Hello everyone! My name is Ferran and I'm presenting this pictorial on behalf of my
co-authors Jared, Elena, Laia, Yoram, Marina, Oscar, Katherine and Danielle.
Such a large and wonderful team!
Anyway, our pictorial talks about food and about play,
and about how culture and traditions might inspire the design of
future technology that enriches our food practices socially and emotionally.
Overall, in the pictorial we present the results of a design-led workshop
where we played with analyzed a bunch of food traditions from
diverse cultural backgrounds and historic moments, all with the goal of finding
recurrent playful mechanisms that could inspire future human-food technology designs;
what we call "play-food potentials".
Our research fits within the emergent space of Human-Food Interaction.
For those who haven't heard much about it, HFI is the field of design and research
that explores the interplay between technology food and human interaction.
Something to note about this space is that it's often quite techno-deterministic.
There's a dominance of works that investigate how to make our food
practices more efficient and automated, with less emphasis on how to make them
more socially, culturally and sensorially rich. We think that this is something to
work on because food practices are much more than an act of survival.
They play an important role in our social, emotional and cultural lives,
so as technology designers we feel that there's need to
nurture those less productivity-focused dimensions of our food interactions.
And in this paper we explore the potential of play and playfulness to do that.
In Human-Food Interaction there are a bunch of examples of play- and game-
inspired technology interventions. This is what we call "Playful HFI".
But in a recent review we found that playful HFI designs often gravitate towards a very
narrow set of forms of playful experience. For the most part, they tend to
afford experiences of competition, challenge, achievement... Those that we often find in mainstream video games.
Obviously, there are some notable exceptions to this trend both in terms of design exemplars
and more theoretical works. In the pictorial we mention some. But, generally, we see a need for diversifying
the set of play experiences embraced impactful HFI. And this is what we do in this pictorial.
We turn to culture and traditions to find forms of playful engagement with food that have become ingrained in people's lives
and that as such could be considered meaningful to them.
We ask ourselves: what can we learn from food culture and traditions that could inspire
playful food technology futures that are increasingly diverse?
Methodologically, this research is based on the Situated Play Design Approach,
which advocates for designing playful interventions that build on existing and
contextually meaningful forms of emergent play.
In other words, the SPD approach proposes to chase "play potentials", which are playful things
that people already do in their daily practices, and use them as a starting point for design.
In this pictorial we report on a Situated Play Design inspired workshop where we chased play potentials
in food culture and traditions. The workshop took place at CHI Play '19 in Barcelona.
Our process was pretty simple. We began with a call for participation to the workshop.
We asked interested participants to submit a position paper including one or more
playful food traditions from their own country, region, community, family...
We then collected all submitted traditions and prepared them for workshop use.
We had a total of 27 traditions, 20 of which are described in the pictorial to illustrate the findings.
And the rest can be found in an external source also referenced in the pictorial.
At the workshop, 18 participants (including the organizers) played with analyzed the traditions.
We also prototyped speculative design concepts inspired by those traditions.
Importantly, the pool of workshop attendees was diverse. They had significant lived experiences in
countries including: Australia, Belgium, Canada, China, Colombia, Denmark, France,
Germany, Israel, the Netherlands, Philippines, Portugal, Spain, Turkey, United Kingdom and the United States.
Throughout the workshop we focused on identifying what made the traditions fun, on uncovering their playful essence.
After the workshop we did a second round of analysis, and that allowed us to come up
with a list of 19 play-food potentials inspired by culture and traditions.
That is, 19 ways in which playing with food can be a source of fun and social interaction.
So long story short, we collected a bunch of traditions
involving food and play and we use design-led strategies to explore their playful potential,
which we then distilled into a list of 19 play-food potentials
that we think and inspire future Playful Human-Food Interaction designs.
Our contribution, the list of play-food potentials, is structured in four categories,
depending on the main design materials used to support the playful experience.
First, we talk about how the materiality of food can give rise to
interesting forms of playful engagement, such as messing with our sense of taste
or using food as a play prop. We also talk about how play might emerge in the
interaction within edibles, for example finding surprises in food or playing
with inedible food remains. Following, we show how play-food experiences can build
on the possibilities afforded by the physical space in which they take place.
