Faculty of Design

Graphic Design

Amani Mohamed

Spice Bottles

The spice bottles are a package design system that explores how spices carry diasporic memory, movement, and cultural identity. Each bottle presents a spice connected to Sri Lankan Malay cooking, highlighting its role within food traditions while also tracing its wider histories of trade, migration, and cultural exchange.Through the packaging, the spices are framed as more than ingredients. They become small archival objects that hold stories of place, route, ritual, and inheritance. As a collection, the bottles show how diaspora can be understood through the everyday materials that continue to shape taste, memory, and belonging across generations.

“The spice bottles translate the thesis into a tangible packaging system that makes the archive feel material and accessible. By focusing on spices used within Sri Lankan Malay food culture, the project reveals how everyday ingredients can hold layered histories of migration, trade, and cultural preservation.Each bottle acts as a vessel for both flavour and memory. The packaging design positions spices as carriers of identity, showing how cultural knowledge is preserved not only through written histories, but through what is cooked, shared, smelled, and remembered. Together, the bottles communicate diaspora as something sensory, inherited, and constantly moving.”