Supermachine Studio

The making of the exhibition, Quick Bites… Design for Better Living at Thailand Creative and Design Center, Bangkok. Supermachine unveils the stories behind the scene of the intensive but enjoyable process.

“This “eat-all-day” obsession has created Bangkok’s renowned 24/7 city-wide buffet, and along with it countless food, packaging and catering innovations. Low cost, and adapted from everyday objects, these designs for better eating show off Thai common sense and quirkiness. Behind them are some of the city’s most successful business stories.” (part of the introduction from TCDC)

We enter the project with a few obsessions; it would be nice to build the exhibition with papers, we want the exhibition to be the so systematic that it could be dissembled and travel to other locations with different sizes of space. Lucky enough, we were informed at the beginning of the project that there was a 50% budget cut. So our humble obsession can survive the situation.

 The exhibiting system we think appropriate is a ribbon-like paper table that folds around in and out supporting different content boxes and panels. Like little maze, the endless table forms big and small spaces for different sections of the exhibition. We think this system will help explaining such a complex space well because it extracts those eating related objects from reality and puts  in line with the coherent narration. In a way, this exhibition does not at all tells stories in a kind of scenic way like some of the previous exhibitions of TCDC. It is a pretty much reductive which we think is quite strong particularly for such a messy topic like Thai eating culture.

To our surprise, in 3 weeks of designing, we have done 200+ rendering trying to develop the system of the endless table. Waffle, zig-zag, box, cart, diaphragm , you name it.In parallel with computer model exploration, many version of physical models are experimented from tiny scale to 1:1.

 We failed a few times with our prototype mock up till we conclude that the most efficient system for it is expanding with crossing folds (pretty hard to name it.) This is cheap to be done because there is only one shape repeating, easy to transport because it can be folded small (when unfold it’s 3 times the folded length). And finally it is very quick and easy to install as well as able to be adjusted to the change of the room and content. It took us only 5 days to produce 100 meter long table.