Fast Food Observation - Tools

Fast Food Observations Tools Danielle Leigh BA Design Year 1

The multi-use of fast food beans as a dipping sauce and how the rim of the cup is used to stop the sauce from dripping.

The spork is one of the few pieces of cutlery that is made for the fast food market, becoming a tool which can do two things: scoop like a spoon and pick up like a fork. Like most fast food cutlery it is made out of plastic so it can be thrown away easily while on the go.

Creative new uses for used packaging, such as using the paper wrapping to wipe your mouth, give new, unintended uses for things, shaping them to our own needs.

The paper chip bag is given a new use as a container to help spread salt equally around chips. This shows the small added efforts people do to shape things to their own preferences.

Again the beans are used as a sauce, and the side of the cup is used to take off excess.

Another behaviour is taking a scoop of beans and then balancing the spork on the rim of the cup so that they cool down quicker. This is a more playful new tool use, not just doing a job, but also creating a balancing act you have to go through to make this use work. This tool seemed to be used more for fun rather than its effectiveness as it was only done a couple of times before they grew tired of it and just used the spork.

An innovative use to pick up a dropped bean with a used salt packet to prevent their fingers from getting messy.

Using the paper chip packet as a place to put ketchup on and use it to dip chips in.

Fast food packaging is very contained and methodical, perfect for quickly grabbing and going, but not as a sit in meal.

Tools In the hustle and bustle of modern life, fast food fits quite well in our fast-paced lifestyle. Eating on the go or sitting in, we usually don’t spend too long in a fast food restaurant if we don’t have to. The whole system caters to that: few tables, bouncy, fast-paced pop music, food bagged up and ready to take away quickly (they seem to rarely use trays now).

Even when sitting in to eat, people rarely spend too long on a meal. In most places there isn’t even cutlery, the symbol of a sit-down meal and appreciating the food you are given, the tools which paced us in our eating. We just use our fingers to quickly eat and then go to get on with life.

And yet somehow we still create these tools to achieve what we want to do. While people bustled around, one woman was eating a burger, using a wooden coffee stirrer to spread ketchup where she wanted it and then took a bite. This small action seemed to go against the whole system of the fast food restaurant and the fast paced life, instead paying homage to when we took our time with things. By taking her time to do this little action, she changed the whole pace of her meal, making an unconscious effort to calmly adjust her meal to her own needs. The fact that she had the stirrer meant that she had already gone through the few tools provided at the restaurant before and found the one she felt worked best, subverting that tools original use.

Small instances of creative innovation, such as using the two halves of a paper salt package to pick up a rogue bean or using a coffee stirrer to spread ketchup, are typical of human behaviour. This tool creation has been with us throughout human history, shaping us and helping us evolve. In modern time we don’t need to create primitive tools anymore, and yet we still do, using sticks to help us and shaping them to how we need them. With so few tools provided in fast food restaurants, we have to go back to that behaviour of tool-making if we want to cater to our own needs and find new uses for objects that were never intended to work in that way. Despite the intended grab and go culture around fast food, we still take the time to shape things to our own preferences, even with so few means to do this with.