Ferran Adrià pioneered the integration of industrial designers, product designers, architects and interior designers into elBulli’s particular creative system.

It was not just a matter of commissioning projects, but of collaborating to achieve an original and innovative result. The synergies created by the experiences led to an unprecedented creative outburst that opened the doors for others to follow in the most innovative segment of the fine-dining sector.

This ability spread to other areas in gastronomy, including developing new concepts for tools, product designs and spaces for one-of-a-kind experiences.

In 2001, a milestone was reached when a collaboration began with Luki Huber, a Swiss industrial designer based in Barcelona, who joined the elBullirestaurante creative team. Luki worked exclusively for the restaurant between 2002 and 2005 to produce designs for new gastronomic tools and seek solutions to a number of problems that had arisen in making certain elaborations.

The impact of an interdisciplinary collaboration taking place in the same team was enormous, and it demonstrated that a small and medium enterprise (SME) such as elBulli was capable of developing its own designs.

It also marked a paradigm shift in the relationship between the fine-dining sector and design professionals, and earned Ferran Adrià the 2006 Lucky Strike Designer Award, presented by the Raymond Loewy Foundation. This acknowledgement is exclusively given to leading names in design, and it was seen to imply categorical acceptance of cooking as a creative cultural phenomenon.