The Last Minute Dinner Party
As part of the RISD Museum’s first Design The Night event in June of 2012 I was invited to create an interactive experience for museum visitors that explored the night’s theme, Tools.
I created an experience I called, The Last Minute Dinner Party. The premise was simple. When visitors entered the room, they found me, an empty dinner table, and a large pile of flotsam and jetsam collected from thrifts stores and recycling bins. I told them that I had five guests coming for a dinner party. All the food was prepared, but I didn’t have anything else…no plates, no cups, no cutlery or serving bowls. I needed their help creating all the tools we needed to serve and eat the food. Our only resources were the piles of random objects, some tape, and a hot glue gun. We had to work together to turn this stuff into an amazing dinner party.
As part of my thesis research I was exploring the concept that nothing is truly made from scratch—everything, be it an object or an idea, is assembled from the materials around us, the bits and pieces of other things. I saw this event as an interesting way to engage visitors with this idea and a chance to watch people as they broke old things down to reassemble them into new things.
It was incredible to watch adults and children working side by side to turn bits of old toys, sports equipment, and disposable packaging into forks, serving bowls, and wine glasses.
One of my favorite creations from the night were personal fishing rods for each guest. When one little girl asked me what we needed for the table, I told her we still didn’t have a way of getting the food from the serving bowls onto each guest’s plate. Over the course of the night she built six little fishing rods so guests could cast their lines to the center of the table and reel their food back to their plate. Genius!
* All photographs by Megan Costello. Courtesy Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design.
