The bottled water you drank today most likely travelled over 1000 before it ended up in your hand. And the bottle it you drank it from will be around long after you’re gone, yet you dipose of it in less than an hour. How is this a good thing?
As a culture we are becoming more aware of the need for sustainability throughout almost every aspect of our lives. The idea of sustainability may feel like a trend, but the results of its global initiatives are nothing to be ignored. The power of design thinking coupled with the philosophy of sustainable awareness can do more than solve problems. It can improve the human condition.
As part of a semester long project at MICA, we looked the the problems that pervade the grocery business on a systemic level—from distribution to personal storage.
I looked at how people engage and interact with their kitchen, specifically the food they eat and how it is stored. I believe that kitchens today are in serious need of a redesign, both formally and functionally. As a designer, I have long been appalled at the enormous amounts of visual pollution that are contained in kitchens—from the various sizes of the packages to the technicolor collaging of graphics and information contained on the labels and packages themselves.
The kitchen has long been tauted as the most social room in the house and what better time than now to introduce a new way of interacting with the most important of all items that reside there—food. Ration is a system of food storage that aims at uniting the consumer with their kitchen. It gives the consumer a sense of ownership and pride in the way their kitchen is presented and interacted with.
I devised a system that distilled this visual chaos into a universal and customizable system of food storage for the kitchen of tomorrow. The containers are similar in size, differing only in height, which supports the modular nature of the system. The labels themselves contain only the information specified by the user, who is also able to choose the color palette of the system. It is a beautiful system the revitalizes and unifies the entire kitchen.
This project was shown at the International Contemporary Furniture Fair during Design Week in New York City at the Javits Center.
