Cooking Connected
Created: Spring 2022
Cooking Connected is a web-based experience that provides a community of resources for those in search of old recipes in order to facilitate the preservation of cultures and memories. Made for people divided by distance, language, and loss, this website allows people to find and contribute to family recipes, seek out advice, and learn how to cook the foods they grew up with. And most importantly, it allows people the ability to connect, through food, to both living and lost loved ones, and their roots.
Cooking and baking don’t always turn out the way you think it will on the first try. And this is especially true when you are blindly following a recipe with no one with experience to ask for help, which was the case for these muffins my sister and I made for Chinese New Year in 2022. Even though we followed the recipe exactly, and they smelled exactly like they did in my grandmother’s kitchen, they did not come out right at all. But with no one to ask, who won’t ever find out.
This lead me to wonder how recipes can be passed down to generations divided by distance, language, and life.
In my research, I looked at a lot of community cookbooks and online groups where community inquiries and advice were given, with a focus on foods.
I talked to people about the foods they liked to eat, distinct memories they had around food, and whether or not they could make their favorite cultural dishes. And what I found was that people found comfort in foods they ate as a child, usually with family. Some people could make their favorite dishes and they were taught by their mother or grandmother, and the things that usually prevented people from cooking were time, effort, knowledge, and access to tools and ingredients.
I also looked at a lot of articles surrounding food’s ties to culture, humanity’s history with food, how food can influence a person’s point of view, and its role in society.
The quote below is from one article that really stood out to me because it implied that eating is more than just sustenance for the body to survive. It is an experience of the senses that is way more fulfilling when it is connected to memory, culture, and identity. This stuck with me as I continued my research because it echoed my experience with those muffins. The smell of them instantly took me back to her kitchen and memories of eating them as a child.
The resulting product of a semester’s worth of research is a web-based interface called Cooking Connected. It uses bright vibrant colors that feel fun and exciting to engage people in cooking and the typeface Rubik, which is a variable font for additional flexibility in the branding system.
Because my source inspiration has a tactile experience, I created digital elements that mimicked that experience, like stickers and sticky notes. Stickers are such a great way to display likes, dislikes, and personalities in real life so I illustrated 20 stickers inspired by fruit stickers to portray dietary rules, cuisines, and preferences.
The video below is a story about the interface being used from the point of view of a 25-year-old illustrator who has recently moved from San Francisco, CA to Phoenix, AZ, and is expecting a visit from her parents for the first time.
Branding, Packaging, Research, Digital Illustration, Product Production, UX/UI, Animation