Bio-Material
Recipe Book
Background: As consumerism continues to drive the accumulation of non-degradable material, designers have began looking at bio-material for alternatives. For instance the grown foam-like material of mycelium (mushroom roots) is very lightweight, has excellent thermal insulating and fire resistant properties1. Similiarly bio-plastics (made of polymers like starch) are being investigated as an alternative for plastic packaging for their ability to break down in water and in the biosphere.
To communicate how easy it is to begin to work with bio-material, this book sample relies on the reader’s associations with cooking as a process, but also introduces a visual/symbol language that encapsulates relevant concepts that are foundational to nature, the sciences, and human experience.
To communicate how easy it is to begin to work with bio-material, this book sample relies on the reader’s associations with cooking as a process, but also introduces a visual/symbol language that encapsulates relevant concepts that are foundational to nature, the sciences, and human experience.
Some of the symbols’ interpretation are less specific which allows them to describe different phenomena. They can be understood in context (e.g. cross-locality can represent heat transfer in thermodynamics, specie migration in ecological terms, or contamination in bio-making).Visual Symbols
The role of the visual symbols is to reframe how we tend to think of certain parameters. Time is a good example: to differentiate how we percieve the time-scale for cooking food (minutes or hours) from the time-scale of bio-making (minutes, hours, days, weeks), two different symbols for ‘time’ are created. An hour-glass to represent minutes or hours, which often require precision, and a half-sun half-moon to represent ‘overnight’ waiting; days or weeks - a duration that tends to involve growth and hence depends on environmental factors like temperature, humidity.
