DOI: 10.18848/2325-128x/cgp/a342 ISSN: 2325-1298

Food as a Pedagogical Tool

Demet Günal Ertaş
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Beyond its role as basic sustenance, food has become a multisensory and experiential medium shaped by sociocultural, aesthetic, technological, and sustainability-related factors. In design education, its material instability, perishability, cultural embeddedness, and sensory richness can make abstract design thinking processes more tangible. This article addresses the use of food not as a professional culinary specialization, but as an exploratory pedagogical medium for early-stage industrial design studio education. This study adopts a qualitative, interpretive, and theory-informed research design. It combines an updated literature review on design thinking, food design, material experience, and reflective studio pedagogy with the qualitative analysis of selected food design examples and four food-centered studio projects. The student projects are treated as illustrative pedagogical case studies. Rather than claiming statistical generalization or empirical validation, the study uses cross-case qualitative coding to identify recurring learning patterns and to formulate a proposed competency-based framework. The cross-case analysis suggests that food-centered studio practices can activate specific design thinking competencies, particularly sensory-material exploration, form-function reasoning, user interaction, cultural interpretation, iterative prototyping, and reflective evaluation. The cases also show differences: some projects foreground abstraction and concept materialization, while others foreground bodily interaction, packaging, cultural reinterpretation, or sensory testing. The article proposes food-centered studio practice as an adaptable and exploratory competency-based framework for industrial design education. The framework should be understood as a conceptual and pedagogical model derived from literature synthesis and qualitative interpretation, not as a quantitatively validated model. Its contribution lies in clarifying how food can support embodied, material-based, and experience-oriented learning when applied with attention to context, institutional resources, and student variability.

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