⚖️Ethics in Design (for my projects)

Food is never just food. It is a system, has history, and is also a relationship. As I develop projects that explore the role of food in human interactions, I realize that ethical considerations are not just relevant—they might be the very core of what I am trying to design.

Food has long been viewed as a personal choice, an individual preference shaped by taste, culture, and necessity. But modern food systems have complicated this. Questions such as “Where does my food come from?” and “Was this animal treated ethically?” reveal the underlying assumptions we hold about justice, goodness, and responsibility. On today’s age we might ask ourselves: should the ethical weight fall primarily on consumers, who make daily choices about what to eat? Or on producers, who cultivate, harvest, and distribute? Perhaps we could add a new element: food itself should have some kind of agency—an acknowledgment that it is, or once was, alive.

This idea of agency in food is not about attributing consciousness to a loaf of bread or a head of lettuce. Rather, the challenge lies in designing experiences that make people more aware of the interconnected system in which food exists. If my projects can create a moment of reflection—where people stop to consider the journey of what they are eating—then they have served an ethical function.

I’d like my projects to focus on self-reflection and ethics, using design to prompt questions rather than provide answers. My role as a designer is to anticipate how people will interact with my work and help them recognize how their values shape their choices. However, this approach has a challenge: I cannot assume people will naturally engage in self-assessment. The success of my projects depends on how well they guide users toward reflection.

One possible solution is design fiction—creating speculative scenarios that reframe familiar situations in ways that challenge expectations. If food had the ability to “choose” who could eat it, what would that say about power and consumption? If a meal responded visibly to the presence of different people, how would that change the dining experience? By distorting reality just enough to provoke thought, I hope to encourage deeper engagement with the ethical dimensions of food.

For my work to be truly ethical, it cannot exist in isolation. Recently, I have been thinking about indigenous food systems—how they represent a sustainable, reciprocal relationship with the land that modern industrial food production often disregards. Elders, too, hold valuable insights, having witnessed firsthand the transformation of food culture over generations. Including these perspectives in my design process is not just an ethical obligation; it is a necessity if I want to create work that is relevant and impactful.

One of the key ideas I explore is giving food a form of agency. In our current system, food is treated as a passive object to be consumed, but in reality, it is part of a larger ecological and social network. Everything we eat was alive at some point, and recognizing this can change how we relate to food. Instead of seeing it as inert, we can design experiences where food visibly interacts with its environment—through fermentation, temperature shifts, or biochemical reactions—making its aliveness more apparent and reshaping our connection to it.

The ethical dimensions of food design are often centered around sustainability and fair labor practices—important but common topics. Rather than following this usual route, I focus on how we frame our relationship with food, how we acknowledge its history, its presence, and its impact. My work seeks to prompt reflection, encouraging people to consider their own values and how those values shape their choices.