How can we generate rituals that allow us to share culture, develop creative skills, and improve collaboration?
Problem Statement
The work environment requires rituals that encourage collaboration. COmer is a project that allows creative teams to meet and share a piece of bread to reflect on the things that unite us.
Research
Seeking to connect the present to the past and the essential with the conventional, we have designed an intangible experience built on one verb and two nouns: SHARING, through BREAD and SOIL, creating a bridge where nature’s basic elements coexist: earth, water, air, fire and men.
This collective vision represents the concept behind ‘CO-MER’, a series of containers that trace and rescue the origins of eating, sharing and cooking. The three pots collaborate symbiotically to accompany the bread-making process; each one configured with a unique function and a correlating one vis-á- vis the whole.
Prototyping
Design Principles
To create a cultural phenomenon, you need bodies, spaces, artifacts, heroes, images, and of course, rituals. COmer is a transcultural, analog, transportable, and inclusive ritual to experience collaboration through the process of preparing and sharing bread.
Ritual Design
The biggest pot is used to mix and knead the flour and water, while the smallest one is where the dough reacts by leavening. Water and earth, together, invite the air to join. Then, by integrating the middle-sized container, all three pots are combined to form an oven, where the bread is cooked over fire. At last, the middle-sized container is used to provide the bread.
The containers are fabricated in clay from Pomaire, a rural town in heart of Chile’s central valley that treasures an ancient pottery tradition. Their circular shape stems from the material’s turning process, symbolizing an equidistance between the convened guests, inviting them to share. Bread and soil coexist in nature and society through the energy of our hands. ‘COmer’ designs an experience around bread-sharing, rescuing past and present values materialized through clay containers. Prefixed by CO, ‘comer’ is the Spanish for to eat: the CO reminds us to always do it together.
Execution & Reflection
Come humans, gather around this table.
Gather to share, to connect, to CO.
CO to eat, cook the dough and part the bread.
Get together; democratically; universally; united.
Soil to cook, CO to eat, bread to share.
Give fire to the bread and bring the men, it is time to CO-mer.
The same, in all races and ethnicities, in the deepest of your DNA.
You are invited to the physical but ephemeral, to the simple complexities of nature.
A simple excuse to be humanized: to connect and to share.
The bread is ready, come together, the gift is to share!
This project got selected as part of the finalists' panel of the Lexus Design Award 2018.
www.lexus-int.com/lexus-design-award?p=year2018
www.lexus-int.com/lexus-design-award?p=year2018
