Core77

Food and the Future of It is Matt Brown's thesis project at the Umea Institute of Design. Part design fiction, part exploration of new agricultural and fabrication technologies, this project imagines what the production and consumption of food might be like in the year 2040. While some of it seems alien (and maybe a little gross), we love that Matt focuses on the creative potential of these technologies--individuals could imagine and fabricate their own type of snack, grow new kinds of food (like tiger shark), or design new forms for things like chips and pasta.

Matt has written up this project extensively on his blog, but here's a short excerpt describing the underlying assumptions of the project:

They all either print food, or grow food. The ones that grow food do it by duplicating cells and proteins (something that we do now to get our lab grown meat). The printers use the same technology (only smaller and better) as the 3D printers that we have now. For this world, I've made some small devices that could exist. Human Creativity is absolutely amazing, and I'm confident that if people could design their own custom eggs, pasta, snacks, and other things then they would.

Pictured above are the Cheese Extruder, Egg Printer and Ape Food.

More projects after the jump.

Ape Snack

Cheese Extruder

Egg Printer

Food Chips