Containers – Group Project - Part III

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

[N.B. This project may contain sexual references and may be NSFW.]

The next step in our project was to produce some more refined sketches and renders, and to create personality profiles for each of our containers.

Container 1

Container 1 (known initially as Vanilla) is sweet and innocent.  It is a cute white furry ball which smells like vanilla.  Inside, though, it hides it's secret - the food you crave that others wont go near...  Essentially, it is an airtight container with a scent embedded in its outer silicone shell that masks any unpleasant smelling food, meaning that you can bring your pungent fish cakes for lunch and no one else need know.

Container 2

Container 2 (the bondage container) is a show-off.  It is a latex strapped cage that can be handcuffed to your desk.  It's for displaying your most precious food items to the world, but not letting them have it - you can look but don't touch...  Using a complicated latex cage as a cover, this container can be used to protect your cookies from prying hands.  Great for food that you want to show off but don't want to share.

Container 3

Container 3 (the latex bag) is a tactile exploration, concealing a hidden delight.  It allows you to play with your food without getting dirty.  For the food that you want to squish and squeeze, but still want to eat...  The shape of the container was based around that of a normal clear plastic food bag, but we decided that we wanted to use gloss black latex to echo the fetish aspect of the product, and to hide its contents from the user.  The latex allows the user to play with their food, incorporating both the blindfolded and groping fetishes.

Container 4

Container 4 (the Peeping Tom) is coy and coquettish.  It hides away behind it's beautiful case, but you can peep at through the etched screen.  Just don't let it catch you!  The idea behind this container was voyeurism and narcissism - beautiful food sits on a mirrored base and is framed behind an intricate carving.  This was very much inspired by traditional oriental paintings of a couple being watched during coitus.  The design shown in the render required further refining to produce a more aesthetically beautiful box, echoing the food inside.

Container 5

Container 5 (the edible container) is a delicious temptation.  Nibble away at the container, but don't eat too much or you'll have to eat its contents too!  The container is made from rice paper, the sweet, edible paper used in sweets and cakes, and is totally edible.  The concept it all about self-restraint.  As the container is temporary, it is up to the user to savour the experience and see how long they can withhold from eating the whole thing and relieving their short-term gratification. 

Unfortunatley, we were only able to render three of the containers before the presentation (container 1 actually broke the rendering software multiple times!).  After the Christmas break, we resolved to buy materials and begin making the prototypes. We realised quickly that due to time constraints our prototyping would mostly be cannibalising existing products to give a flavour of what the final products might be like.

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.

Containers – Group Project - Part I

For the project stage of our personal design agenda work, we were put into pairs and asked to design something that reflected our own agendas.

Myself and Daecan, a former architect student, were paired together and as we are pragmatists, we quickly began to brainstorm what it is that we would like to design.  We began by looking at the objects that we interact with during our day-to-day lives.  This in itself is quite telling, as neither of us wanted to produce something that was purposeless – the product had to have a use, and be useful to the user.

From our list of objects, we investigated a few avenues; looking briefly at the well-trodden path of the eco-friendly toothbrush, the water tap, and the bottle opener, before stopping at food containers.

On a recent trip back to my parental home, I realised that our kitchens are used very inefficiently.  In particular, a large percentage of the kitchen cupboards in my parent’s house are taken up by containers.  Tupperware.  Cake tins.  Biscuit barrels.  Very specifically sized plastic boxes.  And we hoard all of these items because they may be useful for one food item, one day.  It occurred to me, then, would it be better if we can design a ‘one size fits all’ container, one that can change shape to suit the item inside it.

We began investigating the boundaries of this collapsible container; a container for everything.

Starting first with usage, we then looked at scale – could this container transform from the size of a cake tin to the size of a portable water bottle? What shape could it be – did it have to be square? Could it be round?  How would it collapse? And could it be beautiful enough to form a relationship with the user? Would they want to re-purpose it when it had reached the end of its life?

...And then we met with our supervisor, and he suggested that we had been too pragmatic in our approach.  We had essentially already decided what the end result was and we may have been pigeon-holed ourselves too early.  He suggested that we might want to look more at the culture of eating and the interaction the user has with their food... Cue another mind map.

This time, we focussed on mobile eating – i.e. lunch boxes and take-aways.  We considered the traditional presentations of the picture perfect Japanese bento box and the British fish and chips wrapped in newspaper.  We also discussed how different cultures eat their food, what implements they use (if any) and how this can be dictated by the type of food they are eating.  Most importantly, we talked about the overall ceremony that comes with eating food – how we peek into our lunch boxes to see what our mothers packed for us; how we offer our food to others around us; and how modern society loves to take photos of their food to ‘share’ with foodies all over the globe.  The anticipation; the big reveal; and the showing-off.

(very) rough sketches

In our rough sketches we looked at containers that were primarily moulded silicone, allowing the user to play with their food, use the container to eat their food (while keeping hands clean), and could fold down very small for ease of transportation.  Time and time again though we kept accidentally re-designing the paper bag! It seemed a bit of a dead end, so we decided to think individually and come up with some variations based on our cultural exploration, while trying to avoid the re-hashing the archetype of the paper bag.