Diane Leclair Bisson developed The Screaming Plate as part of a sustained research trajectory situated at the intersection of food design and anthropology. While serving as a professor at the Université de Montréal, Leclair Bisson elaborated a series of design-led research projects investigating people’s lived experience of food, food-related objects, and food environments. These projects were conceived with the aim of informing new design directions and generating meaningful tableware capable of responding to diverse social, cultural, and institutional contexts.

A central objective of The Screaming Plate was to address the transformation of eating habits in contemporary Western societies. As food consumption has assumed an increasingly prominent role in social and cultural life—amplified by globalization and heightened exposure to culinary practices from other cultures—new attention has been directed toward the relationship between food and its containers. Within this context, the project examines how tableware mediates not only functional aspects of eating, but also perception, behavior, and meaning.

Grounded in qualitative fieldwork conducted in both domestic and public settings, including restaurants, hospital and school environments, the research explores multiple dimensions of the subjective experience of food. These include processes of food discovery, portion perception, tactile and material qualities of dishware, prehensile gestures, and the role of food-related objects in appetite formation and nutritional education. Participatory methodologies played a central role in the project, notably through collaborative workshops with families and with children in school environments, developed under the framework of the Young Designers Workshops. These workshops positioned users—particularly children—as active contributors to the design process, foregrounding embodied experience and sensory engagement.

The body of work produced within The Screaming Plate encompasses a wide range of experimental tableware typologies. These include spoons and stacked bowl systems designed to support food discovery; alternative configurations for plates and bowls that facilitate new modes of food arrangement and ease of handling; modular tableware sets developed for pediatric oncology units to stimulate appetite; studies for educational and sustainable school lunch boxes; and new surface pattern designs intended to extend the use of inherited family tableware rendered incomplete through loss or breakage. Collectively, these objects explore how design can intervene in everyday eating practices by reshaping gestures, attention, and sensory interaction.

The Screaming Plate aligns with broader research in food design and multisensory experience, emphasizing that tableware and utensils actively shape taste perception, social interaction, and emotional response rather than functioning as neutral supports. By combining anthropological inquiry with experimental design practice, the project demonstrates how food-related objects can operate as agents within cultural, educational, and care contexts, contributing to new understandings of eating as an embodied, relational, and situated experience.