I have chosen to conceive of my ongoing project, A Fork in the Road, as an opportunity to engage design in tackling one of the many issues challenging our times: the scale and consequences of our industrial food system. First being moved by statistics about the relationship between food and fossil fuels in my preliminary research on global warming, I began to focus on the task of visualizing the invisible in our everyday eating habits.
I have considered my design process in the context of this question: In what ways can the design of an exhibition provide both incentives and implements to prompt people to change individual habits for the common good?
This is a general question that I envision can be applied to any set of habits that affect the common good. In the case of this exhibition, I have aimed specifically to increase the consumption of local and regional foods—first in East Tennessee, now in Iowa.
I assert that it is critical not only to raise awareness about issues such as the scale and consequences of our industrial food system, but also simultaneously to facilitate a response to this newfound understanding. Therefore, I am presenting both information graphics (the “why”) and prototypes (the “how”) that could enable incremental changes in food purchasing and eating habits. My solutions toward this twofold end have ranged from the nauseating visualization of 1.1 million dots on a wall to the design of a calendar charting the seasonality of foods growing in each locale. The latter demonstrates my commitment to making this exhibition specific to the audiences in both Knoxville and Des Moines.
Through my ongoing research process, I have come to appreciate the universality of food as a topic, and I continue to respect the complexity of food ethics and food production. What I recognize about “local” as a criterion for food is the breadth of its effect: to buy and to eat more local and regional foods is not merely an environmentalist agenda—it is an act that impacts ecological health and economic health and human health and community health. What aims could be more universal?
My project seems to have become more timely as it has evolved. First the unprecedented global economic crisis and then the massive oil spill have revealed that the large-scale systems that we often take for granted are not necessarily stable or sustainable, and so it is increasingly apparent that we need to develop alternative systems. Our food system—that on which our very lives depend—is an appropriate one to tend to first.
