Output details

Spoon-Glass

Spoon-glass is an evolved, hybrid glass product, fusing the functions of a silver spoon and a wine glass. The artefact is the outcome of an experimental process, building on Fabian’s doctoral research on eating utensils. Its aims and objectives have been to develop a new language of interrelations between aesthetics, design languages and functionality in ways which formally, as well as conceptually, challenge habitual practices and rituals of dining implements and experiences. The innovations of ‘Spoon-glass’ are its questioning of dining object aesthetics and their use-values. These have been internationally acknowledged in Fabian’s subsequent invitation in 2009 from world-leading chef, Roberto Cortez, to design dining experiences, reconceived through new sensory, material and spatial uses of dining table-ware, implements and their uses. This partnership also stimulated a series of dining events in the US and Europe involving internationally-leading practitioners in furniture, product and metal-ware design (including: Tomas Alonso and Hering). The international design innovations of the first ‘dining’ event (February 2009) were showcased by the Victoria & Albert Museum which hosted and filmed it as part of an invited Friday Late Night Event. At this occasion, Fabian’s eating and drinking artefacts, modelled on ‘spoon-glass’ stimulated performances of dining experiences (captured digitally) which transformed habitual expectations of eating rituals and dining object functions. A series of subsequent themed ‘food events’: ‘1 part chef and 4 parts designer’ - London Fashion Week (Somerset House: 2008); ‘Chaos and Harmony’ (Los Angeles: 2009) and ‘Hidden Identities’, including Fabian’s ‘Ghost spoons’, (San Francisco: 2010), have extended Fabian’s and his group’s design experiments, highlighting their international contributions to an evolving aesthetics of the spatial and design experience of dining. ‘Spoon-glass’ has thereby been positioned as an innovative design invention opening further sensory and perfomative opportunities for significant new product types in the craft and art of dining design.