FoodUX

VizThink community member and owner of Frog Commissary, Steve Poses is taking visual thinking and cookbooks to the next level. He has just launched the in development version of the companion website for his new book. (...) I can’t wait to see the results of these collaborations when the book and website launches in the spring. My kitchen is already warming up testing recipes! - sez the VizThink blog. - Link

How do you make a chocolate company? Be obsessed. Be very, very obsessed. TCHO is a new kind of chocolate company for a new generation of chocolate enthusiasts. TCHO is where technology meets chocolate; where Silicon Valley start-up meets San Francisco food culture.

"(...) the brand quality layer 'Brand Experience' illustrates our perception of user experience and brand management of the main stations. We studied the usability, user value, and interface (simplicity, character, and feedback), and rated each site on a scale of eating at various types of Japanese restaurants. (...) We chose restaurants as the metaphor for brand experience because, from an interactive branding point of view, a visit to a website is like a visit to a restaurant in terms of service, feedback, content, pleasure, character, and memorability. And also because Tokyo has the highest density of good restaurants in the world." - courtesy of ruurdpriester

"The idea of thoughtful reduction is an important one in the creation process, whether the end result is a new recipe or user interface: how do you make things simpler without removing what's necessary?" says Lisa Agustin in Information Design Watch

Podcast from Jeff Parks at Boxes and Arrows - Michael Recchiuti talks about the experience of making chocolate and how different flavors inspire new creations for the business and his customers. Looking at different professions outside of the web world in which most UX practitioners work can inspire innovation and creativity.

Flavor tripping in which some fruits alters the body's snse of taste seems a pure example of experience design, according to Design for Service.

Three quotes from the synthesis:

(1) Cooking is a language through which all the following properties may be expressed: harmony, creativity, happiness, beauty, poetry, complexity, magic, humour, provocation and culture.

(2) The information given off by a dish is enjoyed through the senses; it is also enjoyed and interpreted by reflection.

(3) Knowledge and/or collaboration with experts from different fields (gastronomic culture, history, industrial design, etc.,) is essential for progress in cooking. In particular collaboration with the food industry and the scientific world has brought about fundamental advances. Sharing this knowledge among cooking professionals has contributed to this evolution.

Gordon Ramsey: A guerilla UX consultant?

From CHI '08: "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." - Download available.

Adaptive Path's Experience Design Director Ryan Freitas published his presentation 'A House Divided: Two Perspectives on Managing the Customer Experience'. "Restaurants experiment with the elements of the dining experience that are hidden from their customers. If it makes sense to move elements of production forward, consider it as a means to build a compelling experience." Also, he refers to an interesting paper by Robert Glushko and Lindsay Tabas. Great stuff!

Victor Lombardi (of NBS fame) introduces the concept of the Food Guide to guide people during their dinner through the dishes, tastes and textures. Quite a concept. "(...) the food is the focus and the restaurant provides a food-centric experience."

Carl Warner paints still lives with light, food and his expensive camera. His catalogue (screaming Flash requirements) contains very cute pictures.

Food as material - "Food Design makes possible to think in food as an edible designed product, an object that negates any reference to cooking, tradition and gastronomy. Guixé as a Food Designer builds edible products that are ergonomic, functional, communicative, interactive, visionary but radically contemporary and timeless." - It's like creating art with code but never execute the code and see what happens.

At the 2008 conference on 'Design & Emotion' (Oct. 6-8 2008, Hongkong), one of the conference themes relates to similarities and differences between product experience design and design of food and fragrances. The theme caption reads "What emotional responses do we experience in response to foods and fragrances? Are these particular and distinct emotions, or are these the same emotions we also experience in response to product appearance? How can we describe and design for food and fragrance emotions? This theme invites papers that discuss the experiential impact of food and fragrance design."

According to this article, an upscale New York restaurant is the first to feature 'ubiquitous computing', with an innovative table-top interactive menu for wine selection. (courtesy of Business Week)

A research assignment: "TV-programs about cooking are popular but could be more popular if the TV-audience could interact with the cooks about the recipe, suggest alternative ingredients, ask to show or tell more details, give background information or whatever. The main obstacle for Interactive TV seems to be that there is no adequate business model and that there is some historical separation between TV displays having only marginal processor power and PC technology. But technology doesn't prevent Interactive TV." - Might deliver some interesting results.

Control a computerized doll with a lollypop? Students from renowned graduate design programs converge for a Design Expo at Yahoo! to showcase innovative prototypes. Including PeterMe (of Adaptive Path fame).

Chefs are a lot like hardware hackers. Both geek out, absorbing the specs of (vegetables|technology) for the purpose of creating something that nobody else has: (innovative food|new machines). So what happens when the kitchen becomes a hack lab? Something delicious. Something geeky. - And what if being a designer for user experience is like being a chef? FH: Towards an anarchist food aesthetic.

This may seem like a ridiculous price-proposition. For € 1,50 you get half a liter of Spa Blue and for half the price you get three times that amount of water. (...) So here, ease of use is valued over content.

A collection of simple network graphs illustrating how the flavor components of 250 different food products relate to each other, as a tool to inspire the creation of original recipes. By comparing the flavor of each food product, such as strawberry, with the rest of the food and their flavors, new combinations such as 'strawberry with peas' can be made. The more flavors food products have in common, the shorter the distance between the food products.