We resurrected this one from our old blog (it's just too intriguing a notion to discard). Data cuisine: bringing research to life in a manner that's humorous and revealing in equal measure, explains Crowd DNA managing director Andy Crysell...
From hacking events to music innovation seminars (and, of course, the odd DJ), the Sonar festival in Barcelona is not short of stuff to get you thinking differently. But we weren’t necessarily expecting to encounter a session on data visualisation – particularly one that involved food.
Susanne Jaschko and Moritz Stefaner’s data cuisine project for Sonar saw them work with a group of 15 people at the Center Of Contemporary Culture Of Barcelona, collecting statistics about the city and expressing them via new recipes, prepared with the assistance of professional chefs. It’s an interesting and radical realisation of the oft discussed challenge of bringing research to life – humorous and revealing in equal measure (though obviously not so easy to knock up when a client deadline is looming).
You can find out more about their work here. Visualisations cooked up to date include a fried dorada, with sections prepared in different ways to represent emigration from Spain (battered fish for the UK, with a wine sauce for France, cooked in beer and parsley for Germany etc); the sex lives of folk in Barcelona depicted through noodles; a cocktail made with measures to represent suicide trends; and an unemployment Pan Con Tomate.
Crowd DNA’s toaster and microwave will soon be put to the test.
