Six unusual cutlery sets to liven up Thanksgiving dinner
Happy Thanksgiving! To celebrate we've rounded up six quirky cutlery designs that make eating a celebratory feast more memorable, including a hybrid spork, knives that look like tools and utensils too big to fit into your mouth.
Nonsensical cutlery by Maki Okamoto
Japanese jewellery designer Maki Okamoto created these mutated pieces from recycled antique cutlery, adding extra tines or splicing bowls of spoons together with forks. The project forms part of a series of pieces by different designers challenging "efficient and functional" tableware.
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Homemade schizophrenia by Firdaws Fourcroy
Aiming to help users relate to behaviour caused by schizophrenia, Central Saint Martins graduate Firdaws Fourcroy created this cutlery to make eating deliberately difficult. It features a fork that can only pick up one rice grain at a time, a spoon too big to fit into the mouth, and a weak knife that cuts ineffectively.
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Westiental cutlery by Wen Jing Lai
China-born designer Wen Jing Lai fused elements from western and eastern cutlery to create a series of hybrid eating utensils combining knives and forks with chopsticks. Materials are mixed and matched so chopstick-shaped items are made in stainless steel, and knife and fork handles are produced in bamboo.
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Tableware as Sensorial Stimuli by Jinhyun Jeon
Design Academy Eindhoven graduate Jinhyun Jeon created this set of knobbly, bulbous and serrated cutlery to stimulate diners' full range of senses at the table. By testing different shapes, textures and colours, Jeon hoped to mimic the phenomenon of synaesthesia, a neurological condition in which stimuli like taste, colour and hearing are affected and triggered by each other.
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This range of of cutlery by Japanese design studio Nendo looks as though it's been carved from flint like prehistoric tools. The concave surfaces were sandblasted to a matt finish, while the other surfaces have been polished to a mirror finish, heightening the impression of sections being carved away.
Dutch designer Aldo Bakker hoped to create an immortal set of cutlery. The knife, fork and spoon are coated in 60 layers of urushi, a traditional Japanese lacquer made of tree sap that last up to 9000 years.
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