Tech for a social eating experience

Disruptive technology no more

In today's fast-paced world, the shared experience of mealtime is often disrupted by technology. But what if we could harness the power of tech to make mealtimes more engaging and memorable than ever before?

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Our challenge was to uncover the playful aspects of mealtime interactions and explore how technology could meaningfully enhance this experience.

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The work was led by Ferran Altarriba Bertran as part of his PhD. I contributed with data analysis of the user research and ideation.

A portfolio of 11 speculative design ideas that illustrate how mealtime technology could help to realize its playful potential
A new method of testing design concepts remotely, which emerged as a necessity during the Covid 19 pandemic

Two articles in ACM's Human Computer Interaction academic publications

Methods

Getting to know the pros and cons of mealtime tech

I did a thematic analysis of an online survey distributed to 35 people in California and Spain, which allowed me to identify themes in people's eating habits such as which types of uses of phones and technology create isolation from the social experience or a sensory distraction that detracts from mindfulness.

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I formulated design guidelines to help fellow designers and engineers to create technology that has a positive impact.

Mind map titled "Guidelines for mealtime technology" by the Social Emotional Technology Lab, UCSC. It outlines 11 ways technology can support connection, conversation, etiquette, and shared experiences during meals while minimizing disruption.

Discovering playful practices in people's homes

With our preliminary results in hand, we recruited 12 households to do a booklet of 7 activities related to eating to do during the week. These activities encouraged them to reflect on their dining and tech habits and engage in playful actions.

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For instance, one activity prompted participants to reminisce about enjoyable food-related moments and reenact them in brief videos, while another encouraged them to set aside their phones for a day, establish lighthearted penalties for rule-breakers, and contemplate the experience of a phone-free day.

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Our aim was to uncover forms of social and playful dining experiences that resonated on a socio-emotional level and could inspire our designs.

Workbook with examples from fun food traditions from many countries, and section for the reader to reflect on their funny food or technology habits.

Speculative design

After discovering many specific instances of play potentials and social connection from people's experiences around food, we used them to inspire our new technology concepts.

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Through several iterative brainstorming sessions where we sketched the contents of our brain on and on, we selected and refined a dozen of design concepts.

The play-food roulette sends notifications to diner's phones prompting them to do silly, pro-social, or playful things; and creates a storybook of their reactions with photos and videos. Bingo machine: suggested a diner, a food combination, and a way of eating every time it's put in motion.

Foodland is a table centerpiece that allows you to build a virtual ecosystem with the foods you eat overtime. You simple have to take a photo of your dish and send it to the system: your food will come to life in the centerpiece as a hologram, becoming a member of your homes Foodland.

The PlaceMap tablecloth is ripe with food culture knowledge. During the meal it will highlight countries on the map and send prompts to your phone with fun food rituals from the countries, so you can try them out while you eat. That way, you can experiment with new and fun ways of eating while you lean about other culture's customs. Using the Placemap smartphone app, you can choose different modes for your experience: Random, if you'd like the placemap to decide what to feature; or Themed, if you want to focus on rituals of a specific type of from a specific origin, in order to pair well with your meal.

Remote play tests during Covid-19

Ferran put those concepts in a speculative design catalog that illustrated and explained all of our ideas. We then distributed this catalog to people to find out which ideas they thought were best and tested them remotely.

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We developed an innovative approach for remote stakeholder engagement in the co-design of interactive technology known as Designerly Tele-Experiences.

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This methodological framework allows participants to immerse themselves in initial design concepts within real-world contexts, encouraging them to offer fresh ideas that align with their personal experiential preferences.

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This allowed us to see how people reacted to certain concepts or features, what the group dynamics were, and gave participants an opportunity to challenge and expand upon our ideas.

Two people are smiling at dinner while seeing a map centered on Barcelona, and instructions from the facilitator in Whatsapp to try the El Porró tradition, consisting of drinking wine out of a vessel that streams the wine out of a small nozzle.

Credits

Play-food technology futures - Original ideas and images by Ferran Altarriba Bertran, Alexandra Pometko, Muskan Gupta, and Katherine Isbister, from the SET Lab at UC Santa Cruz

Designerly Tele-Experiences: A New Approach to Remote Yet Still Situated Co-Design. Bertran, F. A., Pometko, A., Gupta, M., Wilcox, L., Banerjee, R., & Isbister, K. (2022) Access
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The Playful Potential of Shared Mealtime: a speculative catalog of playful technologies for day-to-day social eating experiences. Bertran, F. A., Pometko, A., Gupta, M., Wilcox, L., Banerjee, R., & Isbister, K. (2021). Access

Sasha Pometko