ZGDW 2026

PROGRAM

ZGDW AWARD

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English

ZGDW IZLOZBA /

Before the First Bite

Address

Akademija likovnih umjetnosti, Ilica 85

Entry ticket

€5, pay at the entrance

Exhibition dates

15 Sept Tuesday

19.30—22.00

16 Sept Wednesday

14.00—21.00

17 Sept Thursday

14.00—21.00

18 Sept Friday

14.00—21.00

19 Sept Saturday

11.00—21.00

20 Sept Sunday

11.00—19.00

Address

Akademija likovnih umjetnosti, Ilica 85

Exhibition dates

15 Sept Tuesday

19.30—22.00

16 Sept Wednesday

14.00—21.00

17 Sept Thursday

14.00—21.00

18 Sept Friday

14.00—21.00

19 Sept Saturday

11.00—21.00

20 Sept Sunday

11.00—19.00

Entry ticket

€5, pay at the entrance

What happens before the first bite?
rication

Can the shape of a plate change the taste of food? Can an electrical impulse make a meal taste saltier without adding salt? How will astronauts eat, and how will people eat in a world without plastic and meat? Through 33 projects from around the world, the “Before the First Bite” exhibition at Zagreb Design Week shows that food design begins long before food reaches our mouths. This exhibition is one of the most important food design exhibitions in the world in 2026.

We think we eat with our tongues, but in fact we eat with our eyes, hands, ears, expectations and the objects that stand between us and food.

The colour of a plate can change the perception of the amount of food on it. The weight of cutlery influences expectations of taste. Sound and light can intensify flavour. For people who have difficulty moving their hands, have impaired vision or a reduced sense of taste, design can mean the difference between depending on others and eating independently.

It is precisely this space before the first bite that is explored by Tina Marković’s exhibition, “Before the First Bite”, which will take place from 15 to 20 September at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb as part of Zagreb Design Week.

Zagreb Design Week has been presenting and developing food design for ten years. It is a field in which food, industrial and product design, science, technology, sociology and ecology intersect. Croatia has particularly interesting potential in this respect: a strong food industry, a rich gastronomic tradition and a large number of local products that create space for thinking about food beyond gastronomy itself.

This year’s exhibition brings together 33 projects from around the world, arranged across six thematic tables. Each poses a different question: what determines taste, who is our table designed for, what do objects say about culture, can we eat without waste, why should design have to be practical and, finally, what will we actually eat in the future?

Before Taste

The first table enters the realm of perception and neuroscience. If taste is not only what the receptors on the tongue register, then to what extent can we design it?
Polish HAK Studio, with its UMA tableware collection developed on the basis of gastrophysics, seeks to enable people with a reduced sense of taste to experience sweetness and saltiness more intensely without adding sugar or salt.
Japanese designer Yamato Miyatake and Thai designer Parinya Punpongsanon use airbrushes and 3D food printing in the Taste Print project to precisely distribute the five basic tastes within a single bite.
Pimsiri Nilkositya from Thailand developed the Por-Dee plate, which uses an optical illusion to alter the perception of the amount of food and help with portion control.
Dutch designer Laila Snevele / SENSOVERSE goes a step further with the Digital Seasoning and Phygital Seasoning projects, exploring how screens, sound, light and augmented reality can alter expectations and, subsequently, the perception of taste itself.
And Tasting Goûte by Charles Michel and Andreas Fabian / Michel & Fabian blurs the boundary between cutlery and the finger. The glass utensil is shaped for a more direct, slower and more mindful tasting of creamy foods.

Inclusive Table

Other works also treat Polish visual heritage as active material. In Parzenica by 3DRD, the motif associated with traditional clothing from the Podhale region is enlarged, simplified and recomposed until it becomes the structure and identity of the bag rather than an applied decoration. Sniezka combines the symmetry of folk ornament, the lightness of lace and forms associated with snow and mountain landscapes. Warsaw-based WONTEK treats 3D printing as a contemporary form of weaving, combining colour, pattern and texture layer by layer. Its Mirage collection comprises six lamp forms and three abstract, organic surface patterns. An original printing method integrates multicoloured ornament directly into the printed surface rather than applying it afterwards. Depending on the viewing angle, the pattern becomes more or less visible, turning perception and movement into part of the object. The lamps are produced in Warsaw from PLA, a bio-based polymer commonly used in fused-filament 3D printing.

This relationship between pattern and structure has a particular resonance in the context of Lodz. The city developed through textile production, looms and repeated patterns. Its design history is inseparable from the industrial translation of ornament into systems of manufacture. A surface constructed layer by layer, carrying a pattern that shifts as the viewer moves, does not imitate weaving literally, but it belongs to a related way of thinking: structure and decoration are produced together.

