Thank you.
Thanks.
Well, hello, everyone.
My name is Ferran, as he said.
And today, I'll talk about the paper
that I co-authored with my colleague Danielle, who's
actually in the audience.
So feel free to reach out to her if you
want to talk about this during the conference.
But also Erno and Katherine.
And our paper is a review of the current state
of playful human-food interaction research.
And for those who haven't heard much
about it, human-food interaction, or HFI
as we normally talk about it, is the research space
that explores the intersection between food,
human interaction, and many times, technology.
A few months ago at CHI we presented
a study of the state of human-food interaction research
as a whole.
In that study, we show that this emerging
field is super heterogeneous and that it's growing very rapidly.
And because of that, we argue that there
is need of ongoing sense-making, both of HFI as a whole,
but also of its multiple areas of interest.
So that's what we decided to do with this paper--
making sense of one of the many subsets of HFI research.
In particular, we looked at those works
that use play and game-inspired strategies to enhance
our interactions with food.
We call this subset playful HFI.
There are a number of previous works that in different ways
have explored this space before.
For example, last year at this very same conference,
[INAUDIBLE] coined the term [INAUDIBLE]..
And they revealed technologies that
enhance eating and drinking in playful ways.
Similarly, recent work by [INAUDIBLE] et al.
has proposed strategies for designing
playful eating technology.
And we ourselves have also explored this intersection
between play and eating-- in this case,
reviewing the state of playfulness
in fine dining restaurants.
Though interesting and relevant, all of those works
share one common limitation, which
is that they mostly focus on food consumption, which
is one between the many areas of food lives
that we're concerned with.
The concept of celebratory technology
thus overcomes that limitation because it proposes
alternative and more experience-focused
direction for human-food action in, but also beyond,
eating and drinking.
However, that work is not necessarily
a comprehensive review but more of a mapping out
of design opportunities.
And most importantly, it doesn't focus on play per se
but more on experience in a general sense.
So long story short, we couldn't really
find a comprehensive review of playful human-food interaction
research.
And that's why we decided to conduct one.
And we began by collecting papers.
And we ended up with a data set of 34 publications
of very different kinds.
Here you can see a summary of what we got.
And then we developed the conceptual model
to analyze the data to make sense
of what we were observing.
And we built on four main criteria.
First, we built on our previous study, the conceptual model
of our previous study of human-food interaction
that we presented at CHI a few months ago.
Second, we drew from existing theories of play and game
design.
You can see some of them on the screen.
We also looked at the criteria that previous people
who did play-related reviews of HCI used.
And we finally looked at the papers
in our data set and identified some additional coding
criteria.
And based on all of those inputs,
we built our conceptual model, our framework.
And as you can see, it has three dimensions
of analysis-- metadata, human-food interaction lenses,
and play-related concepts.
And each of those dimensions is subdivided
in a series of lenses that we use as criteria
to examine the papers.
I'll describe those criteria right now.
Let's first have a look at the metadata.
This is kind of the easy one.
Here we looked at basic stuff like publication date,
venue, type of publication, author's keywords.
In terms of human-food interaction lenses,
we focused on three main criteria.
First we look at the interplay between the human
and the technology and where the agency is
placed on that continuum.
We also looked at the focus of the research
to see what are the motivations behind it
expressed as a continuum again.
In this case, between functionality,
individual experience, and social bonding.
And finally, we looked at the areas of food practice explored
by the research, which we call the domains, including
sourcing, storing, producing, eating, tracking, speculating,
and reflecting on food.
Finally, the third dimension of our model
looked at the play-related concepts
because it's a review of playful HFI.
And here first we looked at the structure
of the play experience.
We examined the interventions to see whether they were governed
by rules or not, if those rules were robust or more loose,
and more generally to see whether the interventions
for that experience were more constrained or open ended.
Second, we looked at the situatedness.
We asked ourselves if and in what ways
the playful experiences were meant to actually intertwined
with the situated food practice and trying to understand better
this connection between the actual situated food
practice and the play activity.
And finally, we looked also at the types
of play experience afforded by or explored in the research.
And here [INAUDIBLE] in the [INAUDIBLE] framework,
I'm sure that many of you will know about,
as our granular experiential qualities.
But to make them more approachable,
we cluster them thematically into five higher level
types [INAUDIBLE] we call experiential textures.
So this is the model that we use to analyze the playful HFI
publications in our data set.
And I invite you to read the paper
if you'd like more details or to ask questions afterwards.
Let me now go through the results
to give an overview of what we found.
When looking at the metadata, we found
that there is a progressive increase in publications
per year, which actually matches the trend that we
found in our previous study of HFI as a whole.
We also saw that the large publications in the data set
are partially but not fully developed, either because they
lack a robust validation mechanism such as a user study
or because they do not really present
novel or significant or clear findings.
We saw a lot of works in progress,
for example, that didn't end up completing into a full study.
When looking at the human-food interaction criteria
we found the remarkable dominance
of eating and drinking over other domains of food practice,
as you can see in the graph.
We also saw that most publications either give agency
to the human or propose balanced agency between humans
and technology, which is actually
pretty different from what we found in our earlier
study of human-food interaction as a whole,
where we saw a clear tendency towards technology automation.
And when looking at the focus of the research,
we saw that there is a dominance of publications
whose goal is to support utilitarian agendas,
like teaching people how to have more healthy eating habits,
et cetera, et cetera.
