Hello I am Tom Gayler and I am presenting this paper FlavorDesigner App Capturing Multisensory
Experiences and Crafting Personalized Flavors for Cueing their Recall
on behalf of my co authors corina sas and vaiva kalnikaite
I will begin with a story.
Francesca is tired.
Today is their 45th wedding anniversary - the first she will be celebrating alone.
She is holding a beautifully wrapped small box, delivered from the new shop in her town
selling unique made-to-order gifts.
This unexpected present is from her late husband with one
simple note: “remember”.
So many shared experiences that she would love to
relive.
While she recalls details, their vibrancy is fading away with each year that passes.
Gently she opens the box to find a delicate pod held by a small silver spoon.
The pod is soft and white-cacao marbled, with purple flakes.
As the pod bursts in her mouth, she is taken back 45 years in
one bound to the Tuscany summer evening of her wedding day, sharing the
heart shaped tiramisu cake with her husband.
She could feel again the silky richness of the white mascarpone cream
coating her mouth.
Oh, and here it is: that tantalizing bitterness of the sprinkled cacao together with the sweetness
of the almond biscotti after they have been dunked
in the unmistakable caramel nutty flavor and apricot-like aroma of the vin
santo.
While tasting the dry lavender flakes in her mouth, she could almost smell the evening
air filled with the intoxicating perfume of the blooming lavender fields over
the Pisan hills.
As Francesca closed her eyes she felt again the gentle evening
breeze touching her face while carrying over that mandolin song together with people’s
chatter, laughter and her pure joy.
This story highlights the powerful connection of memories and sensory experience through
food.
Flavour designer is a proposal for an app to capture both live and remembered multisensory
experiences, and to support the crafting of personalized flavor cues for the
later recall of these experiences.
The FlavorDesigner app can - capture live or remembered multisensory experiences,
create associations of non food-based experiences with flavors, and craft personalized flavor-based
memory cues.
The app draws on various pre-existing scales from food science and sensory evaluation as
well as proposing novel solutions to experience capture.
This supported users to describe actual food experiences both live and remembered.
Users could create food cues for memories which had no prior connection to food.
They were supported through a process to describe emotions, time periods, places of people associated
with the memory and then to take each of these elements to relate to ingredients, dishes,
flavours, colours and smells.
Crafting allowed users to draw on previously designed cues from capture or create stages.
It presents all data captured so users can select and combine the most salient aspects
of the cue.
This study was motivated by the following questions
How can users capture the various aspects of their multisensory experiences?
How can users be supported to design their personalized flavor-based memory cues?
What design implications and tools can support such capture and design for multisensory interactions?
We explored the initial design of the app through a series of online workshops. 12 Participants
took part in total and were given an overview of the app, used a wizard of oz prototype,
viewed a video of the app functionality and took part in a group interview to evaluate
the existing features, content and flow and to propose improvements or alternatives.
Our findings reported on capturing multisensory experience through the app.
Participants noted how the app prompted them to attend to richness of senses as well as
think more deeply about the details of each sensory aspect.
For example thinking about umami tastes were somewhat novel.
For Smell, participants highlighted the matrix, shown on this slide as a way to translate
complicate sensory experiences into more explainable concepts.
In contrast some of the more complex scales used in the app, such as those for texture
were sources of frustration for users - finding the granularity and number of dimensions overwhelming.
Participants were able to use the app to generate a range of creative associations between a
memory and various food, or sensory cues.
In particular this process was generative as seen in this quiet by p1 - “because I
was asked to think of a place, it led me to my hometown, I put all of these associations
that I have to my hometown, which are seafood related.
So, I feel like, “Oh, I started with this memory”, but now this is something else”
The final functionality of the app was seen as “a nice way to capture
what was really important about that experience, like a nice little summary in the words of
P3.
However on the next steps for using the app participants were less clear and suggested
clearly connecting the contexts of use for flavour memory cues closer to the design process
in the app.
Now I return to the questions set-out at the start of this study
Findings indicate that the capture functionality was by large easy to understand and engaging,
but also challenged participants to pause and reflect, given their unfamiliarity with
some of the sensory evaluation scales and their language.
Use of creative methods for capture were appreciated by participants
Findings suggest that people engaged in the crafting of their flavor based cues, albeit
did not fully grasp their value, despite our initial briefing on the rationale of the app
design.
This contrasted with prior work on more extensive flavour design processes and indicates that
an extension of this app towards use overr a period of time maybe beneficial
And thirdly we turn to the implications for design
Three implications for design arose from this work
Firstly our findings indicate the value of combining select validated scales with more
exploratory and subjective measures as a way to engage non-experts in capturing multisensory
experience Secondly we suggest the sensitive integration
of appropriate scales in multisensory interaction design, with preference for fewer dimensions
and less granular scales.
Finally we promote a wider consideration of food-based tools for multisensory interaction.
Designing for a range of target expressions (in this case it was memory) through the processes
and approach of the flavour designer app.
Thanks