This is an ongoing project focused on confronting food waste and bringing joy to the kitchen in the time of social distancing. Learning from mutual aid work happening in Bed-Stuy, I created a digital and physical system that helps to build community.
The pockets are an advent-calendar-esque system that gamifies and giftifies different objects and actions. I was inspired by the positive outcomes I had when using similar joyful prompts in my probe kit during the research phase. Examples of pocket contents include a bag of mixed mystery spices that you can try to guess, a string to turn old tin cans into a socially distant telephone, or a prompt to go on a "scavenger hunt" to find the oldest food item in your kitchen.
My goal is to create multiples of these and give them to people in the neighborhood who are interested, creating new networks of connection. The pockets are refilled each week with a contactless dropoff of a "booster pack" of items, allowing the new connections to be maintained. In response, people provide me with documentation of how they are using the contents of the pockets. This creates connection over multiple platforms - physical, contactless, and digital - and hopefully these new connections last through the pandemic and beyond.
This project was realized through full-size prototypes, an instagram account, and a mini exhibition created by our professor Amanda Huynh.