Value Meal: Design and (over) Eating will represent the United States at the International Design Biennale in Saint-Etienne, France, from November 6th through 14th, 2004. “Featuring 20 commissioned experimental projects by as many American-based designers, the exhibition seeks to explore design’s potential to address the obesity epidemic currently afflicting the United States and, increasingly, much of the world. Core77 asked Aric Chen and Laetitia Wolff, curators of the show, to provide a few brief comments about their objectives for the exhibition:
When we were invited to curate the biennial’s American section, our initial response was the most predicable one: we were going to mount a survey of contemporary work. We wanted to focus on designs for eating, as the obesity epidemic was very much on everyone’s minds. However, while we were aware of how designers were responding to the effects of poor eating habits—for example, by enlarging their seating designs—there seemed to be little discussion about how they might influence those habits. If one thinks of design as an agent of communication and a mediator of human behavior, it seemed only natural to give designers an opportunity to more proactively address the obesity epidemic at its source.
Accordingly, for Value Meal: Design and (over)Eating, we asked twenty American designers to create projects that rethink the ways in which consumers eat, as well as the modes through which those patterns can be affected.”
[Core 77]
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