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 third open call in our Food Tool Design Club series, you are invited to design a tool for lighting food. Light can dramatically change our experience of eating and even impact the taste of the food. From the warm glow of candelabras, to the glare of fluorescent food hall lighting, light sets the mood and determines the way we feel around food. Think lamps, candles, a heating bulb for keeping food warm, a light to advertise food, a way to capture the heat of the sun to cook food, a camping flashlight, etc.! Some questions you can consider as you brainstorm your design: What food is being lit? What is the emotion the lighting might inspire? What is the material dialogue between your light and its setting? What is the light source? Could you design a light that isn’t electrical? How does your tool make the food more or less appetizing?
Please submit your design here by June 18 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
What do the lights connote or symbolize?
Are they referencing food themselves or making food more appetizing? Kauani’s Lumieres textile lamps take the form of indigenous Mexican cacti and colorful prickly pears referencing both their form and celebrating their resilience as drought tolerant plants.
How do food and light interplay?
Food design studio Ananas Ananas made interactive lamps covered in mushrooms that diners could snack on, slowly exposing more light and changing the shadows that emanate from the lamps.
What if the light is ephemeral?
The “but is it cake” for candle art is having a resurgence from the rising popularity of Puglian family run business, Cereria Introna, which has been making candles in the shape of foods since 1840 to wax artists like Bang’N Candles. Wax lends itself to experimentation and drama and artists like Lucky Star Candle and Samuel Warkov create stunning sculptural works to burn.
How does your design change how we experience food?
What is the illumination source? At Adam Wexler’s A New Futurist Cookbook Event II: Dinner at the Light Table meals were illuminated from below with translucent colorful food cooked by Phoebe Tran of Bé Bếp Kitchen.
