The Distant Family Dinner is a performative exploration of how design influences intimacy, rituals and social connections. Presented during Collectible NYC 2025 by Office of Tangible Space (as part of A New Futurist Cookbook), the project “pulls together” a familiar family dining experience and gradually through the dinner, “pulls it apart.”
The setup begins as a shared, communal feast, with one central hub table laden with shared platters and elegant place settings (designed by Mondays). But as diners settle in, the performance evolves, every minute servers pull each of nine nested individual tables one foot further away from the hub. Over the course of an hour, these tables can end up nearly 30 feet apart.
As the physical distance increases, norms of conversation, gesture, sharing, and spatial intimacy unravel and evolve. Diners stretch voices, lean physically, adapt gestures and invent new ways to remain part of the social exchange and dining experience. In doing so, Distant Family Dinner reveals how deeply our rituals of gathering depend on proximity and how design can influence us to reimagine them.
The conceptual springboard for this experiment is A New Futurist Cookbook (an ongoing collaboration by Wexler and Yarinsky) intended as a rethinking of the 1932 Futurist Cookbook, using food, ritual and design to provoke new ways of eating, gathering and being together.
As a project, the Distant Family Dinner is a poetic expression of how distance, design, and ritual intertwine and invites us to ask ‘how might we design for connection?’.