Let's now look at our findings related to play concepts.
When looking at the types of play structure,
we saw that game related structures with robust rules
sets and boundaries are kind of more
common than those that use open ended play and playfulness.
And in terms of situatedness, we saw a pretty equal balance
between [INAUDIBLE] porous, and situated play activity.
So there was nice balance here.
But in terms of experiential qualities,
we saw clear dominance of hard fun-- that is,
playful experiences that are based on competition,
challenged, real and similar experiences,
which are actually types of play that we often
find in mainstream videogames.
And based on those results, I would
like to highlight a couple of things, a couple of points,
that we think can help understand
where we are right now in playful human-food interaction.
The first one is that we saw that there
is a clear focus on eating and drinking
with little consideration of other food domains.
We also found a dominant focus on utilitarian agendas,
sometimes to the detriment of supporting
experience and social bonding.
We saw that playful HFI interventions
tend to promote user empowerment as opposed to technology
automation, which is actually a remarkable difference with HFI
research as a whole.
We found that playful HFI works often use
game-like structures with clear and robust rule sets
and tend to focus on affording experiences of hard fun.
There's a lot of emphasis on those experiential qualities
that I mentioned before, like competition, challenge,
task completion, or thrill.
And finally, on a more general level, we saw that almost half
of playful HFI publications are not fully
developed research, which is something that as a community
we may want to reflect on.
Extending recent calls for more critical approaches in HFI,
we see a need for exploring more thoroughly
the social cultural implications of amending food practices
with playful technology.
Based on this landscape that we observed, in the paper
we propose a series of opportunities
for moving forward for future playful HFI research.
Here today I will highlight three of them
that we find particularly important,
but please check the paper for more.
First, it's pretty clear that we as a community
need to start looking beyond eating and drinking to explore
how play and playfulness can add value
in other areas of our food lives, such as cooking,
growing, buying foods, et cetera.
Second, we argue that there's too much
focus on the utilitarian potential of play
to solve problems.
They can motivate us to eat better,
to be more safe when we prepare the food,
to learn healthier habits, yes.
But that's not all it can do.
Play can also make us happier, bring us joy,
help us connect with others.
And while recent works in this space
are starting to push for this agenda,
our review shows that they are still in the minority.
So we [INAUDIBLE] playful HFI could
explore more the social, emotional, cultural potential
of play at least as much as it explores its capacity
to support utilitarian agendas.
And finally, we argue that there's
a need for embracing the diversity of what
play and playfulness mean.
We've seen a lot of works that propose a very specific kind
of play experience, similar to that
of stereotypical, hard fun-based games.
But given the diverse, messy, situated, highly material
nature of food practices, we encourage
designers and researchers to actually go
beyond that to explore a broader set of play experiences
but also structures.
In a way, we want to do this because we
think that will make us more likely to design technologies
that respond to the playful cravings of not only just
the narrow set of player types but to a broader set of people
and users.
And that's all for me today.
Thanks for your time.
And feel free to shoot questions.
[APPLAUSE]
Any questions?
Hello.
Floyd Mueller, Exertion Games Lab,
RMIT in Melbourne, Australia.
Thanks very much for your talk.
I kind of-- you mentioned several times--
so the playful community did this, and this, and this,
unlike our previous work where we
looked at human-food interaction in general.
Did I hear kind of an undertone that the play community
understands food better than the HCI community?
Shall I take this?
Oh, sorry.
Yeah.
Danielle Wilde, SDU.
I'm a co first author.
You can understand many things from what we're saying.
But no, I don't believe that--
our data does not suggest that the play community understands
food better in any way whatsoever.
In fact, the gaps show that the play community
has a very limited understanding of the potential of food
because we eat for a lot of reasons.
We eat to survive, to live, and for our physical physiological
well-being.
But we also eat for social reasons
and for cultural reasons and to stimulate our senses
and to enjoy good food and good company.
Eating is a very, very complex sociocultural activity.
And our data actually demonstrates
that the play community, who are engaging with HFI, if
have a very, very limited understanding.
But that understanding is different.
The way it plays out is different to how
the human-food interaction community across broader
sections of computer-human interaction
understand or act in this space.
So if there are no other questions,
maybe I'll just say what we hope our study will
do is open up opportunities to reflect
on what's possible here.
But also to reflect on the fact that with the diverse forms
of publications in play for HFI, there's
room to really consider, what does this mean?
Can you pull up the different--
Yeah.
So we have such a range of papers.
And as we can see in the data sets that we provide, some
of them, there are a lot of works
that can be considered unresolved
from a research perspective.
But what this points out is something
we found very interesting in terms of an emerging research
area.
What does it mean that there are a lot of short experiments
and works in progress and sort of works that have
a very short life in some ways?
From a research perspective there aren't big studies done.
They could almost be considered a gimmick.
What does it mean for an emerging research area?
Maybe this is really important and can
be given a bit more support.
Not necessarily support to develop
into more complex research projects
but support to exist as ways of experimenting
with where more comprehensive research might go
and what directions that might go in.
And we found this very, very interesting.
And it's also present a bit in HFI,
but it's really dramatic in playful HFI.
And I think it shows something that
the play-oriented community might reflect
on how we can support and leverage this tendency
and use it to perhaps strike out new ways of understanding how
research can evolve and emerge and grow and establish itself
when new fields are arising.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]