Break Bread
TEAM: Kareem Asfahani | Lebanese | IE University
An urban model that bridges the gap
Although eating is a social activity, meals have become unprecedentedly isolating; or at best people constantly stick to the same faces and places when eating out. In contrast, ‘Break Bread’ is an urban model designed to randomly bring strangers together during meals.
By bringing their own food and hopping into a capsule, ‘guests’ travel through a tube and are haphazardly paired with available ‘hosts’ who have also brought munchies to share. Hosts are either located on rooftop community gardens or in community centers; which are strategically centralized and house marginal communities. Therefore, guest capsules can either plug into a host’s garden pavilion or into a façade of a community center according to their preferred proximity and travel time.
Like a game of Russian Roulette, unusual combinations of people are connected more times than not; which certainly makes for more interesting meals. Users will ultimately end up breaking bread either with strangers in a community garden, asylum seekers in a shelter, monks in a monastery, senior citizens in a retirement home, recovering addicts in a rehab center, or even inmates at a minimum security prison. It is all based on serendipity and the magical encounters life has in store for them.