Over the past semester, I’ve been “designing the course of the future” through a weekly seminar series about innovative education strategies at Harvard University. I recently presented my proposal for a course about culinary innovation, to teach basic problem solving skills to undergraduates (click the poster above for a larger version). One of the most exciting aspects of being involved in the Science and Cooking course has been working with a range of chefs, including quite a few in the Boston area. I’ve learned so much from my interactions with them, and wanted a way to establish deeper collaborations between them and students at Harvard. At the same time, I’ve also become quite interested in how design consulting firms, like IDEO or Continuum, solve problems, and wondered whether that could be tied into the course. Below are some excepts from my proposal:

Culinary Innovation 101 

The target audience for the class is students who are passionate about solving problems and have some basic scientific background. In most school systems, students are presented an overly simplified view of the scientific method: question, hypothesis, experiment, results, and discussion. In actual scientific and culinary investigation, the process is more flexible and iterative. The culinary world is a great testing ground for developing problem-solving skills, since the results are tangible and the time-scale for finding an answer is fast. Even if the participants don’t have a strong culinary background or desire to work in the food industry, they will still gain valuable insight into the process of innovation. The objective is to practice a general problem-solving approach that can be applied to any scientific or engineering problem that also has a human factors component.

The inspiration from this class came from the recent trend towards stronger connections between the scientific and culinary worlds. Throughout history, technology has been used to improve the nutrition, safety, and flavor of food. For much of the past century, professional food scientists were the only ones applying scientific principles to the food preparation process. More recently, numerous collaborations between chefs and scientists have fueled a new wave of creativity. At the fine-dining level, chefs like Ferran Adria and Heston Blumenthal have employed new techniques and ingredients, such as rotary evaporation and liquid nitrogen, for novel culinary experiences. Since the publication of On Food and Cooking by Harold McGee in 1984, quite a few people have pursued careers at the intersection of food and science, such as Dave Arnold (Cooking Issues), Chris Young (Modernist Cuisine), and Kenji Alt (The Food Lab). Despite the diversity of backgrounds, they all share the goal of using a scientific process to address culinary problems, whether it is the creation of a new dish or the evaluation of traditional methods of cooking.

Although the top investigators follow different approaches, their activities can all fit within the general design paradigm, which is exemplified by design consulting firms such as IDEO and Continuum. We’ll use this as a framework for structuring the class:

1. Observation: what are the most relevant questions for chefs?
2. Ideation: how can you combine insights from research scientists, food technologists, professional chefs, and others to answer this question?
3. Experimentation: how can you use a shotgun approach to rapidly explore the space of possible variables?
4. Presentation: how can you design an experiment such that its results will provoke the audience to adopt a new cooking technique or to conduct further experiments of their own? The students will post the results of their original experiments to a public course website, with explanations of the underlying scientific principles. The goal is to receive feedback from home cooks and professional chefs.

Another vital component of the problem-solving process is teamwork. Students will work in small teams for each of the cycles, so that they will learn from the distinct perspectives of their classmates.

For a better understanding of the culinary world, students will visit the kitchens of partnering restaurants and other food establishments. They will then do their own experiments in an on-campus culinary lab, which could be a dining hall kitchen between shifts or similar space. After an initial safety training, they will be able to work in the space on their own schedule. Even if such spaces are unavailable, students could do some experiments at home, including with modern ingredients, using on-line suppliers like Modernist Pantry.

This course will be split into three cycles of four weeks, so that students can experience collaborations with up to three different restaurants. This will also allow them to incorporate feedback into their future experiments and presentations. For instance, they may find that they need to take more photos during the documentation phase or to control for more variables in their experimental design.

The final grade will be a combination of their restaurant visit write-ups, their experimental results, and their public blog posts, as well as overall class participation.

Making it Happen

There are already several design-oriented classes at Harvard, such as Engineering Sciences 96 and Engineering Sciences 20. It’s possible that the collaborations with chefs could be incorporated into an existing course, or adapted for senior engineering design projects. Both options seem quite feasible for the spring of 2013, so I’ll keep posting updates. In the meantime, I’d be happy to provide more details about the proposal and answer any questions about the potential implementation.