design

As many people, I’m a big fan of Japanese cuisine. I can’t say I love everything, because I’m passed over the assumption that if I like sushi, I will like any kind sushi or any Japanese dish. One trip to an authentic Japanese restaurant in California proved me this. But still, I like try my choices with new dishes once in a while.

One good way to do it is with a bento box. A bento box it’s a complete meal, but with many items in small portions, so you can taste several dishes and preparations.

Bento Box at Haguruma this weekend, Munich

However, have you really observed a nicely packed bento box into details? I must confess I haven’t, until I was reading Emotional Design. A bento box has several purposes, some basic but some very subtle:

To have a nutritional balanced meal. Looking at it, you see protein, carbohydrates, and vegetables.
To have a diversity of tastes and offer the possibility of trying different options
To have a beautiful presentation, making the consumer inspired and feeling good by looking at it. The major aim would be to have that little sad feeling for destroying such piece of art before eating it.
To pack as many different dishes as possible, in such small space.
And mainly, to show off the chef’s ability in delivering a nutritional, delicious, packed but yet beautiful meal in constrained space

A bento box it’s a great example of a good design. It has the purpose of feeding and serves this purpose, but adds the extra quality by balancing ingredients and displaying them in a form of art.

As I was thinking over my bento box this weekend, I started thinking on services that lately are becoming very popular into delivering information into a fun and visual form. We all probably have been over extensive reports on market researches and numbers and projections over 150 boring pages. But more and more data companies are starting to offer some other options, like this graphic I’ve seen this weekend:

Infographic by- Shanghai Web Designers