Experimenting with the commons

According to the perspective you decide to follow, this project is a proposal for other disciplines outside of design, to explore and re‐evaluate their techniques and specializations. It has blurry boundaries between the designer authority, the production copyrights and the user and/or consumer. It was realized through a combination of different techniques, traditional and theoretical and overall, if food has its own design, this project captures a moment in the way food is being designed, made and consumed.

Plaster is a building material used for coating walls and ceilings. Plaster starts as a dry powder similar to mortar or cement and like those materials it is mixed with water to form a paste which liberates heat and then hardens. Unlike mortar and cement, plaster remains quite soft after setting, and can be easily manipulated with metal tools or even sandpaper.

Strained yoghurt (also spelled strained yogurt), yoghurt cheese, labneh, or Greek yoghurt is yoghurt which has been strained in a cloth or paper bag or filter to remove the whey, giving a consistency between that of yoghurt and cheese, while preserving yoghurt’s distinctive sour taste.
Caciocavallo is a type of stretched‐curd cheese made out of sheep’s or cow’s milk. It is produced throughout Southern Italy, especially mostly on the Apennine Mountains. Shaped like a tear‐drop, it is similar in taste to the aged Southern Italian Provolone cheese, with a hard edible rind.
Unit price. In retail, unit price is the price for a single unit of measure of a product sold in more or less than the single unit. The “unit price” tells you the cost per pound, quart, or other unit of weight or volume of a food package. Price per unit metrics allows marketers to “calculate meaningful average selling prices within a product line that includes items of different sizes.

I picked a cheap material, a cooking recipe, a forming technique and a basic selling food method. I created a recipe with these four specifications and started cooking light. Plaster reacts to fabric with extreme detail, imprinting the texture of the mold it is poured in. Then, by hanging the fabric mold, the gravity reacts differently depending on the combined weight of the plaster and water. At the end, after the water has evaporated, the actual weight of the lamp can be measured and the light can be sold according to the current price per kilo.

*special thanks to Kathi Hermann