1 CUMULUS KYOTO 2008 COOKING RICE, REDISCOVERING DESIGN Juthamas Tangsantikul & Nigel Power INTRODUCTION Whilst new products arrive with a fanfare, their domestication goes unnoticed. The electronic rice cooker, for example, is now a ubiquitous and mundane object for almost all Thai families. The excitement that accompanied this product’s debut, the thrill of those early performances, where function played second fiddle and the product took centre stage, is already fading from the memories of the minority who witnessed them. One such magical moment is beautifully brought to life in Wong Kar Wai’s movie “In the Mood for Love” 1 . It is 1962 and the various residents of a Hong Kong guesthouse are readying themselves for their communal dinner, a quotidian ritual that is about to be transformed by the introduction of an object of wonder; an electronic rice cooker. In this narrative electronic rice cookers seem to play a pivotal role in drawing two couples together and set in motion the complex stories of love, adultery and estrangement that play out in the remainder of the film. In our study, rice cookers drew fifty-five young Thai people into conversation with their peers, their parents and their grandparents (see 2 for a more detailed description of this project). In a reversal of the dramatic logic of “In the Mood for Love”, few if any recalled those moments when the product first entered their lives. Yet almost all had stories to tell from the far longer period in which the product wove itself into the fabric of their everyday. Is it not odd then that so much of design’s rhetoric and energy is directed towards those early moments of product epiphany rather than the subsequent movement from novelty to equipment? Shifting attention to this latter phase suggests questions that might, in some small way, help to reset design. COOKING RICE “If you wanted to eat rice, say, at six o’clock in the morning, you’d have to wake up at four to get the charcoal stove going, then you had to match the right amount between rice and water, then put it on the stove. The amounts of rice and water were very important. If you put in too little water the rice wouldn’t cook or cooked but not well and became too hard to eat. If you put in too much water, the rice would come out wet, porridge-like. You also had to look after it while it was cooking, and pour away excess water. People who had never done it before or weren’t skilful, their rice might turn out to be ‘three kings rice’.” (70-year-old grandmother in conversation with her granddaughter) “Nowadays, our lives are always in a rush. We have to compete with time. Whatever we do, we have to do it the quickest way, using as little time as possible, otherwise we wouldn’t be able to compete with others. (Electronic) rice cookers do make kitchen work more convenient and much more time- efficient. Because with rice cookers, we only put in rice and water then press