Vienna Design Week Passionswege 2012: Mathias Hahn @ Staud’s Wien

A few years ago the phrase “food design” suddenly started cropping up a lot.

It’s the sort of phrase that makes us uneasy. It just sounds like the sort of shallow, self-indulgent thing Guardian readers get excited about and then book weekend courses in Tuscany to learn.

We don’t trust things like “food design”.

Fortunately for his Passionswege 2012 project with the Viennese jam and pickle maker Staud’s, London based designer Mathias Hahn chose to ignore the food and concentrate on the vessels that store it.

Which is good because we’ve long been fans of Mathias’ work and would hate to have to give up on him over something as petty bourgeoisie and fleetingly irrelevant as food design.

For Vienna Design Week Mathias created five mixed material food storage vessels, one could say glass jars – but that really, really would be doing them an injustice.

For us the highlights of the collection were the object with the wooden base and ceramic lid that contained jam, and the smoked glass vessel which stored preserves in a suspended interior glass container. Both items having an uncomplicated lightness, and almost irreverence, that made them highly congenial.

But all five objects were well thought through, neatly executed and seen together the five represented a complete, homogeneous set. What more could you ask for.

Although we do fear that if they were to be commercially produced they’d invariably fall into the hands of “foodies” and others who would misuse them for their own narcissistic manifesto.

Which is something neither they nor Mathias deserve.