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MISSION ACCOMPLISHED!
Today, I delivered my presentation at the EuroIA 2010 in Paris on the relation between my two passions: gastronomy and user experience design.
FoodUX served its purpose as a collection of background materials for the presentation. In future times, I will keep maintaining @CompCook as much as possible. So, keep tuning in once in a while.
"A crazy topic with a scary video clip of a positive eating experience", I said in my impersonation as Lars Von Trier!
Taste is a very important driver of the eating experience and a complex human phenomenon. It has been a topic of scientific research and philosophical discussion.
Research on Taste
The mission of the Taste Science Laboratory in the Division of Nutritional Sciences at Cornell University is to elucidate the nature and impact of individual differences in perception - in particular, differences in taste and smell sensitivity - on personality, performance, and preferences.
In its first definition, the American Heritage Dictionary limits the tastes perceived by the taste buds to four: in fact there are at least six in addition to the classic four, there are the taste of fat, and a taste called umami. Umami means delicious in Japanese, and is the word for the savory taste of meat. In this way, our taste buds are designed to tell us about the nutritional qualities of the food we eat: sweet for ripe fruit and carbohydrates, sour for unripe fruit and vitamin C, salty for salt and other minerals, bitter for poisonous plants, umami for protein, and fat for fat!
The second definition, which includes smell and touch, is the one most people have in mind when they talk about the taste of a food; taste, in this sense, means flavor.
Taste and Philosophy
As part of my holiday reading list, I purchased Making Sense of Taste: Food & Philosoph by Carolyn Korsmeyer.
"Taste, perhaps the most intimate of the five senses, has traditionally been considered beneath the concern of philosophy, too bound to the body, too personal and idiosyncratic. Yet, in addition to providing physical pleasure, eating and drinking bear symbolic and aesthetic value in human experience, and they continually inspire writers and artists."
Really looking forward reading it.
The combination of design and food can be very fruitful for people and companies. They get a lot of inspiration from it and take it as metaphor, domain or just for the fun of it.
Armin Hofmann from the art blog 'today and tomorrow' reports on one example, the Food Design Probes from consumer electronics company Royal Philips.
"Food Design Probes is a research project by Philips. They developed ideas how we will eat and source our food in the future, like in 15 to 20 years. There are 3 products we might have in our homes by then:
- The Nutrition Monitor. It basically has 3 parts, a sensor which you have to swallow, a scanner which can measure the nutritional value of food and a display device. So you'll exactly know what your body needs and what kind of effect your food will have on it.
- The Food Printer. Remember the 3D sugar printer? Well, this is the next generation. The machine brings molecular gastronomy to your kitchen. 'Feed' is with some ingredients, pick a shape, let it print … and voilà your amazing 3D dish is ready. I can't wait to see all the opensource 3D recipes that will be available!
- The Biosphere Home Farm. It's a 21st century aquarium crossed with stylish shelving unit, it contains fish, plants and other mini ecosystems."
Let's see if this consumer electronics company can deliver some great designs from this far-future research and food inspiration.
In 2004, Dutch restaurant owner and researcher Peter Klosse wrote an interesting thesis, entitled "The Concept of Flavor Styles to Classify Flavors" at the University of Maastricht (NL).
In this thesis, he made a stronge case for a distinction between taste and flavor. His research showed that the taste and richness of flavor are the basis for a classification of flavors.
"Before we can objectively discuss taste, we first need to distinguish between taste and flavor. Taste refers to the human act of tasting. It is an intricate experience which involves all the senses. Flavor, however, refers to products. Food and drink have flavors. Making this distinction is important because this allows us to classify taste as subjective: whether you like the taste of a product is similar to whether you like the color red. Flavor then is an objective notion, making classification and assessment possible.", wrote Peter Klosse in this column.
In 1991, Peter Klosse founded the Academy for Gastronomy which is a training institute for food professionals, chefs and sommeliers in The Netherlands.
In 2005, editor Carolyn Korsmeyer published the book "The Taste Culture Reader: Experiencing Food and Drink' in the serie 'Sensory Formations' (Berg Publishers). Besides taste, this serie looks into other senses such as vision, sound and touch. Not in a technology but in a human perspective.
This book will interest anyone seeking to understand more fully the importance of food and flavor in human experience, said the publisher. So, I read the book and the following quotes resonated:
"(...) the senses usually work together in interrelation to create sense experience; the term that captures this integrative perspective of the senses is 'intersensoriality'." (Korsmeyer, p.8)
"The senses are the organs by which man places himself in connection with exterior objects." (Brillat-Savarin, p.16)
"There is no situation in which sensibility and understanding, united in enjoyment, can be as long continued and as often repeated as a good meal in good company." (Immanuel Kant, p.214)
"The significant quality of smell and taste is that it is possible to recognize them, but much more diffcult to recall them." (Sutton, p.313)
"There is a particular strong line between the senses of taste and smell and the emotional dimensions of human experience." (Lupton, p.19)
"Taste is a sensation of the moment. It cannot be preserved." (Fisher, p.325)
Looking forward reading another book on taste by the same author: "Making Sense of Taste: Taste, Food, and Philosophy" (Cornell University Press, 1999)
In his seminal plenary speech at the Information Architecture Summit 2009 in Memphis (USA), Jesse James Garrett stated that in fact information architects and interaction designers are user experience designers. As designers, they focus on the engagement of people with artifacts, platforms and environments (online and offline).
