Food Design 6 competition submission

On June 15th we submitted our slo plates to the Food Design 6 competition as the following "plan" image and one page text explaining the project.

The one page written submission for Food Design 6:

The Slo collection is a new line of tableware meant to invite Satiation, create a better eating Lifestyle, and Opulent dinner setting. Through the shape of the plate, portions and perception is no longer controlled in the same way. This Design was inspired by the variations of eating behaviors from culture to culture. Specifically, one summer was spent in Acquapendente in the Lazio region of Italy, where the active environment made it much easier to enjoy the abundance of food that we ate. Coming back to Montreal, it became evident that it was not easy to enjoy neither the quantity nor the quality of the food as we previously did. In fact, much of the anticipation before the meal usually ends with a feeling of overconsumption and regret. From there, we wanted to investigate where satisfaction lay.

It wasn’t easy to relate Montreal to a village in Italy, we had to look at the way the North American culture exposed food. Of course, we knew that there wasn’t much we can say or do about advertisements on billboards and television but they weren’t so much of a direct influence when we think of sitting down and having a meal. We knew there was something more to it so we researched eating behaviors and food in culture to find a co-relation.

After reading Brian Wansink’s “Mindless Eating”; David A. Kessler’s ”The end of Overeating”; and Paul Roberts’ “The End of Food”, we used their experimentation and brought it to the breakfast table which was our drawing board of personal discovery. We didn’t just go to our mindless routine; we studied our plate from what it held to how much we were eating. 20 minutes later, there was still half the plate left to finish. Just by the simple fact that the plate could tell us how much we had left to eat it was subliminally telling us how much we should be eating. But just like any awkward setting when you have too much to eat you feel the need to keep going either it’s a family dinner, or you can’t allow food to go to waste.

Instead of putting our frustrations on ourselves we realized that the problem really derived from the shape of the plate. It was just this flat shapeless pit where it becomes so easy to put huge portions. At this stage we became confident that what really needed investigation was how plates can be reshaped and how do people react to it. With only the wood and metal shop available to us, the only resource we had was the lathe machine which is basically a wood turning wheel and carving tools that dig in and create the symmetrical shapes.

After a year’s work, we came up with 7 series of plates, 4 of which remain the most popular and sought after shapes. What was interesting was exaggerating the criteria that form the plate i.e.: the border, the depth, the hollowness, and the size. We decided to keep the size the same as you would find in a restaurant because we live in a culture that believes in the visual abundance. This is the only way to step away from the traditional diet appearance. All the variations were meant to take away space from the plate but also to create a playful environment so that you think about where and how you place the food. In turn, the shapes of the plates are meant to make the food look bigger and still fill the size of the plate. This interaction allows the user to slow down enough to enjoy the environment and food against the submissive need to over eat.