Product designers know when design misses the mark, and why. For example, there was not enough research, the team overlooked the information architecture practice, content entered the design process late, the design standards was driven by marketing, and so on.
I see a lot of parallels in the recipe books’ design.
We see new recipe books at home or in the boxes when we unpack a new oven or even a new Barbeque. When established food chains or the professional chefs plan a cookbook, they storify their experiences and set up the socio-cultural context about the primary ingredients or the value of that category of dishes. For example see this cookbook by FAO, Stop Food Waste Day cookbook, or this cookbook by Transamerica Institute.
I had a quick look at some of the books in this list by Serious Eats, and they share amazing stories of how they see food (I particularly like The Man Who Ate Everything, Amazon), the role of dishes in a life, and the role of life in designing food.
However, many recipe books completely miss the mark for not talking about the environment of the consumers. For example these have a title page, a customary acknowledgements page, an overview, and then a list of recipes in a familiar structure.
I have not seen a recipe book that talks about the users’ environment for specific dishes. For example:
—Are they living in a high-rise apartment and will have the dish while watching a TV show, or in an open lawn in their house, or in a farm?
—Do they plan to have it while enjoying the rain?
—Do they have a lot of books around at home, or many plants, or the patterns of art on their walls, or a music instrument in the living room?
—Are they celebrating something, or they are an elderly couple dealing with loneliness?
Recipe books should build this connection, the bridges of what we are and what we can be, how we can feel while making and then eating that new dish.
We are talking about food—the atomic unit of what sustains our body and our spirit.
Every home recipe book should first ask for what we have around while having the dish.
—Plants
—Books
—Streaming a show
—Kids around with a lot of energy, or we have elders around for a conversation
—Are we dealing with a trauma, a dispute, a questionable relationship, a missed PhD opportunity?
—Will we be reading a newsletter or some fiction?
—Is someone playing music in another room that you can hear
—Will you be alone, just sitting and looking outside the window
There are so many factors that coexist when we cook something—our mind is not only in the dish.
In a meetup among the city chefs, there were long and useful discussions about the modern cutlery, the new fish spatula, graters, and bench scrapers. They talked about the trends in using pumpkin seeds and whole eggs and the latest brands of ovens.
Nobody thought about the environment when people cook and then have those dishes.
This recipe is merely a Figma template. A list of dishes. Ingredients. Steps. Nutrition. Copyrights statement.
But we are not guilty.
Because it is no guilt when it is collective—across industries, categories, and domains. We see it in those Figma containers—dying to be frontended because of a design system investment in Q3 of 2023 because the org have adopted the ‘outcomes over outputs’ approach.
This post is an extension of my LinkedIn post on the topic.
But a recipe book can do better. And let’s not call it a metadata problem.
