Welcome to PLIX Space Food! Explore and create new inventions, experiences, and flavors to enhance the future of dining in outer space!
🥰 Ages 8+ 🕐 1–1.5 Hours 👩👧👦 up to 15 Participants 🍎 1–2 Facilitators 🎨 Craft Materials
Spaceflight is an adventure, but being so far away can be challenging. Astronauts have shared that familiar foods (eaten on Earth) can be a huge source of comfort in space. How can we meet the nutritional, performance-related, and emotional needs of astronauts, as well as future space travelers, through food?
Workshop Prompts & Gallery
Prompts from PLIX
PLIX Community Remixes
PLIX Community Book Connections
Materials
Supply Kit
Below you'll find some materials that we've found work well for this activity, but it's not necessary to have them all!
Printouts
Zine ↓
Remixable Zine ↓
Considerations for Dining in Space ↓
Facilitation
Playtest and Plan
Remember: There’s no one right way to prepare for a workshop. Use these steps as a loose guideline for planning to run this activity.
- Choose one of our prompts, or come up with a prompt that suits your library community. Our activity guides are for getting you started—feel free to change or create new design elements to suit your local community! All PLIX activity guides are designed for a minimum of 1–2 facilitators
- Gather materials and print out the zine.
- Make an example project. Try it out with friends and colleagues. Thoughtfully incomplete, good examples feature a variety of approaches and starting points. Use them to inspire learners to make something uniquely their own. Guide to Making Activity Examples →
- Try the activity with your patrons. Set a date and time. Easily promote your workshop with our ready-made graphics → COMING SOON!
- Populate your workshop space with diverse example projects. Create and play together!
- Reflect on what you’ve done and consider doing a remix!
Facilitation Tips
By design, this activity invites learners to creatively speculate the future of dining and well-being in outer-space environments. Since there are many ways to explore space food, patrons may need some guidance in how or where to get started. When facilitating this activity, we encourage you to support a tinkering mindset, and consider the following to culture a creative learning environment. In addition, check out our general PLIX Facilitation Techniques →
If there’s an upcoming food-related holiday (or any holiday that involves patrons preparing one of their favorite meals), ask participants to design a way that astronauts could celebrate. Or, ask participants to think about their own family’s food traditions and how to transport these to a space context. Have a wide variety of materials to encourage divergent thinking. Provide inspiring images of astronauts eating in space, and liquids on the loose.
We’ve provided some examples of projects that indicate different directions the project can be taken. The examples outlined connect to a few major themes you might choose to explore with your patrons that engage important questions about life in outerspace. Utensil design is a great way to get the creative juices flowing, since you can think about small adaptations that you can make to utensils we use every day (forks; spoons; chopsticks; spatulas; whisks). You can also explore tools to augment astronaut well-being, like the scent-creator we showed, which doesn't necessarily involve food, but rather the design of environments or atmospheres which remind astronauts of home.
If running an in-person workshop, bring along some snacks that might inspire ways that patrons are thinking about flavors, packaging, and food preparation. For example, in workshops we've run, we've brought along pop rocks, moon cheese, powdered drink mix, astronaut ice cream (which isn't actually eaten by astronauts!), hot sauce, etc. Freeze dried snacks work great, since they illustrate the types of foods that astronauts are already eating, but also bring some food items that don't translate so easily (something fermented, like miso or kombucha, or something that produces a lot of crumbs, like potato chips!).
The program could be divided into different meal courses, when check-ins and share-outs could happen. For example, a short warm-up as an appetizer, and then you as the maitre d’ of the space food restaurant can check in with each of the chefs / food scientists on what they've come up with so far. Some clarifying questions you could ask include: how would this be cooked, if at all? What is something that is causing you trouble? What would you like us to notice about your design / recipe?
Pair up your participants so they can share what they are working on. Alternatively, arrange the room as a Space Fare Fair where those who are tackling similar challenges can find one another, designating different tables / areas as “packaging innovation”, “taste lab”, “table-less tools”, etc.
NASA astronauts can tell you that zero gravity can take getting used to. Creative learning is a new way to facilitate, and it’ll take some time to get your space legs without the pull of a structured, step-by-step workshop to moor your feet.
What We ❤️ About This Activity
🔭 Offers a non-technical entry point for engaging with outer space By emphasizing the social and cultural aspects of spaceflight, this activity invites learners of all backgrounds to get started with design for outer space environments.
👪 Encourages collaboration and co-design Patrons are encouraged to work together to think through designs, communicate ideas, and share their inventions.
🗺️ Supports multi-cultural dialogue Through the sharing of recipes and culinary traditions, this activity shines a spotlight on the lived experience of patrons.
♻️ No new materials required The space food workshop prompts can be easily run with on-hand or leftover craft materials and/or recyclables.
About PLIX Space Food
This activity was developed in collaboration with Maggie Coblentz, an industrial designer and space food researcher who works with the MIT Media Lab Space Exploration Initiative.
Other ways to engage with the PLIX Space Food program
- Looking for some background music? Check out our PLIX Space Explorations Playlist 🎶
- Questions? Ask them on the PLIX Discussion Forum 🙋♀️
- Share your experience running this activity on Twitter or Instagram and tag us @heyplix