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Parlour of food futures: future food forecasting as tarot prophecies
Abstract
In contemporary design research and practice, food is often seen as a problem to be fixed. Designers in the corporate startup realm as well as in academic HFI (Human-Food Interaction) have proposed various techno-solutions to curb complex food system issues such as malnutrition and environmental unsustainability. Quantified diet trackers, 'smart' kitchenware, food sharing apps and similar digital food technologies present opportunities for efficient food practices but also challenges to human-food relationship and social food traditions. The Parlour of Futures project reflects on these contradictions and addresses the growing trend of food-technology innovation through the lens of Speculative and Critical Design (SCD). The project takes the form of a traditional Tarot parlour where participants explore possible food-tech futures as prophecies. Through a bespoke Food Tarot cards deck presenting speculative food practices such as Monsanta[n]ism, Gut Gardening, or Turing Foodism, the project provokes playful food-tech imaginaries and future food scenarios. We discuss the opportunities of SCD in nurturing reflective food design and research, and invite OzCHI attendees to contribute their future food ideas during the Parlour demo session.
Embedded in everyday practices, food can be a rich resource for interaction design. This article focuses on eating experiences to uncover how bodily, sensory, and socio-cultural aspects of eating can be better leveraged for the design of user experience. We report a systematic literature review of 109 papers, and interviews with 18 professional chefs, providing new understandings of prior HFI research, as well as how professional chefs creatively design eating experiences. The findings inform a conceptual framework of designing for user experience leveraging eating experiences. These findings also inform implications for HFI design suggesting the value of multisensory flavor experiences, external and internal sensory stimulation and deprivation, aspects of eating for communicating meaning, and designing with contrasting pleasurable and uncomfortable experiences. The article concludes with six charts as novel generative design tools for HFI experiences focused on sensory, emotional, communicative, performative, and temporal experiences.
Ethnographic Experiential Futures (EXF) is an approach to foresight that aims to increase the accessibility, variety and depth of images of the future for design. In this paper, we present a EXF-based case study imagining the future supermarket. Rooted in already-existing images of future supermarkets, we propose that the future super- market experience is autonomous, efficient, informed, local and personal. Based on the idea of four "generic futures" we illustrate each of these categories with a set of scenarios in a variety of ex- periential forms. These were exhibited first in an open exhibition and second in a closed exhibition for experts. To close, we offer reflections on the use of Ethnographic Experiential Futures in the form of a set of questions to inspire future research.
Human-Food Interaction (HFI) scholarship has discussed the possible roles of technology in contemporary food systems and proposed design solutions to various food problems. While acknowledging that there are food issues to be fixed, we propose that there is a room for more experimental and playful HFI work beyond pragmatic problem-solving. We introduce a design research project Parlour of Food Futures that speculates on emerging food-tech practices through the 15th-century game of Tarot. Based on three live Parlour enactments, we discuss what contributions and challenges speculative design methods afford to HFI.
Digital food technologies such as diet trackers, food sharing apps, and 'smart' kitchenware offer promising yet debatable food futures. While proponents suggest its potential to prompt efficient food lifestyles, critics highlight the underlying technosolutionism of digital food innovation and limitations related to health safety and data privacy. This workshop addresses both present and near-future digital food controversies and seeks to extend the existing body of Human-Food Interaction (HFI) research. Through scenarios and food-tech prototyping navigated by bespoke Digital Food Cards, we will unpack issues and suggest possible design approaches. We invite proposals from researchers, designers, and other practitioners interested in working towards a complex framework for future HFI research.
Speculative Enactments are a novel approach to speculative design research with participants. They invite the empirical analysis of participants acting amidst speculative but consequential circumstances. HCI as a broadly pragmatic, experience-centered, and participant-focused field is well placed to innovate methods that invite first-hand interaction and experience with speculative design projects. We discuss three case studies of this approach in practice, based on our own work: Runner Spotters, Metadating and a Quantified Wedding. In distinguishing Speculative Enactments we offer not just practical guidelines, but a set of conceptual resources for researchers and practitioners to critique the different contributions that speculative approaches make to HCI discourse.
