Eating with Type: Designing a Letterpress Workshop Based on Typeful Thinking Approach for Food Education

Abstract

Starting from the observation of an evident precariousness in the contemporary relationship between man and food, this contribution is meant to show a new proposal of workshops for children in the K=12, Grade 4–5 category, aimed at stimulating in a creative and experiential way a critical and conscious thinking about food. Starting from the methodology of Artful Thinking and Object Based Learning, the project shifts the pedagogical focus from the interaction with the artistic object to the interaction with the design object; and in particular with the movable type, identified as an activating element of the educational process in the transition from Artful to Typeful Thinking. The Typeful Thinking workshop therefore represents a potentially innovative food education tool that leverages on the concretisation of critical thinking through five thinking routines that go from conceptual abstraction - through a physical artefact, the letterpress printing - to their tangibility.