Who are we to judge?

The 2018 Future Food Design Awards are approaching fast. With the application deadline on 12th of August, here is another look at the six individuals who will be judging this year's awards: Clemens Driessen, Kees de Gooijer, Jolanda Nooijen, Pedro Reissig, LinYee Yuan and Marije Vogelzang. Overall, the goal of the Future Food Design Awards is to stimulate designers that have an important, remarkable and innovative perspective on the food system. Thereby establishing a better connection between the two worlds of food and design as well as promoting exchange and a more open attitude.

Clemens Driessen

Clemens Driessen is a philosopher at Wageningen University and believes the relationship between food and design is important because: “Food links childhood memories and global capitalism, you in your own kitchen and a friendly lady in a rice field far away, a favourite dish and environmental destruction. Food is both mundane and endlessly fascinating. Food will be central to help us imagine alternative futures in which we can cohabit with others without destroying this planet. Thinking about food means thinking with our body, but never by ourselves alone, there’s sociability, eating with others.“

Kees de Gooijer 

Kees de Gooijer is the Chief Inspiration Officer at TKI Agri&Food and the Food & Nutrition Delta. He told us about his interest and involvement in food: “My personal food fascination is performing the whole chain myself, from seed to plate, and be intrigued by quality and taste.“

Jolanda Nooijen

Jolanda Nooijen is the director of the organic horticultural company Compliment BV and believes the relationship between food and design is important because: “Innovations always occur in the unexpected.”

Pedro Reissig

Pedro Reissig is professor in Food Design and partner of Food Design Agency deMorfa. He looks forward to being an FFDA jury member because: “I feel part of a growing community of like-minded people interested in improving our relations with food in any scale, instance or manner.”

LinYee Yuan

LinYee Yuan is the editor and founder of MOLD Magazine and believes the relationship between food and design is important because:  “Designers, with their training to frame the right question, human-centered design process, and interdisciplinary approach, are uniquely positioned to offer solutions to address our coming food crisis. We need products and systems that are elegant, functional, regenerative and scalable in order to meet the challenge of feeding 9 billion people by the year 2050—products and systems that we will live with intimately in our day to day lives.”

Marije Vogelzang

Marije Vogelzang is an eating designer and founder of The Dutch Institute of Food&Design. Her personal fascination with food is: “That food is not just fuel. Food is related to all of us in a very basic way but it is also our means of expression. We all eat and we all shit and we all love and cry. I am very comfortable moving around this non-elitist zone of simple human existence that food brings. As a subject, food never fails to excite me.”