Researchers from Imperial College London will be asking visitors to London's Borough Market to discover what food design thinking is.

The Imperial researchers and students from the Dyson School of Design Engineering and colleagues from the Royal College of Art will be tempting visitors to the Markets to learn more about food design thinking, as part of London Design Festival. The Festival celebrates and promotes London as the design capital of the world.

The Imperial and RCA team have partnered with Borough Market, home to like-minded producers and inspiring, knowledgeable food experts and importers, to stage a series of interactive design interventions. 

Colin Smith caught up with Dr Stephen Green, a senior teaching fellow at the Dyson School, who leads Imperial’s involvement with the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council funded ‘Open Food’ research to learn what food design thinking is and why we should all head on over to Borough Markets to learn more.

Dr Green and the team will be at Borough Market from Wednesday 20 September to Saturday 23 September 2017.

What is food design thinking?

'Food design thinking is a new approach that encourages us to consider how design can influence and innovate what we eat throughout the whole food production process. It encompasses many things ranging from influencing policymakers, to getting manufacturers to make the smallest changes in their manufacturing and farming processes to improve the environmental sustainability of products.

What do you hope to achieve with this new discipline?

In the food and drink sector, it has the potential to be a catalyst for encouraging more innovation. It may also help us all to tackle some of the seemingly intractable challenges that countries face such as improving nutrition and combatting rising levels of obesity.

How could this approach make food supply chains more sustainable?

We hope this way of thinking could help manufacturers and retailers shift their focus from being purely market driven to opening up more to collaborating with consumers so that new innovative approaches can be developed to get better products into the marketplace.

Give me two examples of how food design thinking could change our culinary experiences in a good way?  

Academics at the Dyson School are developing new ways to embed good eating behaviours in children to support life-long good nutrition.  Exhibitor Florencia Sepulveda has developed a cooking and eating toolkit, which includes specially shaped food cutters, implements for tasting and containers for smelling.  Children and parents use these to creatively explore food through all their senses to encourage a healthy and adventurous relationship with food and eating.

The School is also working with students at the RCA where one of the projects on display is food packaging that is made from sea grass fibre, which has antibacterial properties and is biodegradable, so it could reduce food waste as well as plastic packaging waste.

How will you be participating in the London Design Festival?

A colleague of mine, Dr Weston Baxter, and I are leading two of the exhibits.

One is a called “A celebration of coffee rituals”. We will ask visitors to consider how many of the daily rituals that make their lives meaningful revolve around food and drink, whether bringing people together to relax, or to signal the start of a new day. With this in mind, participants will be invited to reflect on their own rituals that involve coffee, and design new ones. 

The other, action for eating well, will get people to explore what they think good nutrition is. Visitors will be encouraged to make 3D models of their ideas, which they can take away as keep-sakes. These will provide valuable insights into these pictures of good nutrition which, in turn, can be a starting point for considering life-long wellbeing.