In this chapter, I provide an overview and analysis of the ways in which food and eating practices and preferences are documented and represented with digital technologies. The chapter includes discussion of websites, blogs, social media and mobile apps. These digital media work to represent, locate and share food-related images, ideas, beliefs and practices in novel ways. I identify several important features of contemporary digital technologies, including the role played by participatory culture and the sharing ethos, the convergences and cross-platform affordances of digital media and the value attributed to big data about food in the digital data economy. Such elements as the visual properties of food and consuming bodies, the geolocation of sites in which food is prepared, purchased and consumed and the quantification of food and bodies are brought to the fore in digital food cultures. Key directions for future research are outlined.
Much of the academic and commercial work which seeks to innovate around technology has been dismissed as "solutionist" because it solves problems that don't exist or ignores the complexity of personal, political and environmental issues. This paper traces the "solutionism" critique to its origins in city planning and highlights the original concern with imaging and representation in the design process. It is increasingly cheap and easy to create compelling and seductive images of concept designs, which sell solutions and presume problems. We consider a range of strategies, which explicitly reject the search for "solutions". These include design fiction and critical design but also less well-known techniques, which aim for unuseless, questionable and silly designs. We present two examples of "magic machine" workshops where participants are encouraged to reject realistic premises for possible technological interventions and create absurd propositions from lo-fi materials. We argue that such practices may help researchers resist the impulse towards solutionism and suggest that attention to representation during the ideation process is a key strategy for this.
In this paper we contribute to the growing body of research into the use and design of technology in the kitchen. This research aims to identify opportunities for designing technologies that may augment existing cooking traditions and in particular familial recipe sharing practices. Using ethnographic techniques, we identify the homemade cookbook as a significant material and cultural artifact in the family kitchen. We report on findings from our study by providing descriptive accounts of various homemade cookbooks, and offer design considerations for digitally augmenting homemade cookbooks.
An introduction to the special issue on 'food and interaction design' is provided in the International Journal on Human-Computer Studies. The introduction reveals that energy use and food waste across the food lifecycle significantly contributes to environmental issues and is estimated to be producing 27%of green house gas emissions in the UK. The special issue draws attention to the growing and diverse field of human-computer interaction (HCI) researchers exploring the interstices of food, technology, and every day practices. This special issue builds on the CHI workshop of the same name where it has brought together the community of researchers that take food as a point from which to understand people and design technology.
The iTunes App Store contains over six thousand apps related to spirituality and religion. The ACM digital library, however, contains only 98 works that address this topic from an HCI perspective. Despite high-profile calls for research in the area, the HCI community has produced only 19 research papers focused on the topic, almost half of which are the work of one person and her colleagues. In this paper we provide an overview of the relevant HCI research in this area, a partial inventory of spiritually oriented apps in the iTunes US App Store, and a comparison of research and real-world developments. We discuss the gaps in the HCI literature on techno-spiritual practices and speculate about some of the difficulties and challenges that face the HCI community in conducting research in this area.
The Drift Table is an electronic coffee table that displays slowly moving aerial photography controlled by the distribution of weight on its surface. It was designed to investigate our ideas about how technologies for the home could support ludic activities-that is, activities motivated by curiosity, exploration, and reflection rather than externally-defined tasks. The many design choices we made, for example to block or disguise utilitarian functionality, helped to articulate our emerging understanding of ludic design. Observations of the Drift Table being used in volunteers' homes over several weeks gave greater insight into how playful exploration is practically achieved and the issues involved in designing for ludic engagement.
Food is a central part of our lives. Fundamentally, we need food to survive. Socially, food is something that brings people together-individuals interact through and around it. Culturally, food practices reflect our ethnicities and nationalities. Given the importance of food in our daily lives, it is important to understand what role technology currently plays and the roles it can be imagined to play in the future. In this paper we describe the existing and potential design space for HCI in the area of human-food interaction. We present ideas for future work on designing technologies in the area of human-food interaction that celebrate the positive interactions that people have with food as they eat and prepare foods in their everyday lives.
What is food and why does it matter? Bringing together the most innovative, cutting-edge scholarship and debates, this reader provides an excellent introduction to the rapidly growing discipline of food studies. Covering a wide range of theoretical perspectives and disciplinary approaches, it challenges common ideas about food and identifies emerging trends which will define the field for years to come.
