THE POWER OF FOOD + POWERS OF TEN DAY = FOOD FOR THOUGHT

FOOD FOR THOUGHT is the theme of DATS’10. Through workshops, discussions, presentations and displays, participants engage one another to explore how food affects different aspects of our experience.

By design, the symposium’s move this year to the fall calendar of events in the Piedmont Triad targets the date 10.10.10, in homage to the American designers Charles and Ray Eames. Their legacy film, “Powers of Ten,” provokes our thinking about the relative size of things and what we can perceive and understand at each level of scale.

This is the prism though which DATS’10 participants will look at food. The symposium will explore ways in which design, art and technology can inform our thinking to sustain future practices about one of the most basic yet broad-reaching activities of human existence.

Take something as simple – and as intimate – as designing the menu for dinner with family or friends.

What cultural factors go into our personal choices and, as our region becomes more diverse, what might this mean for community decision-making?

What are the impacts of family traditions on food, nutrition and healthy lifestyles?

What about the utensils we use to eat, the pots we use to cook, or the spaces in which we gather to share meals with one another – either at home or in a public place – what makes one design more appealing, practical or useful than another?

How do individual choices and local policies affect what we eat; where we grow our food; how we ship, market and sell it; and whether what we do is sustainable over time – locally, regionally, and globally?

It’s all FOOD FOR THOUGHT at DATS’10.