Abstract
Cultural globalization threatens cultural diversity, especially for minority cultures and ethnic cultures. In response to the fading of cultural identities, there is rare literature discussing how design can contribute. Through integrating the cultural significance of food and food design methods, the paper proposes a culture-oriented food design model to strengthen cultural identity and create connections. A case study of designing a delivery service of Chinese food for the second-generation Chinese Americans is presented to solve their identity crisis through the process of defining user, content, experience, and design around culture respectively. Feedback from target users shows that the cultural meaning contained in the service can evoke their ethnic identity successfully. The result indicates that the design on culturally significant food can be applied to the identity problem related to specific communities and populations by enhancing food experiences, thus to strengthen cultural identity, increase social inclusion and cultural diversity.
Keywords
food culture; cultural significance; user experience; identity crisis
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2018.593
Citation
Guo, Y., and Ji, T. (2018) Culture-Orientated Food Design for Social Issue, in Storni, C., Leahy, K., McMahon, M., Lloyd, P. and Bohemia, E. (eds.), Design as a catalyst for change - DRS International Conference 2018, 25-28 June, Limerick, Ireland. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2018.593
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Culture-Orientated Food Design for Social Issue
Cultural globalization threatens cultural diversity, especially for minority cultures and ethnic cultures. In response to the fading of cultural identities, there is rare literature discussing how design can contribute. Through integrating the cultural significance of food and food design methods, the paper proposes a culture-oriented food design model to strengthen cultural identity and create connections. A case study of designing a delivery service of Chinese food for the second-generation Chinese Americans is presented to solve their identity crisis through the process of defining user, content, experience, and design around culture respectively. Feedback from target users shows that the cultural meaning contained in the service can evoke their ethnic identity successfully. The result indicates that the design on culturally significant food can be applied to the identity problem related to specific communities and populations by enhancing food experiences, thus to strengthen cultural identity, increase social inclusion and cultural diversity.