Design Research

PhD Exposé

Emily Groves, Pre-Doc Stipendiatin, Interaction Design

The aim of this project was to develop a PhD proposal through desk research and mentoring. It began with the idea of developing creative interaction design methods from food cultures with a beyond human focus. Over the four months, it was able to refine this to make it more specifically based around a personal practice and situation, as well as to focus on cultures around cheese-making and cheese-eating as a dedicated subject of investigation. This results in a more unique and applied proposal that complements a existing work, as well as that emerging from the wider design research field.

As designers increasingly seek to decentre people from the design process, certain food practices already embody the interdependencies humans have with the world around them. The production of gruyère cheese involves cows, grass, soil, lactobacillus helveticus, people, the weather and many more entangled actors. This example also highlights how such practices can span multiple spatio-temporal scales, from microbe to landscape, and second-long actions to year-long maturations. So what opportunities lie in bridging cultures around cheese and design practice?

This PhD will begin by pursuing more-than-human approaches from anthropology and design to understand existing cheese-making and cheese-eating practices in Suisse Romand. Then, working in the context of the culinary centre Deli Social, it will mediate this situated knowledge by proposing a series of events and workshops. In doing so, this thesis aims to foster experiences and generate knowledge that can contribute to new theoretical frameworks for dealing with our entangled world.