cookbook

why a cookbook?

After Gwenna Gram, Aoife Dill, Yasmin Daneshjoo, and I were asked to create a design solution that centered around the theme “caring for others”, the idea of creating something for grandparents stuck out to us. Though our group was interested in many topics, such as how care could be improved in a nursing home and how discipline functions as a form of care, we decided to pursue researching how grandchildren care for their grandparents. We all felt personally invested in the topic and were curious at trying to understand how these relationships typically function and can improve.

 Through a combination of surveys and interviews, we found that there is often a big disconnect between grandchildren and their grandparents for many reasons. These issues primarily involve: generational gaps, physical distance, a lack of commonalities, and expectations for each party’s role in the relationship. At this point we felt that we would focus our research on grandchildren and their point of view for a couple reasons:

a) From our survey results, we learned that many grandchildren were putting less effort into the relationship than their grandparents. Therefore, we were curious about creating a solution that focused on how the grandchild could want to improve their connection with their grandparent, without an urgent event requiring them to do so.

b) With the limited time span of our project, grandchildren were more accessible to research.

So, we created the Making Memories Cookbook which allows both grandparents and grandchildren to add recipes and engage in prompts to help strengthen their relationship with each other. Included in the book is an instant camera which nestles perfectly in the spine and prints out photos of the cooking process which then can be stored within the pages as a way of personalizing the book to your family.