Problem statement:
American food culture is limited to balancing the nutrients in meals but in Persian culture, the hot (Garmi) and cold nature (Sardi) of ingredients are considered to maintain a balanced diet. Hot and cold refer to the inherent properties in food ingredients that impact the body not the temperature. Persian cuisine aims to balance hot and cold ingredients in a dish as components of a meal, or to correct the imbalance causing trouble to an individual by food. Persian side dishes play an important role. When a meal is cold by its nature like fish, it is moderated with a hot nature side dish like pickled garlic. So a balanced dish does not mean having the same portion of cold and hot nature ingredients.
Translating the hot and cold nature notion into one product was a challenge for me, but following detailed secondary research provided great insights for concept development and leading me to design a dinnerware set considering Persian food culture.
Balanced dinnerware is a set of two bowls and two plates considered in Persian food culture. Each piece offers two sides by flipping. The color and pattern of each side comes from translating the body’s feeling into the key elements for design after having cold or hot nature foods. Basically, while eating hot nature food makes you feel light and energetic, cold nature food makes your body heavy and steady. Therefore, the white and soft side represents cold nature whereas the copper side with fractal pattern, which comes from a key sculptural element in Islamic Architecture, Muqarnas, represents hot nature.
In this Project, I modeled 3 final concepts by Solidworks and rendered the final dinnerware set with Chaos Vantage.
