Future Now
The IFTF Blog
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Food Futures Lab Hosts Expert Workshop
Recently the Food Futures Lab convened a diverse group of experts to participate in a half-day workshop to explore the future of human-food interaction. The workshop drew on the talents of an impressive group of thinkers from academia, the culinary arts, design, technology and more for a series of interactive sessions aimed at understanding the possibilities that emerge when combining foresight and design processes to reimagine our food system. The event was generously hosted by Airbnb’s Global Food Team in the company’s San Francisco headquarters. An appropriate setting, as Airbnb has long been a champion of design-based thinking and considers it to be a strategic tool.
This year, the Food Futures Lab’s research is focused on the future of food experiences. Food designers are moving beyond packaging and aesthetics to use food as a lever to impact human health, environmental resilience, local economies, and more. To do this systematically, we need a new discipline for designing food experiences—a practice of human-food interaction design that integrates the relationships between humans, their food, their aspirations, and the contexts in which they eat. To learn more about this year’s research, read our overview here.
We are excited to incorporate the insights gleaned from this workshop into our 2016 research and look forward to sharing the results at our member workshop on October 12 and 13 in Palo Alto, CA (for more information contact Dawn Alva at [email protected]). Thank you again to our hosts at Airbnb and to all of the amazing participants.
Participating experts included:
Geetika Agrawal, La Cocina
David Bordow, Momentum Machines
Miguel Cabra, food design and innovation consultant
Adam Elmaghraby, food innovation consultant
Toshi Hoo, HooHaus
Soh Kim, Stanford
Matthew Lange, UC Davis
Anna Lappé, Real Food Media
Misa Misono, IDEO
Thomas Nelson, Kitchen Table Advisors
Kristen Rasmussen, UC Berkeley
Michael Robertson, frog
Rebecca Power, Future Repasts
Liz Rossof, Betabrand
Tassiana Willis, Youth Speaks
Emily Yao, Planet Murple
George Zisiadis, Momentum Machines
About the Food Futures Lab
IFTF’s Food Futures Lab identifies and catalyzes the world-changing innovations that have the potential to reinvent our global food systems. We use a suite of methodologies to systematically envision future possibilities, and draw insights to drive action today. We align the minds, innovations, and resources shaping the future of food with a long-term perspective. The Food Futures Lab challenges assumptions and reveals new opportunities to make a resilient, equitable, and delicious future of food.