DESIGNER: Hendrik Thomberg
PROFESSORSHIP: Transformative Design
THEME: The Ritual
DESIGN: B.teMe
The basis of this project is an experimental examination of everyday rituals against the background of how conscious and subconscious, repetitive actions influence our understanding of the world. Food culture in particular makes it clear how closely tools and cultural techniques are interwoven with our understanding of the environment, attitudes and behaviour. Rituals influence our everyday habits, which together characterise our lifestyle.
As the use of cutlery is learnt very early on, usage, etiquette and social norms are very familiar. The use of alternatives is often viewed with suspicion; eating with your hands, for example, is considered ‘uncivilised’ or even unhygienic. Because there is a right and wrong way to use conventional cutlery, experimentation, freedom, alternatives etc. are lost in the act of eating. Only cooking, decorating and planning meals offer room for manoeuvre. If food intake is often degraded to a minor matter, this is accompanied by a lack of appreciation of food and its preparation.
Theoretical and practical work run in parallel right from the start, so experimentation and research can be mutually beneficial. Initial experiments with nails and screws to try out eating with fewer prongs than usual showed how skewers can be defined differently than usual and used for eating. My idea of bringing the eating tools closer to the food provoked a more conscious approach to food even in the first tests. I realised that breaking through routine processes is useful to encourage a general questioning of habits.
Grasping is a crucial component for changing habitual eating behaviour. The basic functions of skewering, cutting and scooping traditionally occur in isolation and are combined here without the specification of precise gripping surfaces or specific gripping positions. The ‘B.teMe’ ensemble is not to be understood as a closed set, but more as an open study that is primarily intended to explore and test boundaries:
- the design favours slower and more thoughtful eating and thus helps to build a »healthier« relationship with food
- the unfamiliar shape prevents familiar usage patterns and replaces rules of etiquette with playful experimentation
- the cutlery offers resistance to inadequately reflected rules and norms
- a more conscious intake of food can consecutively support a generally more conscious consumption of goods
