Food Thinking

Design thinking is no longer fit for purpose. How can design be practised more relationally and inclusively, mindful of complexity and inequality? Through food thinking and asking better questions says Sophie Lovell, co-founder of The Common Table.

Where should design go from here?

In 2021, increasingly dissatisfied with the contexts and modality of our work relating to design and feeling the need for a radical shift, studio_lovell created a platform from which we could find out what that shift needed to be. All we knew was that it should not be embedded in design tropes that felt increasingly irrelevant and that we should feel passionate about it.

So we founded The Common Table as a “platform for food futures and systemic change”. The heart of The Common Table is an independent digital magazine with a comprehensive mandate: to bring diverse viewpoints from around the world to a common table to facilitate new ways of understanding and working through the medium of food-related systems.

It has taken us until now to realise what we did by taking this step. We knew this move away from design and architecture communication and writing towards food systems was at first more of a sidestep than a shift. But the more people we talked to through The Common Table and our other work, the more we realised that the issues being faced, regardless of discipline, were essentially the same: from supply chain problems to the chronic effects of the exploitation of people and planet, the destruction of ecosystems and climate, to collapsing infrastructures. So what had changed in our relationship to design that made us want to turn away from it?

Essentially we felt that design, as a mindset, had become unfit for purpose. The Covid pandemic – the “great reset” for some, the shocking loss of life (seven million and counting) and loved ones for millions of others – had made it glaringly obvious that humanity shares one small planet and catastrophes are things that happen to everything and everyone on it. Therefore, any reductive, object-based design approach to individual problems seemed utterly pointless.

The questions we started asking ourselves were: How can design be practised in a holistic, contextual way, mindful of complexity and inequality, and more fit for purpose? What if the universal model of design thinking, so embraced by capitalism, is not the right approach at this watershed moment; this paradigm shift in the planet’s history? What if problem-solving is as useful as trying to decapitate a Hydra (cut off one head and two more grow in its place)?

Wicked problems in a wicked world

Taking a problem-solving approach implies something is “wrong” from a particular point of view, and that the designer – the hero – comes along to fix or improve it. It puts the designer and the user on a closed-loop binary seesaw. It is not contextually aware. A human-centred, iterative approach like design thinking heavily echoes the traditional Western science model: empirical observation, systematic experimentation and the formulation of hypotheses and theories based on evidence. It’s all about conquering a “problem” through a mindset of experimentation and rational discussion until the “right” answer is arrived at.

There are other methods of course. Over the past decade or so, speculative design  – a term coined by designers Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby, who developed an entire discipline of research-based, “what if?”, design strategies – has yielded a rich and vital field of design from the likes of Liam Young, Superflux, James Auger, Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg and many more. Speculative design strategies have increased hand-in-hand with the increasing number of global emergencies facing the planet and its populations and that is a good thing.

Left-field thinking, like that often employed by speculative designers, used to be considered the realm of the “crazies” and “off-gridders” but these were the ones who had spent the last 40, 50, 60 years thinking about what would happen if economic growth-based practice continues unchecked. With one global emergency following the next in snowballing succession, together with an explosion in self-publishing, the left field has now become centre stage and the hunt for the big design idea to save the world is on.

However, while often strongly system-critical and challenging of the reactive problem-solving approach, speculative design still tends to belong within the design thinking model as an ostensibly extended research and prototyping phase for those so-called “wicked problems” design thinkers like to talk about. Therefore, although speculative, you could say it is still hypothetical and therefore remains within that very linear, problem-solving paradigm.

Mindsets, not masterplans

What if there was another, more relational, way of approaching the design process that was rooted in the here and now rather than fictional futures? One that is based not on things or problems but on building and maintaining healthy relationships. A non-binary approach that is adaptive, and embraces context, equity and equality. One that allows for even contradictory interests for a multitude of stakeholders: macro and micro, human and non-human. One that is less causal, more entangled.

Spatial practice from architects radically rethinking “architecture after architecture” has been working in this direction for some time. Consider the work of Tatjana Schneider and Jeremy Till at Spatial Agency, for example, who have shifted their focus from “matter of fact” to matter of concern” and “making stuff to making policy”. Or the collaborative studio Forty Five Degrees who “investigate the built environment … across multiple scales, analysing its physical, social, and economic entanglements”. Both practices, however, predominantly use the (human) built environment and (human) social interactions and spatial use and occupation as the framework for their endeavours.

If “design thinking” is a flawed construct within a dated and extractive paradigm, what could be used as a framework for this more relational design approach instead? One that takes us from “what if?” to “what next?” with agency and equity. Not so much reinventing the wheel as shifting the axis around which it spins by choosing to work within a framework of practices that are as old and rich as human existence – namely the cultivation and preparation of food.

Food and agriculture are the oldest industries known to humankind. They are a universal, yet uniquely diverse set of industries filled with knowledge stemming from millennia of experimentation, adaptation and cohabitation with hundreds of thousands of constantly changing ecologies. Yes, the majority, if not all, of industrial agriculture and food production is deeply flawed and mostly based on accelerationist progress with heavily extractive, colonial and environmental impacts but there are also many thousands of other, niche-specific, forms of agriculture that are not.

Arguably, the perspectives and values of all human cultures are deeply embedded in their food and agriculture practices, which means this embodied knowledge is per se manifold, contextual and holistic. Therefore, the diversity of non-industrial, place-based agriculture and food-related practices (such as fermentation, crop diversity, and ecology-appropriate planting) should make ideal learning tools for addressing the many failing and dated human-generated systems that need to change.