A fantastic resource for both teaching and learning, the book features:
- a comprehensive introduction to the text and to each of the four parts, providing a clear, accessible overview and ensuring a coherent thematic focus throughout
- 20 articles on topics that are guaranteed to engage student interest, including molecular gastronomy, lab-grown meat and other futurist foods, microbiopolitics, healthism and nutritionism, food safety, ethics, animal welfare, fair trade, and much more
- discussion questions and suggestions for further reading which help readers to think further about the issues raised, reinforcing understanding and learning.
Edited by Melissa L. Caldwell, one of the leaders in the field, Why Food Matters is the essential textbook for courses in food studies, anthropology of food, sociology, geography, and related subjects.
A leading MIT social scientist and consultant examines five professions--engineering, architecture, management, psychotherapy, and town planning--toshow how professionals really go about solving problems.
Underground kitchens, public fridges and local meals at strangers’ homes offer an interesting and economically attractive alternatives to traditional channels of food distribution. The new practices of food sharing facilitated by technological development and using new social media combine an interest in modern engaged consumerism with a promise of more sustainable food chains and waste reduction. The main objective of this article is to map and analyse the risks and regulatory challenges posed by the variety of emerging sharing economy practices in the food sector. Drawing on the identification of the key features of sharing economy and the specificity of food in that context, this article discusses various forms, scales and motivations behind the existing food sharing initiatives. The article describes three main categories of food sharing models, namely harvest sharing, meal sharing and leftover sharing, and illustrates them with concrete examples of networks or platforms. Against this background, the article scrutinizes the major risks and challenges of food sharing, ranging from individual and public health and safety to market fragmentation. Reviewing the available regulatory options to address these risks, and juxtaposing them with the risks stemming out of regulatory intervention as such, the contribution calls for balanced approach to food sharing governance in the European Union.
Flavor is often a pleasurable sensory perception we experience daily while eating and drinking. However, the sensation of flavor is rarely considered in the age of digital communication mainly due to the unavailability of flavors as a digitally controllable media. This paper introduces a digital instrument (Digital Flavor Synthesizing device), which actuates taste (electrical and thermal stimulation) and smell sensations (controlled scent emitting) together to simulate different flavors digitally. A preliminary user experiment is conducted to study the effectiveness of this method with predefined five different flavor stimuli. Experimental results show that the users were effectively able to identify different flavors such as minty, spicy, and lemony. Moreover, we outline several challenges ahead along with future possibilities of this technology. In summary, our work demonstrates a novel controllable instrument for flavor simulation, which will be valuable in multimodal interactive systems for rendering virtual flavors digitally.
Food and interaction design presents an interesting challenge to the HCI community in attending to the pervasive nature of food, the socio-cultural differences in food practices and a changing global foodscape. To design for meaningful and positive interactions it is essential to identify daily food practices and the opportunities for the design of technology to support such practices. This workshop brings together a community of researchers and practitioners in human-food interaction to attend to the practical and theoretical difficulties in designing for human-food interactions in everyday life. Through a practical field study and workshop we explore themes of food experiences, health and wellbeing, sustainability and alternative food cultures.
Contents: Professional Knowledge and Reflection-in-Action: The crisis of confidence in professional knowledge From technical rationality to reflection-in-action. Professional Contexts for Reflection-in-Action: Design as a reflective conversation with the situation Psychotherapy: The patient as a universe of one The structure of reflection-in-action Reflective practice in the science-based professions Town planning: Limits to reflection-in-action The art of managing: Reflection-in-action within an organizational learning system Patterns and limits of reflection-in-action across the professions. Conclusion: Implications for the professions and their place in society.
Due to the development of computer technology and the wide use of the Internet, intelligent appliances with multimedia capability have been emerging into our daily life. Kitchen is one of the places where such intelligent appliances have been used. Since modern life style is driving people spending less time on cooking healthy food at home, an enjoyable and healthy life style can be assisted with an intelligent kitchenware such as a smart fridge. In this paper we introduce a novel application for a smart fridge with intelligent multimedia capability. It is designed for managing items stored in it and advising its users with cooking methods depending on what kind of food is stored. It can also perform other functions such as dietary control, nutrition monitoring, eating habit analysis, etc. We are confident that such a smart fridge will be an important component in future smart homes.
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