Dissertation Draft

Revisiting my disseration for friday's submission, I spent some time reading on new concepts of Transition Design and Concepts of Commensality that I found from food design researchers from a zoom talk I had attended last week. One of the researcher's portfolio; Gabriela Aquije Zegarra had a particular article that piqued my interest and gave me alot of insight into their discussion about how design and designers can design food futures through discourse.


Kitchen Aid Care Through Collective Cookery

One of the books I found from Gabriella’s written piece was a book by architect, Carolyn Steel, How Food Shapes Our Lives which she referenced in the article about how although urban areas occupy a small fraction of the global surface, they consume up to 75 per cent of the world’s food and energy resources, with daily eating practices distanced from their impact on bioregional natural systems.

It shows our co-dependence on our natural system for food and energy resources. Steel calls our desire to want to live both in cities and in nature the ‘urban paradox'.

It makes me think a lot about the concept of nature being harvested for urban needs and how cities like Singapore sometimes try to open up man-made spaces where nature is built into this little city, for relaxation and biophilia. But not enough spaces in Singapore allow for free harvest of plants where we are able to see the dependence on food. Community gardens do exist but it is not apparent with such small amounts of land.

For example, there is a certain type of plant my mom plucks from urban areas in Singapore to use in creating a hair dye in tinting her hair darker. However, doing so is illegal. But her showing me how she had found and harvested these weeds to her putting it in her hair is a satisfaction unlike other. The efforts put into the harvest makes the value and reward more worthwhile. Similar to the very known “IKEA effect” where it notes – the increase in valuation of self-made products, where we use the IKEA manual to assemble to product and feel immense satisfaction from seeing it fully formed! Or even when you see your code working properly :,)


What if we bring Singaporeans into the process of farming our precious imported food through technology?

Designing for the Pluriverse

In the same article, Gabriella refers to Anthropologist Arturo Escobar's Book on "Designing for the Pluriverse" (Designing for many) where she argues that to foster transition into more – and rather urgent – sustainable futures, designers need to develop a relational conceptualisation of the domains of everyday life in terms of nested structures (household, village, city, region and the planet)’,

Escobar points to the practice of ‘transition design’, developed by designer and academic Terry Irwin; Irwin argues for the need for transition to more sustainable futures and proposes frameworks that enable designers and communities to work together at ‘the interconnectedness and interdependence of social, economic, political and natural systems’.