According to Jesse, human engagement involves the mind (cognition), the heart (emotion), the body (action), and the senses (perception). Designers must know how to design for these human capabilities.
It almost goes without saying that besides for user experiences, the senses are also crucial for culinary experiences. Tastes, flavors, and smells are important human perceptions of the qualities of food. But are these inherently the qualities of food or are they only emergent through tasting and eating?
Long ago, the French lawyer and politician Jean Anthelme Brillat de Savarin (1755-1826) wrote an important and celebrated book on the human senses in a gastronomic context: "The Physiology of Taste or Transcendental Gastronomy" (1825). The book contains hardly any recipes but many anecdotes and observations covering all aspects of the pleasures of the table. He is considered 'the greatest food critic ever'.
By reading this book, we gain understanding of our senses. We can use it to what JJG had in mind for user experience designers: facilitating compelling user experiences, never to forget.
At the POLI.design (Consortium of Politecnico di Milano) in Italy, there are new post-graduate courses called 'Food Experience Design'.
The second edition (March 2009) focused on the specialization to create and design innovative pizzerias.
The fourth edition (Sept-Nov 2009) focuses on rethinking baker's, pastry and ice-cream shops.
From the various other courses like Hotel Experience Design, Entertainment Design or Outdoor Experience Design, some pictures are available as well.
Food is art and science. Besides chefs performing the culinary arts and crafts, many researchers have looked into food from a scientific perspective.
Under the subtitle "The Science, Culture, Business, and Art of Eating", author Herbert L. Meiselman (Senior Research Scientists at the U.S. Army Natick Research Development and Engineering Center) has collected an interesting set of scientific essays on The Meal. The chapters of the book are grouped into parts such as 'Definitions of the Meal', 'The Meal and Cuisine', 'The Meal and Culture', and 'Designing and Producing Meals'.
Although the book originally costs a fair amount, it is currently available at a reasonable 20 dollars at Amazon.
From the introduction: "The objective of this book is to appreciate the complexity of meals; to see the psychological, physiological, cultural, nutricial, biological, sensory, food service/catering, and other business aspects of meals; and to see the interdisciplinary nature of understanding meals; meals are complex, but understanding meals and addressing meals in the practical world requires a more complex view of the meal."
Taking the restaurant as a metaphor for delivering compelling user experiences means being interested in the backstage as well as the frontstage. Backstage work in the restaurant (a.k.a. the kitchen) has been the ethnographic subject of the American sociologist Gary Alan Fine (1950). He published his findings in "Kitchens: The Culture of Restaurant Work".
About the book: "Kitchens takes us into the robust, overheated, backstage world of the contemporary restaurant. In this rich, often surprising portrait of the real lives of kitchen workers, Gary Alan Fine brings their experiences, challenges, and satisfactions to colorful life. A new preface updates this riveting exploration of how restaurants actually work, both individually and as part of a larger culinary culture."
"The day begins slowly. Entering an empty, clean kitchen on a cool summer morning, one has little sense of the blistering tornado of action to come."
Chairman and founder of Cantu Designs and executive chef of Moto restaurant Homaro Cantu shows how our expectations of food based upon what we know or are familiar with can be used to change texture, taste, smell and flavor and create new experiences. Great example of designing a new food experience with known ingredients but with different processes. Transmogrification (a.k.a. the process or result of changing from one appearance, state, or phase to another) is what he does.
From Pop!Tech 2006: "Part mad scientist, part artist, chef Homaro Cantu pushes the traditional limits of known taste, texture and technique in a stunning futuristic fashion. With lab partner Ben Roche, Homaro slices and dices technology to reinvent the way people eat."
Watch his presentation at Pop!Tech 2006.
In this podcast (ITConversations), he talks about his background, restaurant and dishes.
courtesy filip borloo
During the Chi 2009 panel discussion (moderated by Patañjali S. Venkatacharya) on what user experience designers could learn from food designers, the following references were mentioned.
- Blackwell, A. F. 2006. The reification of metaphor as a design tool, ACM Trans. Comput.-Hum. Interact. 13, 4 (Dec. 2006), 490-530.
- Grimes, A. and Harper, R. 2008. Celebratory technology: new directions for food research in HCI. In Proceeding of the Twenty-Sixth Annual SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Florence, Italy, April 05 - 10, 2008). CHI '08. ACM, New York, NY, 467-476.
