Font Size: 

Urban living has been promoting individualist life styles for a long time now. Structured everyday of urban today will get denser, the grid it forms will get harder to practice within. In the work and leisure cycle of everyday, leisure will get dominated – or even contaminated – with working practices, the boundary formed between the two with the rise of industrial revolution will get blurred in favor of working practices. Yet, however dense it gets, the very fabric of everyday gets to live on, thanks to the practices tactical in character (deCerteau, 1984). While cooking has also become a single-person everyday practice throughout the years, it used to be a collaborative practice including various members of a family or a group of people. This is also visible in various communities, yet not in the urban context. Thus, social cooking presents potential as a tactical response against urban individualism, incorporating the base need for food and the need for socializing.

In this paper, implications of cooking as a social conduct and opportunity, in the contemporary urban life promoting individualism, will be explored. The aim of the study is to understand social cooking practices as tactics and create a service design that readily incorporates cracks enables tactical practices to transpire. Consequently, an exploratory design response on social cooking developed through the understanding of everyday life will be presented. The design response deconstructs and re-structures the social cooking experience in minute detail, while retaining the platform for tactics to flourish.