, interdependent and connected by shared interest, represents 39 different areas of expertise. Our citizens range from chefs and caterers to nutritionists, from food scientists to researchers, from experiential and multisensory event producers to illustrators, artists and architects working with food. A wide variety of designers are also represented - with specializations in graphics, product, service and systems design.
We also bring together policy makers, tech geeks, entrepreneurs and gastronomes with expertise in writing, communication, and blogging. We count on members of our community working with anthropology, education, sustainability and innovation. Our objective is to make meaningful connections and grow our tribe of like-minded individuals, not limited by discipline but connected by shared purpose. What makes us innovative and unique:
- Horizontality: Inclusive of all disciplines willing to enhance our food systems.
- Sustainable Politics of Design: Hosting and promoting co-creation processes where diverse approaches merge to decide how we continue to eat.
- Inspiring solidarity and empathic practices, we integrate intellectual beauty into the discipline of Food Design.
We’re agile, rapid thinking, fast learners who love what we do. In contrast to other more widely known areas of design, such as product or furniture design focused on mastering the depths of a practice, the horizontal nature of Food Design differentiates. It supports potentiality.
