About

The Cooking Sense is an ongoing project that was started as part of my MFA Design thesis research. I spent a year investigating the various processes, strategies and challenges people experience while cooking in order to design an interactive cooking tool that encourages a responsive, rather than passive, approach to creating and executing recipes (See demo below). Along with this project, I continue to explore cooking and eating and its relationship to personal identity, memory, history, cultural and geographical narratives. I love cooking because of it’s parallels with design – taking separate elements and bringing them together into a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. Cooking also allows us to create a mneme – a memory in physical (and edible) form. In one taste, texture, or smell, we can immediately be brought back to another time and place. I think this is what fascinates me most about food – it’s ability to allow us to time travel. Even the process of cooking – gathering the ingredients, prepping them, processing – can become a ritual in of itself that when, acted out, allows us to have one foot firmly rooted in the past, while remaining aware in the present.

As I continue my work in this area, this site serves as a space to document, not only recipes, but the stories behind them, visual experimentations involving food, reflections on cooking and eating, events, and inspirations. If you would like to share your thoughts, submit a recipe, story/project or have a project you would like to collaborate on, please contact me at share@thecookingsense.com