What’s cooking? Designing to change food-related behaviour

When Charles Eames was asked about the boundaries of design, he replied, “What are the boundaries of problems” (Burns et. al, 2006). This quote pinpoints the wide aspect of design, and as the complexity of society is increasing it becomes important to discuss how design can deal with complex and wicked problems (Rittel, 1973; Kolko, 2012) in the process of creating desirable solutions (Fallman, D., 2003) to change food-related behaviour (Abdussalam, Foster and Käferstein, 1989). Food and meals in our environment are embedded in complex physical, social and cultural contexts and there is a need to understand how people, spaces and food interact and how this interaction influences food behaviour (Mikkelsen, 2011). This requires transdisciplinarity and holistic approach (Rasmussen and Smidt, 2001), which leads to discussing the possibilities within the combination of the two fields, food and design, when facilitating changes of food-related behaviour. The aim of this paper is to give overview of how actors within the field of food and within the field of design are approaching the complexity of food and meals in order to understand the role and strengths of design when crafting the future of designing to change food-related behaviour.