Category Archives: process + design

What’s the taste of corruption?

February 11, 2017 – 13:11

The next Data Cuisine Workshop will focus on ‘Corruption’ and take place in Pristina, Kosovo. If you have questions about it, please contact us. You want to participate? Simply register at here. Let’s find out together how corruption tastes!

Corruption remains one of the most significant problems Kosovo faces today. UNPD Kosovo fights strongly to make corruption a problem of the past. We are happy to be invited by them to tell stories of corruption through data dishes that we will create during this two-day workshop on February 25-26, 2017.

Tags corruption, food, learning, local, participation | Permalink | Comments Off

action process + art process + design workshop

Out of Soil continues in India

September 15, 2015 – 08:45

The Out of Soil project started as a playful action in Berlin in April 2015. The project and its different parts have taken their cues from the ambiguous meaning of the words ‘out of soil’ as in ‘made out of soil’ or ‘running out of soil’.

We are happy to announce that the project Out of Soil will be happening in New Delhi, India end of this month. New to the project are Soil Speaks stickers which give wearers a chance to give soil a voice. We have been invited by Dr Vandana Shiva and Navdanya to perform the Out of Soil action at the Bhoomi: Maati Ma – The Festival of Soil on October 1.

As a new extension to the Out of Soil project, we will run a 3-day Soil Games workshop with high-school students in New Delhi. Soil is much more than just a matter of economic and existential value, but the way we perceive and use it is deeply rooted in our cultures. The workshop brings up the culturally different concepts and personal stories connected to soil and transforms them into games.

Together with the students we will develop and play games that relate to the themes of soil and land use. We will introduce various game mechanics and talk about typical local games. Moreover, participants will learn about soil and land issues in the world, about the composition of soil as well as plants and life underground. Also traditional and cultural meanings of soil will be looked at: what role does soil play in myths and religious beliefs? We will discuss the economic and social meanings of land, land use, ownership and agriculture and their ramifications on the life of each of us. Based on these introductions, games will be developed and tested in small groups, and eventually presented at the Festival of Soil.

Out of Soil in India is supported by IFA, Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen.

Tags games, India, learning, participation, religious beliefs, soil | Permalink | Comments Off

process + design

We suggest: a catalytic data dinner

September 4, 2014 – 08:50

The press response was unbelievably positive after the last Data Cuisine workshop at Sonar/Big Bang Data Exhibition in Barcelona. We got covered by a lot of international design blogs like Trendhunter, Citylab, Core77, Fastcodesign, We Make Money Not Art, CNet, Desingbook etc and print magazines (Folio/Mexico, Page /Germany), and we even made it into the major Costa Rican newspaper La Nacion and Forbes Online. So what’s coming next for Data Cuisine?

We aim for a few more editions of the workshop, in order to continue to explore the medium for data representation in conjunction with local cuisines. We are also considering varying the format in the future. Next to the current model — a workshop — we are sure that a high-end data dinner would work well.

We found that the consumption of the food at the end of the workshops could have more emphasis or almost be developed as a separate event. A data dinner would not focus on the collaborative workshop process, but on the dining experience, in which the represented data would provide the topic for analysis and debate.

A data dinner could have any topic that is represented statistically, i.e. society, economics, science, culture and politics. Imagine a group of politicians, managers or scientists that is served several courses of a data dinner representing main issues in their respective field in such a sensual and surprising way. We believe that experience would stir a very inspirational debate opening up new perspectives and lines of thought.

When served the data dishes are not legible without explanation. Some look like ordinary dishes that reveal their meaning only by eating them. Others are very graphic and visual, but in general one has to be told what data they represent. In this way the dishes generate curiosity, which is already the ideal starting point for a discussion about the story and data ‘behind the dish’.

In its article on Data Cuisine, PAGE magazine recommended to anyone interested in it to request a workshop for his or her city. We add: any company, government or organisation that could imagine having a data dinner, please get in touch, too.

For the whole link list of press articles go to the project site.

Tags change, debate, food, methods | Permalink | Comments Off

open data process + design workshop

2nd day: It’s all about food

September 17, 2012 – 07:30

On the second day of the Open Data Cooking Workshop in Helsinki we moved to Aromi Kitchen, a kitchen for cooking classes, and started to get our hands dirty. The workshop participants had selected their topics and data the day before. They also had done most of the shopping and thought out their recipes.

So Sunday was all about working with the ingredients and learning from Antti how to create delicious and good looking dishes while Miska, the data hunter, helped to find the last bits and pieces of missing data and Moritz and I were busy documenting what was going on.

Symeon makes his dough for the Lasagne called Spiced Foreigners Between Pasta that compares Finland’s population with and without immigrants.

Rossana mixes her Suicide Cocktail based on Finnish, German and Italian data on suicide rates, monthly average wage, alcohol consumption and average temperature.

Dimitrii gets ready to cut beet roots for his Criminal Herring in Fur Coat based on Finnish Crime Rates in 2011.

Hero shot of Jen’s Happiness Cocktail visualising the amount of smiling Facebook friends…

…and of Nathalie’s and Melinda’s Lakmoussetikka showing the amount of harvested blueberries (jelly on top) in relation to the amount of blueberries that are not picked in Finland (white chocolate mouse).

Tags data visualisation, food, improvisation, local, society, workshop | Permalink | Comments Off

open data process + design workshop

Open Data Cooking is steaming in Helsinki

September 16, 2012 – 10:19

Yesterday we started the Open Data Cooking Workshop at Aalto Media Factory in Helsinki. Together with twelve participants we embarked on a journey through local open data, food and data representation with culinary means. In the morning we gave short introductions into the different disciplines like Open Data in Finland by Miska, principles of cooking and Finish cuisine by Antti and data visualisation by Moritz. See more documentation on the Data Cuisine site.