Rethinking the design of (food) conferences – The case of Creative Tastebuds 2021

Climate change, food systems and sustainability are nowadays connected themes at many conferences. In response to these societal challenges, we arranged the symposium Creative Tastebuds 2021 to qualify questions and studies across disciplines on how we can all eat sustainably for both pleasure and planet. But how can conferences be designed in ways that build up the new knowledge that are needed today? Based on a critique of the traditional concept of conferences we discuss how alternative designs can contribute to new understandings and new answers. With inspiration from design anthropology, we discuss how knowledge production can be stimulated based on three basic elements: conceptual curation of the event, experimental and interdisciplinary collaboration and a sensuous scenography that fits the content of the conference. The symposium was designed to create an ambitious, interdisciplinary and creative atmosphere, where dialogues were facilitated in innovative ways and across virtual and physical participants. The reasoning is that audiences need to be engaged in new ways in order to foster creativity and be able to invent new solutions. Food conferences are especially suitable for playing with formats, as food is a topic everyone can relate to, and in addition, it points to the sensuous aspects of knowledge exchange. In this article, we explore conference design around the subjects of food and taste through examples of the dialogue-creating instruments used at the symposium Creative Tastebuds 2021.