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Shoaib Hadeed

Canterbury 100

A boxed sensory experience for the Beaney museum in Canterbury, telling the city’s past, present and future through taste and smell.

Role
Research, concept, prototyping and identity
Year
2025
Context
MA Product Design, University for the Creative Arts. A brief set in the Garden Room of the Beaney House of Art & Knowledge, Canterbury.
Status
Concept, prototype exhibited
Tools
Blender, 3D printing, Laser cutting
Three teal 3D-printed bottles side by side. The first is carved with Gothic arches, the second twists like a wrung cloth, and the third is an open lattice.

The brief

The Garden Room at the Beaney House of Art & Knowledge is a large communal space holding layers of Kent’s history, art and culture. The brief was to create a communal product or spatial intervention inspired by the room’s character and story.

What museums leave out

I studied the Beaney, the British Museum and the UCA library. Both museums show their artefacts behind glass, separated from direct interaction. The text gives historical context, but the experience stays visual. The Beaney adds some sound, through digital links that explain the history of its artefacts. The British Museum relies almost entirely on sight.

Four round photos of museum displays: a gilded winged statue, a glass cabinet of helmets and pots, a tray of minerals under glass, and a wall case of bangles and baskets. Below them, an eye, and then icons for the ear, nose, tongue and hand, labelled limited sensory experience.
From my research boards: artefacts behind glass, and the senses a museum leaves out.
  1. 1Artefacts sit behind glass, so the experience remains predominantly visual.
  2. 2Hearing, smell, taste and touch are left out. That became the gap to design for.

Joseph Cornell’s box installations pointed the way. He preserved fragments of history, memory and culture inside small enclosed boxes, much as a museum frames and protects its artefacts in vitrines. So the idea became a contained sensory experience in a box, one that engages sight, smell, taste, touch and sound. It doesn’t disrupt the room. It adds a layer to the shared museum experience.

Three bottles, three times

The story comes from Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, where pilgrims travel together to Canterbury Cathedral, each telling a tale tied to place, memory and the senses. I turned that into an edible journey through time, across three points: 100 years in the past, the present moment, and 100 years into the future. Each has its own bottle.

The info card from inside the box, in three teal panels. The road to the old city: Canterbury 100 years ago, with 70 per cent red wine, apples, orange juice, cinnamon and honey. The city as it breathes today: modern Canterbury, with olive oil, cooked apples, lemon juice, cinnamon, clove and water. The future feast: a speculative Canterbury 100 years from now, with caramelised sugar and honey shaped into an edible mesh.
The info card inside the box, with each bottle’s story and recipe.
  1. 1The road to the old city: Canterbury 100 years ago, echoing the past and the ancient pilgrim road.
  2. 2The city as it breathes today: modern Canterbury, layered with old stones and new flavours.
  3. 3The future feast: a speculative Canterbury 100 years from now. Edible, playful, sustainable.

The ingredients come from the food culture of Chaucer’s time: red wine, apples, orange, cinnamon, honey, lemon, clove and olive oil. The past is recreated through historically grounded ingredients, the present through contemporary preparation, and the future through imagined combinations.

Cooking as design

I developed the recipe by hand. Apples were crushed and cooked, juices and spices combined, and honey, wine and water adjusted to balance sweetness, acidity and aroma. It evolved through tasting and smelling rather than fixed measurements, so cooking became a design process, with taste and smell as the materials.

The bottles took more experimenting. I pushed clay through a syringe to imitate clay 3D printing, but it was slow, dried too early and kept clogging. For an edible container, I heated honey and sugar into caramel and piped it into a glass-like mesh. The translucent, fragile forms fitted the idea. But the caramel hardened too fast to shape, broke easily, smelled burnt and stuck to the teeth.

Three photos: dried clay mesh shapes on brown paper, a tangle of amber caramel strands on paper, and a pan of red wine with chopped apple.
Clay mesh, caramel mesh, and the recipe in the pan.

Making it

I modelled the bottles in Blender, with the Beaney’s arches and a lattice mesh worked into their surfaces, then 3D printed and painted them. The lettering on the box was cut with a laser cutter.

Two Blender screenshots. Three grey bottle models with their stoppers floating above, one arched, one latticed and one twisted, and a close-up of the arched and latticed surfaces.
The bottles in Blender.
Three photos: the Canterbury 100 lettering cut on a laser cutter bed, the printed bottle parts and lettering sprayed teal on a board, and the finished green box with the teal logo on its lid.
Laser cutting the lettering, painting the parts, and the finished box.

The identity takes its lettering from the architectural lettering on the Beaney’s original plans, a style architects commonly used, which ties it to the building and its heritage.

On the left, hand lettering from the Beaney’s plans: drawing number, job number, November 1975 and a scale. On the right, the Canterbury 100 logo in green, three rounded shapes above the word Canterbury and the number 100, in a similar lettering.
The lettering on the Beaney’s plans, and the logo drawn from it.
  1. 1The letterforms come from the Beaney’s original plans, a typographic style commonly used by architects.
  2. 2The logo represents the three bottles: 100 years in the past, the present moment, and 100 years into the future.

Testing it

In sensory testing, one participant said the aroma immediately brought Canterbury to mind, and recognised the flavour as belonging to the place. They described distinct layers of flavour, then a crisp feeling as the liquid touched the tongue. Another used it purely as a perfume, and said the strong citrus heightened their senses. So taste and smell together could carry a sense of place, and the object worked in more than one way.

Scent has limits in a large room, though.

A floor plan of the Garden Room in teal. Dotted rings spread from the bottle at its centre, fading towards the walls, with four visitors drawn from above at different distances.
How far the scent carried across the Garden Room.
  1. 1The scent dispersed well near the source.
  2. 2It became increasingly faint towards the edges of the room, showing the spatial limits of how far smell can reach.

Where it went

Canterbury 100 was exhibited at the university. I also photographed it at the Beaney and at Canterbury Cathedral, the end of the pilgrims’ road.

Three photos: the Canterbury 100 box in front of Canterbury Cathedral, a latticed bottle in a carved stone niche, and the box and bottles on a table inside the Beaney.
Photographed at Canterbury Cathedral, and in the Beaney.

What I’d change

It’s costly and slow to make. Edible bottles can’t be mass-produced, and food-safe materials add complexity. At a larger scale it would need glass or other stable containers, and edible parts have a short shelf life that needs controlled conditions and trained staff.

There’s room for it to grow, though: as part of guided tours, events and workshops, with local producers of honey, apples and spices, or as small tasting kits in the museum shop.

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