Tag Archives: food

open data process + design workshop

2nd day: It’s all about food

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).

 

open data process + design workshop

‘Data Cooking’ or ‘How to make a real pie chart and other data dishes’

Have you ever tried to imagine how a fish soup tastes whose recipe is based on publicly available local fishing data? Or what a pizza would be like if it was based on your cities population mix? Do you want to know how public data could relate to cooking? Can you imagine to push the paradigms of data representation to the extreme by applying the principles of your local cuisine?

Then you should consider participating in the ‘Data Dinner Workshop’. It combines the representation of local open data with cooking. The workshop aims at researching ways to represent data on a multi-dimensional sensory level by exploring the inherent qualities of food such as colour, form, texture, smell, taste, nutrition, origin etc. It offers to its participants the opportunity to translate concrete numbers, i.e. local open data, into concrete matter, i.e. a menu, thereby gaining unexpected insights into both media and learning about their principles and relations.

The workshop is designed as a series of collaborative and experimental research experiences, blurring the boundaries between teachers and participants, data and food. At the end of each workshop, an open data menu and cookbook will be created.

The workshop series is organised by us in collaboration with Moritz Stefaner. Moritz is a well-known information visualizer focusing on information aesthetics and interactive visualization. He holds a B.Sc. in Cognitive Science and an M.A. In Interface Design. In each city where the workshop takes place a local chef will be teaching together with Moritz.

If you want to become involved, host a workshop or participate, please contact us.