Co-creating commensality

Commensality is the feeling of fellowship when eating at the table with others. In a research context, commensality unveils dimensions of social relations between people, as well as human and non-human actors. We present an example of co-creating commensality, enacted with members of a local sustainable market association around their Annual General Meeting (AGM). We devised a suite of activities that we believed would generate social and cultural significance for the association members, as a pathway to fostering change. These activities used food as a design material, as well as research concern, and included: an inspirational talk by the CEO of a local vegan business; a mapping, envisioning and backcasting exercise; and a co-created dinner following the AGM. A driving intention in designing these activities was to support participants to leverage comensality as a way of infrastructure their development as agents of change.