This book is the result of a 15 week project I did for the Furniture Design Studio course at the Florence Institute of Design International. The aim for this project was to come up with an idea or a vision that had to be translated into the design of a spoon, a table and a space.

Special thanks to my teacher Peter Forbes for his guidance during this project and his inspiring stories. He created a open and comfortable atmosphere in which I learned a lot about what Italian design is about and had the chance to further develop myself as a designer. 

I hope you enjoy reading this book and in the process find reason to create a unified society in which every individual is free to express their own identity.

Bowie Nijdam

I was born and raised in Amsterdam, the Netherlands and have lived there most of my life. Even though I travel a lot and go abroad for studies Amsterdam will always be my home. 

When I have to describe my own culture I think about the vegetables store that my grandparents used to own in the city center and the stories they told about rebuilding the country after the second world war. I think about rollerskating through the Vondelpark with my dad when I was a kid. I think about the market where I go to on Saturday where everybody know each other and calls each other uncle or ant like they are family. I think about driving my boat through the canals with friends. But mostly I think about this small cafe in my favorite neighborhood in the city where my brother works. It is like a living room for everybody where every single day people with different ages, backgrounds, stories and jobs come to have a couple of drinks after work before they go home. It is a simple place with just a bar and a couple of tables, they have traditional dutch snacks and sandwiches and there is no music being played.   It is a place I love to come, feel at home and for me it is the definition of what the Dutch culture is all about.

In the last couple of years though I sense that people have the feeling that their culture is being threatened. Immigrants are forming a big part of the population and are given a high priority by the government in terms of housing, education and social support. 

If you walk around in the center of Amsterdam you only hear people speak English. The houses where people used to live in the city center have become too expensive and are now owned by expats are people from outside the city. 

All these factors causes people in my city to feel denied and pushed away from the things they love in life. They see all these influences from outside as a threat and this has really changed their attitude towards the outside world. They have become protective and prejudiced and therefore keep other cultures and people with different backgrounds at a distance. 

Immigrants on the other hand do not feel welcome in our city. They feel denied, left on a side path and not accepted. Their children go to separate schools from the Dutch children and they live in separate neighborhoods with other immigrants. They have problems learning our language and see no real opportunities for a better life. All of this means that these people have problems immigrating into our society and that there is no real communication between different ethnical groups. The lack of communication creates a divided population where different ethnical groups are diametrically opposed to each other. 

My idea for this project has to do with overcoming this divisiveness and unifying the different ethnical groups in society. I think that by listening and showing interest into each others culture a lot of this prejudice and anger can be overcome.

Food is one of the few things that we all have in common. Everybody needs and loves food and therefore has a certain passion for it. The Mercato Centrale in Florence is a great example of that. Everybody gets different types of food at the counters and then sit next to each other on huge tables to share the meals together. 

Food and the way people eat is a great representation of a culture. One person uses a spoon to eat, others use chopsticks or their hands. In some cultures people eat from one central plate in the middle of the table, others eat alone in front of the tv or at a stand on the street. The food ritual is so divers between cultures that I think that this can create peoples interest into each other because something new or different is a great topic to talk about.  

The design for my spoon, table and space should create an atmosphere where people can express their culture and share it with others. It should show that different cultures, habits, shapes or colors can come together and create something special.

I want the design of the spoon to be the representation of somebodies eating culture. The differences between eating cultures are huge and therefore all the spoons coming to the table will be different. It will show the diversity within society and hopefully trigger the peoples interest into each other eating rituals.

When I think about my own eating culture, the soup that I have on Saturday is the first thing thats springs to mind. Almost every Saturday the owner of the cafe I mentioned earlier makes a huge pan of a typical dutch pies soup. Everybody in the neighborhood comes to the cafe at the end of the day and get a bowl of soup from the big pan thats stands on the bar. 

Sharing a pan of soup with friends is already a intimate eating ritual but for my spoon design I want to take it a step further. I want to make the ritual even more personal by making the spoon bigger so it functions as a bowl. With the handle on the side you can take the soup out of the pan directly and then use the same bowl to eat. This creates a feeling of actually sharing the pan together which brings the people around the table closer to each other.

I wanted the table to represent the unifying part of my idea, because it is the central object in the room where everybody goes to. It had to have no clear set up so it randomly arranges people around it. This causes them to have different viewpoints and forces them to interact with different people. It had to be a standing table which gives the users much more freedom to move around. I wanted the table to be made out of different sections that somehow come together to create a balanced and strong construction.

The space had to just facilitate the eating ritual. It is plain, simple without any distractions. It should put all the attention towards the table because that is where I want people to go. I wanted it to form a light, safe and comfortable atmosphere where people like to spend time and be accessible from every side. The table should always be visible so it attracts as much people as possible.