- Kowalski, L., Ashley, J., and Vaughan, M. W. 2006. When design is not the problem: better usability through non-design means. In CHI '06 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Montréal, Québec, Canada, April 22 - 27, 2006). CHI '06. ACM, New York, NY, 165-170.
- Langford, D. and Jones, C. 1994. The kitchen interface—a lateral approach to GUI. SIGCHI Bull. 26, 2 (Apr. 1994), 41-45.
- Oppenheimer, A. and Reavey, H. 2003. Beyond "puree": reinventing the blender. In Proceedings of the 2003 Conference on Designing For User Experiences (San Francisco, California, June 06 - 07, 2003). DUX '03. ACM, New York, NY, 1-10. Better ways to find the right recipe
- Svensson, M., Höök, K., and Cöster, R. 2005. Designing and evaluating kalas: A social navigation system for food recipes. ACM Trans. Comput.-Hum. Interact. 12, 3 (Sep. 2005), 374-400.
Caroline Jarrett writes in Caroline's Corner about the differences between The Heuristic Inspection (Gordon Ramsay) and User-Centered Design (Heston Blumenthal) on how to improve the restaurant experiences. On Ramsay "I realised that Ramsay is really doing heuristic inspections. He has a list of specific things that a good restaurant should do, starting with basic hygiene (he’s very keen on not killing the diners). He looks at the quality of service, level of organisation in the kitchen, portion control and profitability." and on Blumenthal "Blumenthal watched the videos of the user reactions and totally changed his approach (now, doesn’t that sound familiar?). He started to think about the users, and not just the diners who already chose Little Chef."
Personas are documents describing multiple relevant aspects of a target audience. Is someone's behaviour structured or rather chaotic. This also reflects in cooking styles. Is 'mise en place' obvious or not (e.g. cooking while preparing).
Now, enrich your persona descriptions with traits of people's cooking personalities. They reveal a lot. "Cornell University researchers studied nearly 800 family cooks and determined five distinct types. So what's your cooking personality?" - by Tara Parker-Pope (NYT)
Be human, start cooking! - "Cooking is a human universal. No society is without it. No one other than a few faddists tries to survive on raw food alone. And the consumption of a cooked meal in the evening, usually in the company of family and friends, is normal in every known society. Moreover, without cooking, the human brain (which consumes 20-25% of the body’s energy) could not keep running. Dr Wrangham thus believes that cooking and humanity are coeval." - From an article in The Econonomist on Richard Wrangham's thesis (anthropologist - Harvard University)
Lucia Terrenghi reflects in this position paper "Sticky, Smelly, Smoky Context: Experience Design in the Kitchen" 
on the challenges to design, setup and evaluate a user experience in hybrid contexts, i.e. physical and digital ones, of everyday life.
It is an exploration of the introduction of digital display technology into the kitchen environment. The paper looks at the complexity of the cooking context and considers how the introduction of technology in the kitchen can affect the cooking experience.
How something looks has great influence on how it feels. "Look-and-feel" would many say simplistically. This applies to objects in our environment, like products, dishes, and others.
The study of Sun and Wang from Taiwan called "Analysis of Interrelations between Bottle Shape and Food Taste" shows how specific atom arrangements of a bottle shapes ones taste.
An interesting relationship between tangible and intangible phenomenons. Just like an application and the user experience emerging from its use.
From The Hindu: "(...) most people don't even notice why the food they eat arrives looking, feeling or sounding the way it does."
Architects Sonja Stummerer and Martin Hablesreiter are on a mission to make people really look at what is on their plates. The young authors of the German book, Food Design, won a `Special Award of the Jury' at the Gourmand Awards last year. This year, they will be shooting a documentary on food design, as they travel across Europe.
Their documentary film is a must see.
In its Simplicity Labs, Philips ('Sense and simplicity') collects successes and horror stories of people with their kitchen and during cooking.
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:
- "Cooking is a language through which all the following properties may be expressed: harmony, creativity, happiness, beauty, poetry, complexity, magic, humour, provocation and culture."
- "The information given off by a dish is enjoyed through the senses; it is also enjoyed and interpreted by reflection."
- "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."
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."
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."
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.
Or ... how to 'improve the workforce' by changing food habits.
Designing for a global audience means making sure it fitts in all cultures. Almost impossible considering all differences among people. What and how people eat differs all over the place. From chopsticks to forks and knives and how it relates to culture and design. (source: uigarden)
Virpi Roto (Sr. Research Scientist Mobile HCI at Nokia) stated in this paper 
that "(...) we can talk about user experience whenever there is interaction with a product. A cake does provide user experience, because I can interact with it: I touch the cake and feel how soft it is, and bitting that cake gives delicious taste as 'feedback'. That's how I interact with the cake." - So, food and UX do have things in common.
Mike Kuniavsky (of Adaptive Path fame) published a post on wine from an informational perspective.
