Outside the Box:
Refrigerators in an Alternate Present

Practices are embedded within products; at their best, designers can activate progressive behavior (or any other type) by creating the material culture that supports and enforces behavioral practice.

In my MFA thesis work I set out to better understand this hypothesis and explore how it might affect my own design and research. I began with a short ethnography of self-professed “food radicals”—those who reject our hyper-globalized and industrial food system and instead embrace (or make do with) their own set of food practices, including radical locavorism, home processing, and raw diets. Check out some of what they told me in this video.

The "Unfrigerator" represents a futurist exercise manifested through product design: I’ve imagined an alternate present where the values and practices of these radicals are normative and reflected in material culture.

An ethylene-reducer, one component of the "unfrigerator," is described in the portfolio section.