Co/Lab Hungry for Change | Eat It! The Future is Fast Food!

Co/Lab: Hungry for Change is the successor to the Embassy of Food and builds on three years of design-driven research within the World Design Embassies of the Dutch Design Foundation. Where the Embassy laid the foundations by bringing together a broad coalition of designers, policymakers and businesses, Co/Lab focuses on deepening that collaboration and developing practical tools for change. Barbara Vos, who shaped the Embassy of Food as creative lead over the past two years, is working in this third year with designer and director Anna Noyons of Ink Social Design. Together, they explore how organisations can better understand what influences consumer behaviour and how they can translate their values more convincingly into policy, communication and design.

What if we redesigned our food environment so that the healthiest and most sustainable choices became the most irresistible? A good question, because every day, our choices are being influenced. Our food environment is designed to be quick, easy and appealing. We are constantly tempted by irresistible snacks: grabbing something from a kiosk as we run for the train, picking up a greasy cheese roll at the petrol station, or facing a tempting biscuit at the checkout. Meanwhile, the healthier products often remain untouched.

A better environment doesn’t start with the individual

We are already experiencing the consequences of this unhealthy environment: increasing rates of chronic illness, rising healthcare demands, and escalating costs. It’s not that people are foolish or unwilling, the system itself makes it extraordinarily difficult. “‘A better environment starts with you’ is an illusion,” says researcher and programme maker Barbara Vos. “The slogan was originally coined by the oil company Exxon to shift responsibility for environmental pollution onto individuals, rather than the industry itself. That’s still the crux of the problem: people are blamed for their choices, while the environments in which those choices are made have been designed by others. And that means we can redesign them too. If we don’t, we give free rein to commercial forces whose goal is profit maximisation to decide what ends up on our plates. As a result, salt, sugar and fat remain the cheapest and most visible options.”

“People make normal choices in an unhealthy environment,” adds social designer Anna Noyons. “Eighty percent of what’s on supermarket shelves is unhealthy, and KFC’s slogan proudly claims that a junk food meal for a family is cheaper than buying groceries. The level of unhealthy temptation is almost inhuman. Design can help to break that pattern, because designers don’t just respond to behaviour, they help to shape it. If we understand how temptation works what attracts people, how convenience operates, where their desires lie, we can use that knowledge to make healthy and sustainable choices appealing,” she says.

The environment won’t change as long as we only treat the symptoms or believe that individuals are to blame. Our choices are shaped by social and cultural patterns—by what is considered normal and by what we can afford. In the United States, for example, food deserts exist where people have no access to healthy food at all. “The goal is to change the system itself, so that healthy and sustainable eating is not only possible, but also the easiest and most attractive choice,” says Vos, who was originally asked to make the broad, abstract challenge of our food system more visible and tangible.

Designers open up new perspectives

As creative lead of the Embassy of Food, Vos brought together designers, policymakers, businesses and researchers to explore how design can contribute to genuine change. “Designers can do more than come up with solutions,” says Vos. “They help connect people who would not normally meet and open up new perspectives.”

In the first two years (2023 and 2024), the focus lay on exploring the food system and bringing together a range of perspectives. The creative lead built a multi-voiced coalition of partners, each working in their own way on food, health and sustainability. Design functioned as a shared language, a way to connect diverse interests and worlds.

From this collaboration, three central themes emerged: health, behaviour and food environment, which now form the foundation of Co/Lab: Hungry for Change.

This year, Barbara Vos once again leads a growing alliance of partners aiming to deepen and apply this design-driven approach in practice. Alongside long-term partners such as Rabobank and the Province of North Brabant, new collaborators have joined, including the Ministry of the Interior and Kingdom Relations, In4Art, and S+T+ARTS Hungry EcoCities. “Each partner brings something unique,” says Vos. “By identifying where our interests overlap and placing design at the centre, we create space for new insights and actions. We don’t know exactly where we’ll end up, but we trust the process.”

The value of social design

“To deepen the collaboration further, we need social design as an area of expertise,” Vos believes. That’s why she has started a partnership this year with Anna Noyons of Ink Social Design. “Ink understands better than anyone how design can contribute to behavioural change,” says Vos, “and they know how to translate insights about behaviour into something that actually works in practice.”

“Designers can play a key role in transforming the food system,” says Noyons. “Not by simply presenting citizens with something new, but by reshaping the systems around them. If we design structures and environments so that sustainable choices naturally become the most attractive ones, behaviour changes almost automatically,” she explains.

She continues: “Designers are uniquely comfortable with not knowing, they dare to work in processes where the outcome is still open. They have the imagination and creativity to envision what we cannot yet see, and the ability to reshape environments and create new ways of acting.” By designing, testing and learning together with partners, innovative solutions emerge that can be applied on a larger scale.

The Three G’s

With its ability to make things tangible and practical, Ink Social Design has developed within Co/Lab: Hungry for Change a hands-on framework that helps organisations understand what drives consumer behaviour. This enables them to strengthen their role in the food network, place consumers at the centre, and communicate their values more convincingly. The framework revolves around the three G’s: Geluk (Happiness), Geld (Money) and Gemak (Ease). The main factors that determine how people make their food choices. “That’s the holy grail,” says Vos. “If you don’t take those three into account, you lose connection.”

To actively involve the public, a new fast-food brand has been developed with the provocative slogan:
Eat It! The Future is Fast Food! During DDW, the accompanying snack bar opens at Ketelhuisplein, serving a menu based on the three G’s: Happiness, Ease and Cheap. In a thought-provoking yet non-preachy way, visitors can taste temptation as a driving force for change. They are invited to reflect on their own eating behaviour and on how our food environment shapes it. They can also engage in conversation with designers and partners—and ideally leave with a takeaway consisting of a fresh perspective and a desire to make change happen.