Containers – Group Project - Part II

Part II of the Design Agenda's group project.  Read Part I here.

[N.B. This is where the project becomes a little NSFW.]

Daecan and I had set ourselves a timeline and series of goals we wished to achieve - despite not having finalised a product yet - this helped us to work to schedule and not allow this project to fall by the wayside come Christmas.

After our previous unsuccessful exploration together into a container design, we looked individually at different aspects of the culture of eating and tried to come up with some sketches of containers that included cultural eating habits.

My family has a lot of quirks, as a lot of families do, and one quirk in particular is based around food preparation.  If you are making a sandwich and you've just put the lid on it (i.e. the top piece of bread) and you realise you've forgotten a crucial ingredient, you can't take the lid off it to add it in.  That would be rude.  Taking the lid off a made sandwich is like peeking at it's undressed state - you're revealing its hidden insides to the world...  I know, it sounds strange, but families do have these quirks!

This exposing of the sandwich, this voyeurism got me thinking more about the naughty side of food and our cheeky interactions with it. It reminded me of our group conversations about peeking into a lunch box that someone else has packed for you and the excitement that goes with it.  These thoughts stuck in my mind while I did some cheeky voyeuristic lunch box sketches.

When I showed Daecan my sketches the following week we decided to explore this topic further, linking in the modern culture of food porn - taking photos of you food and uploading them to social media to share with the world.  We discussed food porn; how it objectifies and fetishises food, glorifying the presentation of food to a god-like level to be worshiped by unknown 'followers' from all over the globe, with their 'likes' and 'comments'.  This led us to the wider topic of fetish, in a much broader sexual sense, and how fetishes often revolve around the senses, or deprivation thereof.

Beginning with voyeuristic fetishes, much like the food porn trend (you can look but you can't touch), we tried to think of fetishes incorporating all of the senses and a container to represent each.  We ended up with 5 characters to define our containers:
A. Disguise
B. Physical restraint (bondage)
C. Blind folded
D. Taste tease
E. 'Peeping Tom'

We thrashed out some loose ideas and with our supervisors approval began working on renders to present to the rest of the group the following week.