Hello, my name is Tom Gayler, and I'm here to present you this article, exploring the design
space for human food, technology, interaction, and approach from the lens of eating experiences.
It was published in January in the ToCHI journal, and we're very happy
to be able to share it with you here at Chi. This paper is presented on behalf of myself and
my coauthors, Corina Sas, and Vaiva Kalnikaite, starting with the motivations for this research.
Food is embedded in everyday practices, and it can be a rich
resource for interaction design. This article focuses on eating experiences, uncover how bodily
sensory and socio-cultural aspects of eating can be used to design better user experiences.
It brings together exploration of design around food and design with food from both literature and
practice to highlight the body and experiential perspectives of food and eating this work results
in a conceptual framework for designing for user experience, leveraging eating experience
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 six charts as novel generative design tools for HFI experiences focused
on sensory, emotional, communicative, performative, and temporal experiences.
The research questions that guided this work, were how have eating experience has been
previously designed for how do professional chefs designed for eating experiences?
What is the space of designing for UX in HFI
based eating experiences and how can we support the exploration of this design space?
This research combined two approaches to understanding food and eating experience.
It recognized the need to draw on a wealth of practical knowledge in this domain.
And therefore combined interviews with chefs with the systematic review of the research to date.
Next, I will report on the findings from the systematic literature review of 109 papers
and the interviews with 18 professional chefs who were all involved in creating
food and eating experiences across a range of contexts from restaurants to art installations,
further details of the methodologies and sampling can be found in the full paper
for each paper included in the review, we coded for three things, one the bodily experience
that was described to the purpose or role of food in the experience or interaction,
and three, the technology that was used to facilitate the experience.
The schema was iteratively developed between the authors,
starting with bodily experiences of eating within the review. This covered external
uni modal expirations, and these were the majority of the work in this space.
Two external multi-sensory experiences involving the integration of two or more
senses, a smaller but significant group of papers reported on internal senses, such as digestion
and metabolization, the purposes of human food interaction, range from the more sensory focused
to emotional cognitive and social, some purposes were better defined within the application domains
such as healthy eating or dining the technologies within the review
covered those supporting sensory experience. Those focused on healthy eating those aimed at
improving dining experiences and those which were assisted dining tools. Three main themes
emerged from the interviews with chefs, the first details the breadth of sensory experience,
both external and internal that influences the design process of chefs.
The second covers the performative aspects of eating experiences and how these are designed
for by chefs across time. The third theme reports, the ways in which personal experiences
are woven into eating experiences in particular, the influence of memory,
our findings suggested the value of the body and the rich sensory emotional and
meaningful experiences associated with eating. We suggest that food and eating are useful ways
to approach two underexplored bodily spaces for user experience the mouth and the gut.
The mouth is both the central sensory center in eating experiences, but also an active tool
in engaging and developing experience. Over time, we indicate scope for further
work on a broad range of sensory experiences and exploration of time within this context,
beyond the mouth and deeper within the body, the gut is an almost forgotten part of food
and eating experience at a longer time scale. We propose that by thinking about experience in
this space, better approaches to healthy eating that extend beyond instantaneous taste and flavor
to longer term experience of how that food affects experiences such as satiety, fullness, and warmth
alongside the conceptual framework. We also present five implications for design.
First is the move from taste stimulation to multisensory experiences, pushing designers
to consider multi-sensory richness and complexity when creating user experience.
Secondly, a move from the perspective of external stimulation, for example,
a focus on sight smell and sound to a perspective of external and internal adding
digestion and metabolization to considerations promoting the mouth and gut sites for design.
Thirdly, aligning with the first implication is a movement towards rich, personalized flavor-,
emotion, and flavor-, emotional memory mappings go and beyond the more universal,
but uni modal taste emotion mappings. The fourth implication highlights the
potential for meaning in eating experiences, through conscious design with the social and
cultural aspects. Again, opening up the space for personalized experiences, the final implication
provokes designers to think about the trajectory of eating experiences and the role of different
senses in shaping the experience over time. In particular, it points towards designing
coherent and progressive experiences that build and climax. Finally,
we present the charts as design tools. These were inspired by Ashby diagrams
and previous work on sensory and aesthetic materials for design. And these charts identify
how food and eating experience can be used to support different types of user experience.
By design, here are the senses leveraged chart, and this identifies how internal
and external sensory experiences vary in terms of that complexity.
And it includes insights from both of the studies that literature review and the interviews,
this chart explores the various techniques and technologies for
stimulating or depriving those senses. And it uses the same scales as the
previous chart, but it's much more heavily influenced by insights from the literature.
In contrast this chart and emotional experience draws much more heavily on the findings of
interviews and highlights the gap for low arousal, low valence type experiences with food and eating
whilst highlighting the dual interpretations of some challenging sensory experiences
such as bitter tastes or spiciness this chart on communicative experience, arranges examples
by the information they communicate explicit to implicit and the sociality of that information
from personal to communal this highlights the bias in existing work towards, personally,
meaningful ways of communicating with food in place of, more wide audience interactions.
This fifth chart looks at performative experience in terms of the duration and audience
with unpleasant smelling or tasting experiences, offering short duration experiences for big groups
and more balanced sensory experiences longer, but more small scale performances.
This final chart covers temporal experience relating to the before and
after the moment of eating and lasting from fleeting to enduring experiences,
smell and taste dominate the short-term experiences with
visual and internal sensations lasting longer. Thank you very much. It's been a pleasure to
present to you. You can find the charts as a downloadable resource on the URL
listed and more details on the method approach and findings can be found in the full paper.