The Meaning of One Bite
As One Bite is currently undergoing a series of revamps and also new developments, our team has been in a reflective mode lately. Things that we have been doing right, and things that may not work for future despite working perfectly fine before. And one of the things that we have been reflected upon is the name of "One Bite".
Names are very important as it is about our identity, and people might have wonder how this name has come about. When One Bite was founded back in 2014, the name was derived from the ideology that designs can be as vibrant as different flavours that you could taste. That has actually played a part in landing us the award for RIBA EAT! 2015 Competition, RIBA HK Chapter! However people have also felt that this name might be slightly out of date or misleading at times. Are we a designer firm that specialises in F&B projects? Or are we in the F&B industry? Sometimes, our name would even be wrongly pronounced as 'One Bit' instead, and caused a lot of funny (and awkward!) moments…
So are we going to keep the name as “One Bite” or not?
To me, I had a different take on this name. Food is always about reconciliation. As an essential item of a banquet, it is the centre of any family dining table, wedding banquets, or even banquet of reconciliation between conflicted parties. It's the time when everyone sit together and share the same food, same drink, and care nothing else. There may be moments of which people are apart, disconnected, differ or even confronting each other. But at the dining table, we return to the banquet table, reunite and share the banquet together again. Food reconnects people by reconciliation of the separated, the disengaged or even the forgotten.
Therefore, to me, here in One Bite, we attempt to reconcile things that does not make human sense in this world with our design. That is why collaboration is part of our core business process. It is in our nature to collaborate in order to reconnect. We collaborate with our clients. We collaborate with our community. We collaborate with our fellow designers. The role of designer is to use our intrinsic skills of creativity to reconnect things in this world so that it will hopefully make a little bit more sense.
Despite a corporate and business development point of view that the name of “One Bite” may have several drawbacks, it actually reminds us of our roots and our values of why we are doing design.
Hence we will continue to be One Bite Design Studio, and we are proud of it.
We will continue to develop One Bite Design Studio as a design collaborative platform, including the new One Bite Social and One Bite Research, and hopefully we could live out what we truly believes in.
Written by Billy Kwan - on an evening flight from Hong Kong to Singapore in May.