Doko Bar Shenzhen
Waterfrom Design designed Doko Bar Shenzhen to examine the lines between the virtual and real worlds by immersing guests in a combination of observing others and being observed while dining at the Shenzhen eatery.
In this age of Internet celebrities, people eat not just to satisfy their appetite, but they also use the food and the environment to show off themselves. Where Doko Bar located in Nanshan District of Shenzhen, is a representative Internet celebrity dessert shop. Waterfrom design, originated from the 15-minute theory, considers the eating process a show.
From the moment our guests step inside our store, take a seat, and from the moment we prepare our dessert to deliver our dishes and our guests taste our food, every step of the way is like tight-coupling chapters of a play. Everyone in the store becomes a member of the platform. The space is a laboratory in which people taste their food.
360°-immersion theater experience of observing and being observed
Combing over the habits in social media, we can see that people long for a sense of achievement that they get from putting real-life materials on virtual platforms. They convert the accolade they get in the digital world into self confidence in the real worlds. Such show and tell behaviors have blurred the border line of network activities and made the real world and the virtual world reflections of each other. Therefore, we have drawn inspiration from the immersion-style theater found in Broadway’s Fuerzabruta.
We have taken it one step further to add explanatory notes to the traditional host-guest nature in dining etiquette. When the stage surrounds you and the play unfolds 360° all around, the observer in one moment can become a part of the show in the next moment and take delight in being the observed. This really turns the one-way view–either looking up or down the stage, but never both up and down–in traditional theater on its head.
Seats by windows are often the most attractive in most restaurants, but we take the function of windows inside the building. We open social media-like frames and screens of various sizes that put spotlight on shows in each frame. In this way, we have broken through the limitations of stores without street frontages.
All seats in our store are next to a walkway. From chefs placing their food in plates, to servers putting the dish on guest tables, to stylish guests taking their seats, every frame is part of the theater–all in 3D, all realistic, all familiar to social media language. People have the dual fun of taking the best seat and enjoying the expectation of being observed.
Design: Waterfrom Design
Photography: Kuomin Lee
