Dumpling Happy Hour

DESIGNER: REFAELI YAOFEI MA

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DESIGN CHALLENGE PROMPT

Dumplings are convenient, cheap, delicious, and healthy. However, cooking fresh dumplings can be a difficult job for beginners. Everybody enjoys fresh dumplings more than frozen ones, but not everyone has the skill to cook the traditional Chinese dish. Dumpling Happy Hour toolset makes it easy, fast to cook tasty and traditional dumpling.

WHAT IS DUMPLING

Chinese Dumpling: A famous doctor Zhongjing Zhang invented the dumplings during the Eastern Han Dynasty, one thousand years ago. Today, as a kind of Chinese traditional food, this dish is widely enjoyed throughout the world. Basically, the dumpling is a dish consisting of ground meat and vegetable filling wrapped inside a thin layer of dough and then boiled. In China, especially in northern China, making and eating dumplings is an important activity for most families in the Winter Solstice and Spring Festival. Dumplings symbolize a reunion and special event for most Chinese people. For Chinese people, the dumpling is not only as a food, it is part of an irreplaceable traditional culture.

WHY DUMPLING

People choose dumplings because they have some emotional factors. Most of the participant told me that they begin to receive special feelings for dumplings with family. Making dumplings arouse their memories of family because this is a traditional family activity. They believe that making dumpling together is a necessary activity. It is meaningful and indispensable. They believe that the process of making dumpling is more important than the result because it is the enjoyment in interacting with other people during the process. People feel that they are getting closer to each other during this activity, and this activity makes them feel belonging.

As we know, people choose dumplings because they are convenient, cheap, delicious, and healthy, balanced nutritious food. Furthermore, people like dumplings because they can eat everything they need in the shortest time if they choose dumplings. Frozen dumpling is not really tasty, the dumpling wrapper is very thick, and it is not healthy at all, the only reason why they choose to eat frozen dumplings is that they cannot make dumplings by themselves. In fact, most participants mentioned frozen dumpling is not good, especially the expert. They told me that they choose to make dumplings by themselves not just because they can make tastier dumplings, but they don’t want their children to eat preservatives every day.