An example could be playfully appropriating the space to sit and act strangely,
or to create a play space with meal-related items. And finally, we explore
how food practices can be playfully augmented by adjusting the
rhythm and social norms of food preparation or the meal itself. And that
can take many different forms, for example doing things together in synchrony
or taking different roles throughout the play-food the experience. In this video we don't have much time,
so I won't get in too much detail about all of those play potentials and the traditions that motivated them.
What I'll do is I'll unpack one of those four categories so you get an idea of what
you'll find in the pictorial. And I'll focus on the first of our play-food potential categories,
which is "playing with the materiality of food".
At the workshop, we found several ways in which playful food traditions leverage
the rich qualities of food materials to afford emergent play. One of them is
challenging people and allowing them to get messy. An example of this is
"La Calçotada", a tradition from Catalonia where people meet to grill and consume a type of onion called "calçot".
Eating "calcots" is difficult: their size and elongated shape makes it quite hard to put them into one's mouth.
It's very common that the sauce that they're dipped in ends up
dripping and falling onto one's face and clothes... Making the whole party laugh.
So getting messy is a big part of the fun in this tradition. And actually,
this tradition also tells us about another way of playing with the materiality of food:
being subversive and messing with others. In "La Calçotada", your hands get
quite full of dark ashes very quickly, from the burnt peels of the "calçots".
Oftentimes, people take that as an opportunity to mess with others:
they sneekly prank their friends and family by painting each other's faces.
This is a great way to laugh together and to strengthen bonds, something that's
clearly desirable when we're sharing a meal.
A third way in which the materiality of food can afford interesting playful experiences
is when it alters our physiology. A clear example is "Touhu", a traditional
Chinese game where players throw arrows to a large vase from afar.
If they miss the vase, they have to drink some wine. Here, the drink is not only a
reward or punishment (depending on how you look at it) but also a key element in
the experience. The more one drinks, the less dexterity, and therefore the
more laughter and fun. The material qualities of food can also afford playful experiences
by messing with our sense of taste.
For example, "Pimientos del Padrón" is a typical Spanish tapa made of a bunch
of grilled small green peppers. Interestingly, only some of those peppers
are spicy. And that quality turns the experience of sharing that tapa into
a Russian roulette type of experience where the thrill of not knowing whether
the selected pepper will be spicy is combined with the excitement of seeing
others experience the bad luck of eating spicy one.
And finally, food materials can also be used as props in a play-food experiences.
An example of that is the "Kale Tour", a German tradition that celebrates the
beginning of the kale harvesting season. One of the funniest parts of the
tradition is to see the newly-appointed "Kale King" wearing a crown made of kale,
which is actually a rather silly-looking vegetable. So these are five ways in
which the materiality of food can be leveraged to afford rich playful food experiences.
But as I said earlier, in this pictorial we present more play-food potentials
that use other elements of a food experience as design material.
And we illustrate all of them through real traditions, so just go ahead and check them out
because they're really fun and there's a lot to learn from them that could inspire design.
Overall, we argue that the traditions featured in this pictorial
have become ingrained in people's lives as expressions of culture
and that, as such, the play-food potentials that they inspired have a
strong cultural grounding. They present playful experiences and interaction
mechanisms that have evolved over time and have become, in different ways,
part of people's lives. Because of all of that, we argue that they could be a useful
inspiration for playful technology design. One that might help Playful Human-Food Interaction designers
broaden the palette of play forms currently embraced in this field.
There are obviously limitations to our work, one of them being that
there are many more playful food traditions around the world than the 27 we explored in the workshop.
We address those issues in the pictorial and we encourage you to read it,
to learn more about all the play potentials we found and to read about how we think they might
inspire technology design... And to join us in reflecting about the limitations of
our research and the need for future work that addresses them.
So, to conclude, we hope that our pictorial contributes to designing food-related technologies
that are increasingly playful and, in being so, they care more for the social,
cultural, and emotional dimensions of our food engagements. We hope that our list
of play-food potentials shows how playful technologies and experiences can
be far more than competing, achieving, progressing and overcoming game-like
challenges. And most of all, we hope that they help surface a bunch of forms of
playful experience that can contribute to making our food practices more social
and more fun. And that's all from us! Thanks for listening and feel free to
get in touch if you have any questions. You can find our e-mails listed on the
screen. We'll be more than happy to chat with you about this!