Carl DiSalvo

Since the fall of 2011, I’ve been working with Betsy and the Education and Community Programs staff at the Walker Art Center to develop the Walker Kitchen Lab. As part of the project, we are researchers-in-residence at the Walker Art Center this summer, with the Open Field program. After months of planning, the residency has officially begun, with the public launch of the project on June 18th.

What is the Walker Kitchen Lab?
The Walker Kitchen Lab is a design research project exploring the kitchen as a site for cultural expression and social action. It’s part of the 2012 Open Field programming at the Walker Art Center. From June 18th to June 29th, a collective of researchers, designers, artists, students, and educators will work together to investigate the design and use of kitchens, and create a series of prototype objects and events that support novel ways to make and share food.

That’s the “blurb” and it does a fine job of describing the work we’ll be doing from June 18th to June 29th.

It’s going to be an exciting two weeks, and you can follow the work on daily basis on the Walker Kitchen Lab blog.

But the motivation, and the work, extends these two weeks.

Over the past year, I’ve become interested in so-called “social innovation” and “social practice” and the role of design in these endeavors. One of the things I’ve been thinking about is how to design infrastructures to support social innovation and practice. Another thing I’ve been thinking about is the collectivist quality of these endeavors. The Walker Kitchen Lab is, in part, a platform for exploring these interests — a kind of constructed field site for experimenting with and reflecting on infrastructures for social practice and collectivist action. My hope is that this project will be start of a new line of work, and that from the project I’ll be able to identify some markers of collectivist action and some qualities of infrastructure for social practice.

It also marks a new direction in my design research with regard to food. While I’ll continue working on interaction design and small-scale agriculture, the Walker Kitchen Lab provides a new perspective on food and interaction design, which emphasizes participatory approaches to the making and sharing of food. Certainly, there is a wealth of work in this area, including the design history of kitchens and kitchen products; speculative kitchens of tomorrow; the emerging field of food design; and notions of radical hospitality). I’ve yet to articulate precisely what my take on this will be, but this project should provide a starting point for investigating the domain. More on that, as it develops…..