PARSONS SCHOOL OF
DESIGN PRESENTS:

Ria Patel

Product Designer | Visual Artist
Ria is a digital product designer who thrives on crafting experiences that weave context and narrative into interaction. Finding novel ways of presenting ideas and having them attract and engage with people is what draws her to experience design and creative technology. 

Specialising in user-focused approaches, her work aims to bridge the gap between people and technology through crafting immersive solutions, while constantly exploring and expanding her technical tool-kit.

Beyond her professional pursuits, Ria can often be found sketching scenes from everyday life, creating comics, and curating playlists.
Thesis Faculty
Jesse HardingFran HoepfnerNancy Valladares

Eating A Long Ways Away

A digital archive collecting food
items that invoke a sense of belonging

Collecting food memories of ‘home’ on the web

Eating holds strong emotional connections for individuals experiencing displacement, as it often becomes a carrier of memories, cultural heritage, and personal comforts. Despite being a private and subtle practice, many find solace in preparing and consuming specific foods as a means of self-care. Bringing visibility to this intimate aspect of the human experience could foster community, facilitate the exchange of cultural knowledge, and provide support among individuals navigating displacement.

‘Eating a Long Ways Away’ is a method of collecting, documenting, and visualizing the human act of accessing a sense of belonging through food. This project aims to study and archive notions of home and belonging through crowd-sourced data while exploring the form of a web platform and digital space as a conduit to realizing a food-scape that  facilitates interaction across unfamiliar kitchens, cultures and geographies.

‘Add Your Entry’ to the platform and interact with those that have been collected.

Interface design of the platform
Explore curated audio-stories that speak of belonging and food through the lens of
displacement and its many forms

The current iteration of this project has been designed for desktops
A high-fidelity prototype documenting desired interactions:

To explore this archive: Go To Project Website

To know more about my process: Go To Project Case Study