Better questions

Human bodies are composite and complex symbiotic relationships between human and microbial cells and human relationships with other humans as well as the non-human on this planet are equally symbiotic. If individuals or communities only take without giving back, they will not thrive and neither will anything else. In 1969, Rachel Carson famously wrote in her book Silent Spring: “In nature, nothing exists alone.” We already know that all living things are part of a web of life and if you touch, change or move anything you should do so with care, not just for the obvious consequences but for the unforeseen ones as well. So let’s start putting that knowledge into more universal practice in a collaborative, non-exploitative, nurturing way.

In her 2015 book The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing argues that “staying alive – for every species – requires livable collaborations. Collaboration means working across difference, which leads to contamination. Without collaborations, we all die.” We need to disentangle ourselves from notions of “progress” and fully embrace existing entanglements with nature, with other living beings, with cultural wisdom, our bodies, our technologies and our planet. This can be done not by finding reductive solutions to perceived problems but by cultivating the ability to openly approach dysfunctional processes and understand information and needs using sets of flexible adaptation skills based on asking better, inclusive questions.

Investigative, cross-disciplinary practice in design is, of course, not new but the scope and the focus on food systems have been changing significantly. Spatial practitioners Daniel Fernández Pascual and Alon Schwabe, aka Cooking Sections, have been working in this research-based investigative manner on food-related topics for the past decade as part of their huge and ongoing “Climavore” project. This is a research platform and agency working with marine biologists, botanists, farmers, chefs, herders, fisherfolk, anthropologists, geneticists and many others to ask “how to eat as humans change climates.”

Cooking Sections’ “Salmon: A Red Herring” sub-project, for example, included an exhibit in the Tate Modern 2020-2021  but also involved asking questions and engaging in collaborative field research about the salmon farming and fishing industry as well as the natural salmon ecosystems over several years. The project also reached into the Tate Modern’s infrastructure. the museum permanently removed salmon from all its food outlets and “replaced it with ingredients that promote regenerative aquacultures like bivalves and seaweeds”. Their practice mixes the visual arts, the food industry, geopolitics and more. They completely get that asking better, more inclusive questions and striving for an extensively collaborative practice is essential for human survival. And it is no accident that they chose food systems to work with.

Knowledge environments

Through The Common Table, we too are continuously immersed in other practice examples across all sorts of different fields that find their meeting points in food systems. From people like Noa Kekuewa Lincoln and his collaborators, who are working to restore food sovereignty networks on the island of Hawai’i through indigenous cropping systems, to Sean Roy Parker’s proposals for diet degrowth through recalibrating interspecies relationships or Johanna Mendelson Forman’s Conflict Cuisine and the role of food as a tool for peacebuilding. And whilst none of these would call themselves “designers” they are all deeply involved in asking better questions about the design of food systems and food cultures from a relational perspective.

These examples indicate another reason why agricultural and food production practices are an ideal place to start rethinking how we design, namely that they are the result of people working in partnership with their contexts – human and non-human – with the understanding that there is no one right way of doing things but an open mind is crucial. Or, in the words of marine mammal apprentice and poet Alexis Pauline Gumbs: “How can we listen across species, across extinction, across harm?” To establish environments where enough nourishing food can be produced regeneratively, people need to work within their ecosystems. Designers should not be working within manufacturing environments but within multidisciplinary and multi-representative knowledge environments.

Food Thinking

Regenerative agricultural practice is all about the future. It is about looking ahead, anticipating needs and being highly flexible and adaptive to elements that may be beyond our control. It’s also all about listening to and appreciating the needs of environments in an equitable manner: human and non-human elements together. This makes it the ideal knowledge environment in which to find new forms of practice – a new core approach that defines the way we ask questions.

In a bleak recent lecture, which can be seen online here, the highly respected architect Indy Johar of Dark Matter Labs, an organisation devoted to developing new support networks for collaborative system change, called our planet “a global farm with a small zoo for wild animals.” The ramifications of that are terrifying when put into the context, as he does, of the current dramatically accelerated level of planetary destruction.

Like Dark Matter Labs’ collaborative system change, embracing food thinking not only facilitates an accessible, inclusive path to understanding and nurturing thriving ecologies by building and maintaining healthy relationships it is also essential to survival. Humans need to stop treating the planet as a for-profit industrial farm owned by a handful of people, not at some speculative time in the future but immediately. Stepping away from the toxic system in which design has hitherto been complicit towards knowledge sharing and collectively working on asking better questions isn’t left field it’s a radical straw that needs to be grasped by all available hands with immediate effect.

Sophie Lovell is a writer and editor and the co-founder of studio_lovell and The Common Table, a digital platform for food thinking and systemic change, together with her food communication designer daughter Orlando Lovell. Born in London and based in Berlin, Sophie has worked on and with numerous publications in the fields of art, architecture and design, including uncube and Wallpaper* magazines. She has also written and edited several books on design and architecture, including David Thulstrup: A Sense of Place and Dieter Rams: As Little Design as Possible (Phaidon).

Title artwork © Niceaunties, reproduced with kind permission. An adapted version of this essay was first published under the title “Food production is an ideal place to start rethinking how we design” by Dezeen, May 1, 2024.