Future Food Design Awards

Design for the future of food to be awarded prize during Dutch Design Week

june 20 2018 – The Future Food Design Awards (FFDA) is now open for entries that challenge the way we view food. The FFDA invites designers from all corners of the world to share their ideas and projects for this leading international prize, which was started to encourage and highlight innovative and disruptive designs for a sustainable food future.

A growing number of designers are involved in contributing to a more sustainable food system. However, at international design conferences, the emphasis still mainly lies on the aesthetic aspects of design. The FFDA has a different focus. Marije Vogelzang, eating designer and jury chair has the following to say about the Future Food Design Awards:

“We urgently need to ensure that we don’t keep the worlds of food and design separate. We should integrate them to encourage and highlight innovative and disruptive designs for a culturally rich and sustainable food future.”

What the Future FFDA is looking for

The FFDA is looking for designs that challenge our conventional view of food. Concepts can range from developing a new food culture to reshuffling the food chain. Issues such as land management, the use of fresh water reserves, the influence of agriculture on climate and the use of scarce resources are issues that are shared worldwide and are all related to food security. Other themes could be contemporary domestic table customs, migration, technology and eating habits. The FFDA challenges designers to use their vision of the future of our food as a mirror for all human beings and their food consumption.

Assessment criteria

The jury will judge the entries on several criteria, the most important of which are:

• The impact on a healthier, fairer and/or more sustainable future for food → this is open to broad interpretation as in: raising awareness, contributing to a debate, reaching a wide audience, changing agricultural practices, an extremely innovative or radical idea, etc.
• The extent to which creative design and design thinking has been applied in the project and/or the process → is the design striking, unique and distinct in the field of design, does it demonstrate vision?
• The degree of urgency and social engagement of the project design → does the design pose an interesting question at this point in time for society in general?

The prizes

• The winner will receive a cash prize of €5,000. This prize money is only to be used for further developing the design or a follow-up step.
• The audience award consists of a cash prize of €2,500. This prize money is only to be used for further developing the design or a follow-up step.
• International exposure which we will do our utmost to secure.

Last Year’s Winner: Fernando Laposse

The first winner of the Future Food Design Awards in 2017 was the Mexican-born Fernando Laposse with his project Totomoxtle. Totomoxtle is a surfacing veneer for interiors and furniture made with naturally colourful native Mexican corn husks. Not only did he discover a completely new material with great decorative potential, he also tells an important story about the loss of biodiversity and helps the local communities that grow the corn. By giving a new purpose to the native corn husks, the native varieties of corn can be grown again. Farming this type of corn preserves local heritage and has a positive impact on local communities by increasing employment and contributing to people’s incomes. In Fernando’s opinion, sustaining crop diversity and the freedom to choose how we feed ourselves is not only important for preserving culinary traditions but essential for a fair and healthy food production system in the future.

The Future Food Design Award is an initiative of Agri meets Design and The Dutch Institute of Food&Design and is sponsored by the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs, ZLTO and the Province of North-Brabant. See all the details at www.agrimeetsdesign.com and follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter: #FFDA18