Jihyun Ryou is interested in food preservation.

“I’ve learned that we hand over the responsibility of taking care of food to the technology, the refrigerator,” he explains. “We don’t observe the food anymore, and we don’t understand how to treat it,” he adds.

To Ryou, design is not about making life easier but about propagating knowledge. Instead of concealing, design reveals time-tested rituals, processes and traditions, finding new ways to elucidate them.

Thus, for his ‘Save Food From the Fridge‘ project, Ryou has crafted a series of food storage contraptions that counter the hidden, black box technology of the refrigerator by relying on “traditional oral knowledge [that] has been accumulated from experience.”

Ryou’s analog appliances explore old kitchen wisdoms. His distinctive wooden shelves are designed to regulate dryness and humidity, lightness and darkness, and other variables crucial to food preservation, all through simple, natural technologies.

“Saving Food from the Fridge,” a series of analog food preservation appliances by Jihyun Ryou.

(via invisiblebee)