Cerita Rasa – A Home for the Stories Behind Every Dish

Overview

Cerita Rasa is a digital storytelling platform designed to help diasporic individuals preserve and share cultural food memories. It focuses on capturing personal and food stories that often exist only in memory or family conversations. By turning these memories into a shared archive, Cerita Rasa strengthens cultural identity and family connection across distance and time.

Project Goal

The goal of this project is to design a meaningful and accessible way for diasporic communities to document, preserve, and share food-related memories, making cultural storytelling more intentional and lasting.

Target Audience

The primary audience for Cerita Rasa includes diasporic individuals of all ages who are passionate about their cultural heritage, as well as families seeking to connect with their roots through food. The platform also aims to attract community organizations that focus on cultural preservation and storytelling.

Where do food memories go when families grow apart?

For many diasporic families, food is one of the most intimate ways culture is preserved and shared. Recipes are not just instructions. They are tied to people, places, and lived experiences, often passed down through shared meals, observation, and casual storytelling rather than formal documentation.

However, migration, distance, and generational shifts change how these memories are maintained. Family members may no longer cook together, speak the same language fluently, or share the same everyday environments. As a result, many food memories remain fragmented and exist in personal recollection, but are rarely captured or preserved in a lasting way.

Over time, these stories risk becoming harder to access, not because they lose meaning, but because the context that keeps them alive slowly changes.

Key Research Insights

Key Insight Synthesis

Food memories within diasporic families are deeply meaningful, but they often exist in fragmented, and undocumented ways that make them difficult to preserve across time and generations.

This creates an opportunity to explore how food memories might be more intentionally preserved and shared across generations.

How might we help people preserve and share food memories across generations?

This helped understand how food memories move from being triggered to being captured, shared, and revisited.

Understanding the Food Memory System

I created an ecosystem map to show how the platform connects users, food memories, and family members within a broader personal, cultural, and social context. It illustrates how food memories are created, shared, and preserved through interactions between people and the platform, helping maintain emotional and cultural connection across distance.

Validating the Direction

Building on my interview insights, I conducted a co-design session with 6 participants, and introduced different activities. The main activity was to create their own food memory pages by organizing different memory elements.

Across all participants, I observed that the story was consistently placed at the centre of their layouts, usually grouped with photos, people, and emotions, while recipes were treated as secondary.

This showed that food memories are experienced as narratives, instead of instructions, and this insight directly shaped Cerita Rasa as a storytelling-focused platform for preserving food memories.

Introducing Cerita Rasa

Cerita Rasa is a digital platform designed to help diasporic individuals preserve and share food memories within their families.

The name comes from the Indonesian language, where cerita means “story” and rasa means “taste” or “feeling.” I chose an Indonesian name to reflect my cultural background and the emotional role food plays in Indonesian family life, where food is closely tied to memory, belonging, and connection across generations.

Together, the name represents preserving food not just as recipes, but as memories connected to people, moments, and emotions that shape how we experience family and culture.

The logo is represented by a chili, which symbolizes how spice is an essential part of Indonesian food culture and reflects the intensity of emotional and sensory food memories.

Key Feature – Explore

One of the features is an interactive map, which presents food memories on a world map, where each pin represents a submitted food story from different locations.

When users click on a pin, they can explore the food memory shared by someone else, including the location, story, context, and emotional details behind it. Users can also contribute by submitting their own food memories to the map.

This creates a shared space where food stories are connected through geography and personal experience, which allows users to explore cultural and emotional connections across different places.

Key Feature – Discover Stories

The Discover Stories feature allows users to explore food memories submitted by others in more detail, beyond the world map view.

Users can browse individual stories and filter them based on cuisine, region, season, or emotion, because food memories are often remembered in different ways depending on personal experience and context. This helps users connect with stories that feel familiar or meaningful to them, whether through shared culture, emotions, or specific life moments.

Supporting Features – Timeline & Community Exchange

The Timeline Archive allows users to create private timelines with family members or close friends, giving them control over who can view and share their food memories. Since food memories can be personal, this feature supports more intimate sharing within smaller circles, where users may feel more comfortable and connected. It also allows families to revisit and compare memories over time, which can strengthen relationships.

The Community Exchange feature extends the platform beyond digital storytelling by allowing users to share and discover community events. These can include in-person or hybrid gatherings where people come together to share food and stories. This feature was introduced based on feedback suggesting the importance of real-world connection, helping users build relationships and experience food memories in a more social way.