Future Commensality - An Exploration of New Intimacy through Sharing Food
How can new notions of intimacy be created through digital commensality?
The Corona pandemic has led to a change in social norms and behaviour. In times of social isolation, maintaining social bonds and a sense of intimacy have become difficult.
Future Commensality treats eating together as a valuable social activity that strengthens social bonds and intimacy. In doing so, the project focuses on digital commensality in creating remote intimacy: digital connectivity has helped us stay socially connected, yet there are gaps in creating intimacy in digitised interactions.
With my project, I seek to highlight changing notions of intimacy in the context of commensality, ultimately speculating on possible future scenarios. Here, design is used as a medium of inquiry to enable speculative reflection. Food sharing functions as a starting point for experiments with physical and digital formats. Insights into the sensory and emotional aspects of intimacy based on proximity that cannot yet be replicated in a digital format pave the way for future design research and new perspectives on this topic.
