mouthfeel & emotions
EMOME
Master's Degree Project in collaboration with IKEA
Examiner: Per Liljeqvist, Lecturer at Lund University
Supervisor: Claus-Christian Eckhardt, Professor at Lund University
External Supervisor: Michael Nikolic, Creative Leader at IKEA of Sweden
June 2017 / Lund, Sweden
It is a set of emotional outlet eating tools for not only eating but exploring with your mouth.
This is something more than normal cutlery that shoveling food into your mouth. I aim to let out the emotions that you are hiding. In addition to riching the dining experience and encouraging people to be mindful with every bite. Providing 5 different emotions such as fear, surprised, kinda sexy, worried, and annoyed that you can explore with your mouth. This project started from our journey to Mars with NASA and focus on food-related areas. On long-duration missions, food becomes more important from a psychological perspective.
I did an experiment trying out some tools that I thought would be fun or might not suppose to eat with. I tried normal cutleries with fur handles, no-handle cutleries, a wheel, beads, rings, two different foams, and mesh. It was mainly for exploring how your mouth can do with different gestures and what texture in the mouth is interesting.
Food is an effective connector. It is a tool for creating discussions and for questioning our beliefs.
In the book, The Psychology of Food Choice, Shepherd, and Raats believe most people are very habitual in their choice of food and size and timing of meals. As a result, they have learned a set of beliefs and expectations about the impact of their habitual diet. However, I believe eating is sometimes to reward ourselves, to soothe or manage our emotions. But people nowadays only feed their hunger but feed their minds.
In another book, The Meaning of Cooking, Kaufmann said, “ Eating gives us pleasure. There is the simple pleasure of having had enough to eat and the more refined pleasures of experimenting with our senses.” And I believe people are still longing for more experience.
I believe eating is sometimes to soothe or manage our emotions. However, people nowadays only feed their hunger but their mind.
In this project, I especially wanted to look into the underlying emotional issue. For most, we've been taught to "overcome" our bodily cues. Rather than expressing our emotions, we tend to stuff them down with "comfort food" that gives our bodies a false sense of fulfillment. When we deny our strong emotions, they grow even stronger. As they gain strength, they also seek outlets. You can't suffocate your emotions and not deal with them. Sometimes, you need to get it out, otherwise, it could suffocate you. Everyone gets angry, upset, or jealous at some time. In fact, the only question about these emotions is whether we choose to deal with them now or later.
Emotions are complex and yet very personal, especially about food. And finding strong connections between emotions and the overall mouthfeel wasn’t easy. I am not trying to generalize what kind of mouthfeel relates to a certain emotion. It is all based on the experiment and interview I did and my personal experience but hopes most of you can relate to it. Among my exploration, I believe not only good feelings or emotions we will have when we eat even though it is the main expectation of having food. Combing mouthfeels with different eating gestures to achieve that. These emotions are based on my imagination of what astronauts would try to hide because they have to be high-performance on board and not allow emotional disturbance. Each of these features is subtle but lets out the emotions or just simply enhances the dining experience.
Exhibited at
Serial Eater CID, 2020 June - November
Reciprocity Design Liège, 2018 October
Stockholm Furniture Fair, 2018 February
Kulturnatten i Lund, 2017 September
Degree Exhibition Lund School of Industrial Design, 2017 June
