Identity through food : Designing for cultural persistence through culinary traditions within diasporic communities

Abstract: This project explores how designing for human-food interaction (HFI) can preserve individual and collective knowledge about the food identities of Latin American migrants living in Malmö, Sweden. The project was carried out through a participatory design process, where specific needs were identified to preserve and track the evolution of culinary practices. Subsequently, an iterative co-design process took place to explore and prototype possible solutions. The project culminated with the creation of an app called Kipu, a platform designed by and for migrants to archive and share their knowledge and affects related to food. After reaching a final prototype and validating it with the participants, several insights relevant to interaction design were identified and analyzed. Some of these pointed to the significance of preserving cultural knowledge in distant identities, the relevance of the construction of platforms in a participatory design process, and the importance of considering the outcomes of a design process as socio-materiality instead of objects.