Discover the exciting fusion of North American influences on traditional sushi with Sashimigration - an interactive cookbook-themed website that takes you on a culinary journey through various localities across the continent. Explore, create, and indulge in a new world of flavor with Sashimigration!
WEB PLATFORM
SASHIMIGRATION
How can I go about developing a digital platform that effectively combines playfulness, immersion and taste appeal to promote the learning and understanding of sushi?
Challenge
Context
As regional cuisines expand beyond their origins and into foreign cultures, the identity of a dish can undergo transformations influenced by socio political and environmental factors. Sushi, with its diverse expressions across vastly eclectic regions, poses the question of how its cultural identity has been reshaped through re-localization in North America.
Solution
Developing a website that invites users to embark on a culinary journey tracing the migration of sushi from Japan to North America. Along the way, users learn about the diverse regional influences that have shaped this popular dish. Within a personalized cookbook-style framework, users have the opportunity to experiment with a variety of ingredients and flavours, allowing them to invent unique sushi dishes.
Research
Driven by curiosity and fueled by unhealthy cravings, I wrote a thesis that documented the evolution of traditional Japanese sushi in the context of North American consumer culture, exploring its shifting cultural identity. The goal was to understand the original cultural uniqueness of sushi, its integration into North American culinary practices, and its contemporary expressions in the landscape of food.
With an eclectic set of data tied to intriguing narratives, I decided to make a web platform introducing sushi, illustrating a timeline of regionally distinctive sushi varieties across North America, and providing an experimental space for inventing sushi recipes.
What is traditional Japanese sushi and how has localization in North America reshaped its cultural identity?
User Flows & Mapping
To create an educational platform, the user flow was designed to streamline users through a series of linear steps, simulating the experience of reading a pop-up book while allowing for more flexibility. Wireframing often served as a means to create timeframes to visualize animations or multilayered transitions to produce a nuanced experience. As you navigate Sashimigration, remember: that the only limit is your appetite.
3D Modeling & Animating
Although I have experience using software outside of the typical design programs, learning to 3D model on Blender was refreshing albeit risky at the time due to daunting deadlines. The objective here was simple: keep things simple, interactive, and recognizable, which meant optimizing wherever possible to bring flat vectors to life.
For a project showcasing various sets of sushi and ingredients, it seemed logical to break down everything presented to the user. It's worth noting my obsession with disassembling things to understand their workings (albeit sometimes forgetting to reassemble them), which influenced the choice to integrate exploded view schematics as the narrative for each sushi in my prototype.
Key Takeaways
You never know where you’ll end up from a simple question and some curiosity. In other words, all it took was a question and some interest to get to this point. The entire process from researching to animating to prototyping for Sashimigration was quite fulfilling, starting with plain data on a document and turning it into a nuanced and immersive experience. Although it sounds like a typical design problem, as a platform based on food, cooking, and different textures, the trick I found effective was to allow users to play with ingredients as one would in real life.
Prototype
And now, the moment you've been waiting for! Watch the video below for a firsthand look at Sashimigration or click the link to test the prototype.