Materials and Rituals

The third table slows the pace. The focus is no longer on technology, but on material, the hand and centuries of knowledge embedded in everyday objects.
British designer Jasper Morrison and French company Puiforcat present Jersey luxury cutlery, made in Japan from cherry wood and finished using the traditional fuki-urushi technique.
Scottish designer Kathleen Reilly’s Oku project combines a knife and chopping board created in collaboration with Japanese craftspeople from the Tsubame-Sanjo region and the company Karimoku.
Austrian Simiæn / Julia Schwarz, with the Licking Rocks project, transforms green stone into tableware for the ritual of drinking lichen tea.
British designer Max Lamb / 1882 Ltd. uses hand-carved plaster moulds as the starting point for the Crockery collection, creating tableware that feels almost archaeological.
Croatia is represented by Vlatka Leskovar / BOIR with the SAL⊥ project — a tabletop salt pan made of wood and ceramic that reinterprets the Mediterranean tradition of hand-harvesting salt.
Bosnia and Herzegovina’s Zanat presents Nera Bowls, sculptural wooden bowls finished using the traditional technique of hand carving.
Austrian studio mischer'traxler does precisely the opposite of conventional shaping in the Reversed Volumes project: fruit and vegetables become moulds, their volume becoming the negative from which a bowl is created.
Each of these objects reminds us that the table is not merely a place of consumption. It is a place of ritual, memory, craft and culture.

Zero Waste

The fourth table addresses a problem that begins after we finish eating: waste.
British company Notpla develops packaging made from renewable seaweed as an alternative to plastic.
Croatian designer Ines Vlahović presents The Seaweed Wrap, a thermal wrap for delivering hot food made from seaweed and paper.
Bulgarian company Cupffee produces cups made from crispy wafers that do not end up in the bin after the coffee — we can eat them instead.
Polish company Biotrem uses wheat bran, transforming it into biodegradable tableware under pressure and heat.
What these projects have in common is not an attempt to produce yet another “more ecological” version of single-use packaging. Their question is more radical: does packaging have to become waste at all after use?

Play and Friction

The fifth table is perhaps the one most closely connected to this year’s Zagreb Design Week theme — Friction.
Here, design does not solve a problem. Sometimes it deliberately creates one.
Peleg Design’s Egguins project turns boiling six eggs into a small choreography of penguins accompanying them from the pot to the table.
Greek architect Katerina Kamprani first presented her famous series The Uncomfortable at Zagreb Design Week in 2017. She does precisely what designers are generally not supposed to do: she deliberately makes familiar objects impractical. The result is simultaneously comic and frustrating, but it forces us to notice how much intelligence is hidden in things we otherwise no longer even look at.
Croatian designer Ema Gerovac Nogolica presents the Žvig rakija glass. Because of its rounded base, it cannot be put down while full: once you have picked it up, you have to complete the ritual.
Spanish Bag Disseny Studio adds a ceramic ring resembling a ballet skirt to its Ballarina cup, protecting the fingers from heat while also serving as a lid.
French designer Roxanne Brennen goes even further in the Dining Toys project, exploring the points of contact between food, pleasure, sexuality and liberation from traditional rules of behaviour at the table.
This table perhaps asks the simplest question in the entire exhibition: why do we eat the way we do?

The Future of Food

The final table leaves familiar everyday life behind and enters scenarios that today sound like science fiction — although perhaps not for much longer.
The Center for Genomic Gastronomy, in the Smog Tasting project, treats polluted urban air as a possible food ingredient, using it in experimental egg-white biscuits. The provocation is deliberate: if we already breathe pollution every day, what happens when it literally becomes part of our menu?
Latvian designer Klinta Locmele, with the Zero project, develops tableware for astronauts eating in microgravity, where the rules familiar from Earth — including the assumption that food stays on the plate — can no longer be taken for granted.
Dutch designer Chloe Rutzerveld, in the Broiler Insects project, imagines genetically modified insects as one possible answer to the question of future protein sources.
Malu Luecking’s Landless Food project explores the cultivation of microalgae and marine flavours on edible structures without the use of conventional soil.
The Fraunhofer CeRRI research team — Ines Lauber, Lynn Harles and Gesine Last — develops four speculative scenarios for the future of food in the Food Fictions project: from growing algae in your own kitchen to entirely new ways of caring for the gut microbiome.
Dutch-Swiss designer Carolien Niebling, meanwhile, looks for the future in one very familiar product — the sausage. She explores how it can be redefined through new ingredients and production methods while simultaneously reducing the amount of meat we consume.

Before the First Bite

Through 33 projects, “Before the First Bite” shows how little at our table happens by chance.
Taste begins before food. It begins in the shape of a spoon, the weight of a glass, the colour of a plate, the material of the packaging, the light in the room, sound, smell and expectation. It also begins in social rules, technology, ecology and the question of who can participate equally at the table in the first place.
Food is therefore much more than food.
And design much more than how things look.
It is precisely in the space between these two worlds that Zagreb Design Week has spent the past ten years exploring how design can change not only the objects we use, but also the way we eat, live and experience the world.

Exhibitors

Vlad Oganov — Vlad Oganov Objects
Sonia Trapkowska, Filip Rydzyński — GIBKI
Oliwia Ledzińska — NOWO
Stanisław Stupkiewicz, Filip Niczyj, Zbigniew Rybiński — Wontek
Katarzyna Rumińska-Rutkowska — 3DRD
Kajetan Luteracki — Bluba Studio