Hello!

 

I thought many times about what to call this book, and I have researched the words to find the best one that fit the story I wanted to tell. I think I have searched 100 times for the meaning of the word Diet and studied a little bit of history to understand the connection between the word “Diet” and what was the meaning of the word through time and civilizations. Diet has nothing to do with losing weight; Diet is basically what a cultural group eats, all based on their influences during thousands of years in a particular geographic area.
 
People who know me understand why I started to write it and how those things I will mention are deeply connected to who I am and how I deal with something within the Design field and daily life, following my passion for design and cooking. It may seem odd, but you can compare the making of food to almost anything in life; it’s just a fundamental part of our existence, which has molded our relationships and actions over time. A poorly written recipe can waste your time, ingredients, and money and make you feel lost on how to move on - Do I mix the dry ingredients first or put it all together? - This can lead you and the people you are cooking for to a terrible experience.
 
Cooking has many “facets”, or should I say levels? Complexity? Let’s say we use the work complexity; it’s easier to understand and capture the meaning. If you are here as a cook or chef, you know what I’m talking about, and if you are here as a designer, it’s also apparent that both areas can become highly complex sometimes. One of the essential aspects that connect cooking and design is creativity. To be a great cook at home or a restaurant chef, you must use imagination. The mixing of ingredients, spices, and cooking methods, depending on the order, can create many different tastes and experiences, and when designing a new product or experience, the way you conduct and mix the teams, capabilities, and how you drive the design process can also have a significant difference in your outcome. Many people hear phrases like “To be a leader, you need first to be led by example” it’s true; to be a great chef or designer, you have to nurture yourself with good experiences that, inside your head, turn into great examples. But, let me tell you - Not only does creativity connect both, but creativity is also only one of the aspects I will discuss in this book. If you have already seen the Netflix series called Chef’s Table, you see that restaurants have an organized kitchen, a plan, and a menu; they test the recipes until perfection is achieved, calculate prices for each item, and weigh the items before the preparation, all to keep consistency, and that is one of the keys to win a Michelin prize and become a worldwide recognized restaurant, consistency. How do we achieve it in design? By creating standards and processes that can be repeated in each project or using the exact outcome of other projects to set new ones in the right direction.
 
Let’s go together on this crazy adventure of comparing cooking and design, and I hope, in the end, all of the most tedious and complex parts of the design business and processes are clarified and made easy for you to understand, apply and harvest incredible results from it.