Observations: taste in designed spaces

There is a time of year when landscapes become a delight for the palate. In summer, bramble bushes carry berries at every stage simultaneously: still moving towards ripeness, tight and red, purple and almost ready, black and sweet. This variety of shapes and shades offers something to taste, not only see.
A designed environment can also engage the sense of taste by leaving food at hand, by placing edible plants within reach, thus inviting people to participate in summer’s generosity through all the senses.

The Observations grow from a daily habit of noticing details in nature and drawing design insights from them. They’re collected in a monthly digest as part of anooi’s newsletter, which gathers the studio’s world and explores the idea of nourishing spaces. The same attunement shapes the studio’s work, lives in A Biophilic Year – a book-object and online archive on people, nature, and design – and becomes a sensory practice with In Season, a seasonal physical letter.