This design brief is a part of Food Tools Design Club, a series of monthly open design calls that invite the MOLD community to experiment, play, and submit designs for food tools.
For the second open call in our Food Tool Design Club series, you are invited to design a tool for a picnic. Outdoor eating provides a delightfully unwieldy set of design parameters. We welcome submissions on ways to transport food, tools to cook in situ, mobile gathering points, takes on the picnic blanket and more. These tools might engage your community, celebrate the outdoors, or provide an alternative to a picnic classic. Some questions you can consider as you brainstorm your design: Where will you be dining and eating? How far do you need to travel? What is the material dialogue between your tool and the site where it will be used? How can your design be an invitation for others to eat with you? Are there new rituals around the picnic that you might invent? What if the picnic isn’t for humans?
Please submit your design here by May 13 including:
1-3 images of your tool (1 on a neutral background)
2-3 Sentences describing your tool
Medium (No AI please!)
Your name
Social media handle or link to work
How are you packing your picnic?
Picnicking or packing food to go can be the most luxurious way of enjoying the outdoors or a utilitarian form of eating away from home. From simple yet iconic wicker baskets, to metal lunch boxes decorated with celebrities popularized in the 1940’s, to orderly and cute bento box meals.
In the last century the rise of disposable packaging led to a dip in lunch boxes and baskets, but in a moment of increased ecological concern there is a resurgence of interest in reusable containers. Tiffins or dabbas the two to four-tiered lunch boxes for multi dish meals popular in Asia are most commonly made of metal or bamboo and some are incredibly ornate with enamel florals, hammered tin patterning, or lacquered decorations. There is an elaborate delivery service popular in Mumbai where dabbawallas deliver lunches all across the city at lunch time so that food is warm and fresh.
What is the actual food you are bringing along?
There are hyper engineered picnic bags with coolers and insulation such as the Yeti lunchboxes to containers specifically designed for single foods like the Burrito Pop, or the Dosa Lunch Box.
Zongzi, tamales, sandwiches, baozi, are a few of the handheld picnic ready foods I like to bring along on a picnic mostly because they dont require much packaging and dont get messy in transport.
Picnics are an opportunity to experiment and necessitate adhoc designs, they also seem to illicit play. Elisa Sunga started a huge picnic to celebrate cakes where strangers share slices and the only cost of entry is a cake. Other picnics like Martí Guixé’s Solar Kitchen where meals were cooked on solar cookers on a rooftop in Milan, was a proposition to rethink how and where food was prepared.
What is the setting?
The picnic blanket or table is the simple architecture of turning any outdoor space into a dining room, inviting gatherings to take place directly on the ground. It is incredible how transformative a piece of fabric is — I have hosted picnics in riverbeds and on streets that if it weren’t for a nice blanket would otherwise not be the most appealing places to eat. A now ubiquitous feature of campsites, public parks, and outdoor restaurants, the picnic table was originally designed to be mobile. Even though now they are usually heavy wooden surfaces, the classic form is easy to flat pack the parts and build on site.
There have been many modern takes on the picnic table and blanket from the metallic Two Too Large Tables by Allan and Ellen Wexler in Hudson River Park to Frank and Patrick Riklin’s Bignik, an ongoing massive scale fabric picnic blanket is being stitched to include everyone in the Swiss Appenzell region.
For further inspiration, check out the Food Tools Design Club are.na: