Chloe Rutzerveld

The Dutch designer Chloé Rutzerveld is a self-proclaimed “food designer and food futurist.” Her work confronts challenges in food production and consumption with designed interventions for rethinking the social, ecological, economic, and health of food and eating. Trained as an industrial designer, she brings methods from designing for small-batch production—in particular the use of 3D printing—to the making, modifying, and processing of new food types. What her experimentation and various publicly engaged collaborations propose is to remake our common understandings of food by imagining new ingredients, structures, habits of making and eating, and, of course, new ways of “cooking” that use digital fabrication techniques. Rutzerveld hosts “future food dinners,” in which she engages a direct and participatory model for developing her ideas while bridging research, production, and consumption. The collaborative nature of these events encourages lively discussion among participants, particularly seeking the limits of adoption for some of the more radical ideas. Breaking down barriers to experimentation with one of the most culturally defined categories of everyday life—food—is facilitated through collaboration, cooperation, education, and self-production.