The design research group Robots in Gastronomy’s 3D-printing food cart debuted last week in the “Adhocracy” exhibition at the Istanbul Design Biennial.

Robots in Gastronomy may not be the first tinkerers to come out with a 3D chocolate printer, but they’re certainly the most mobile. At the opening of the Istanbul Design Biennial last week, the Robots debuted their prototype for a food cart that brings 3D printing technology (and multidimensional snacking) beyond the walls of the research lab and onto the streets. (Is there an A+ Award for deliciousness?)

The group’s MakerBot 3D printer debuted earlier this year at Milan Design Week, where the collaborators printed out chocolaty confections for the “Future in the Making” show. For Istanbul, the Robots — among them architects from GGLab, chef Paco Morales, and architects Luis E. Fraguada and Deniz Manisali — constructed a curvaceous wood pavilion for scooting the bot around town. Eat Read more!

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Increasing in popularity and decreasing in cost, 3D printing technology has been appropriated from the industrial sector by DIY communities and repurposed for various uses other than rapid prototyping, from mass customization of frivolous knickknacks to the creation of intricate jewelry. As part of “The Future in the Making,” a recent exhibition organized by Italian design magazine Domus and Audi for Milan Design Week, Spanish architecture studio GGLab and designer Deniz Manisali showed off their method of applying additive manufacturing technology to haute cuisine.

Working with chef Paco Morales and the Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia (IAAC), the team outfitted a MakerBot—a low-cost, open-source 3D printer with an impressively industrious marketing and PR team—to print a collection of diverse, formally complex chocolate sweets. This highly customizable technology could loosen formal constraints on dishes and increase workflow and volume in the kitchen, but, more importantly, has the potential to foster novel, inventive considerations of ingredients, flavors and aesthetics. Although less romantic, 3D printing also has foreseeable applications in industrial food production. Continue.

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Images (c) Maya Almaraz.

Gastronomy is all about discovery. So it was with no great surprise that we learned of Dinner in Seven Acts, a recent meal-based architectural event, designed by architect-artist duo Warm Engine and built by craftsman Daniel Quinn. Seven Acts proposed spatial engagement as a way to heighten the experience of taste, through a series of surprises, revelations, and provocations orchestrated by its designers. More.

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