EATING - Alternative Designs for Restaurants

Description

SUMMARY

The aim of the “Eating” competition is to develop a design proposal for the restaurant typology, intended as a place of preparation and consumption of food. It is asked to the participants to create innovative and unconventional projects on this theme, questioning the very basis of the notion of the restaurant.

While numerous top chefs have been reinventing the way food is prepared, fast food companies have revolutionized the way food is consumed and sold. In addition, food trucks and delivery services have been gaining more popularity every day, establishing a new intermediary step between the restaurant and the client.

With similar creative attitude, the participants are urged to create an artifact, merging considerable programmatic innovation and valuable design tools. The proposal can be a device, a piece of furniture, an interior design project, a pavilion, a building or an urban plan. The scale of intervention, program dimensions and location are not given and they can be arranged by the participants to better suit their project.

restaurant noun [C]
An establishment where meals are served to customers.
As follows, very essential aspects of the conventional museum can be questioned.

- Can a restaurant be something different than a traditional Establishmet? Can it be based on an untraditional business model? And, can it be located in something else than a building? Can it be a network in the city rather than one single construction? Or can it be reduced to a smaller space, like a single room or just one object?

- What do we consider a meal? And, what kind of meals selection should be operated? Should a restaurant base their dishes on clients desires? What kind of design would be required for a restaurant with an almost infinite choice of dishes? And what if a restaurant would sell only one kind of meal? how could design innovatively respond to such an approach? Or, what if the meal selection would be operated by the restaurant for the client, and not vice-versa? Could a restaurant know in advance what’s better for its customers?

- Do meals necessarily have to be served in a restaurant? Can service be avoided and/or automatized? Or can there be an intermediate step between take away and traditional restaurants, where consumption ? In addition, could customers participate in the preparation of their food? Or could they instead be provided with an even better service, where consumption becomes the only phase in which they are involved, cutting waiting time and travelling?

- How can a restaurant become a place where food preparation is reinvented? How can food be prepared in a new way? And what kind of food, should be prepared and served? Can we reconsider what we normally serve as food, in order to improve the performance of a restaurant? What kind of food preparation process should be adopted to reduce waste, and how can waste be reused as a resource within the restaurant?

- These are the questions to suggest to the partecipants as possible fields of investigation. Each project can tackle one or more of the issues suggested, as well as raising new ones in relation to the competition topic. Just try to be as creative and unconventional as possible.

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