The future will taste different. The World Wildlife Federation and Knorrs identified 50 plants that enrich both people and planet. The contents of the list may surprise you. Join Danielle Wilde in a tasty discussion, as we use these Future 50 Foods to think about what to wear, eat and grow moving forward. 

21. Februar 2020 hos Vibeke Jerichau, Kongebrogade 48, Kolding, DK

Hvor – Danielle Wilde udfordrede ud fra overskriften ’Mad som et sociokulturelt sofistikeret materiale’, og ved at fokusere på – 50 fremtidige fødevarer udvalgt af World Wildlife Federation og Knorrs – som alle (næsten) var virkeligt tilstede på bordene, blev det til en sanselig, provokerende og øjenåbnende aften.
Tak til alle der tog udfordringen og deltog med engagement og god debat.

samt support fra (many thanks to): Easyfood, funding; Lisbeth Voigt Durand and Mette Ravn: fabulous ceramic cups and bowls; Grethe Sørensen: cider; Benjamin Wolters: surdej; Marcus Ronalds: wooden tiles.

Our DIS’18 workshop aimed to articulate values associated with handmade through a co-creative exploration in the food domain. Our objective was to explore the potential of integrating such values into future food-related technologies. In a full day workshop we critically reflected on the notion of handmade; engaged actively with food—production, plating and consumption—as design material; and conducted collective discussions around the values that these processes and materials can embody when attended to through lenses other than efficiency.

By handmaking: touching, smelling, tasting, listening, speaking and enacting choreographies with the materials at hand, we deepened the discussion of the meaning associated with the handmade and brought a richness to ways that designers, developers and other thinkers imagine future food-related technologies.

publication: Vannucci, E., Altarriba, F., Marshall, J., & Wilde, D. (2018). Handmaking food ideals: Crafting the design of future food-related technologies. In Proceedings of the 2018 ACM Conference Companion Publication on Designing Interactive Systems (DIS ’18 Companion). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 419-422. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3197391.3197403

Our CHI’18 workshop addressed emerging food-tech trends and controversies, aiming to extend the existing body of HFI research with new insights sought via co-creative activities and discussion. Through food-tech prototyping and scenarios navigated by our Food Tarot cards, we unpacked issues and proposed diverse imaginative yet plausible HFI ideas.

Participants presented their HFI research and design projects, ranging from a DIY wine fermentation kit to an AI-based recipe recommender. These tools provoked discussion about the contrast between ‘new’ food technologies aiming for ‘clean’ food practices and ‘old’ traditional food techniques supporting ‘messy’ practices and experimental human-food entanglements. We recognised that while safety needs to be assured, we should support and revive messy, experimental, and playful HFI approaches.

publication: Dolejšová, M, Khot, R.A., Davis, H., Ferdous, Hasan S., Quitmeyer, A. (2018). Designing Recipes for Digital Food Futures. In Extended Abstracts of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA ‘18). ACM, New York, NY, USA, Paper W10, 8 pages. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3170427.3170622 

Our workshop at DIS 2019 focused on the predominance of solutionist approaches in HFI design and research, proposing that the field needs to adopt more critical and self-reflective stance. Through a foraging walkshop around local San Diego foodscape, followed by creative food crafting and discussion, we addressed the existing and anticipated HFI issues. Our goal was to engage in collective down-to-earth food interactions to reflect on the current state of HFI and imagine desirable futures.

During the walkshop, we documented our experiences through written notes, sketches, photos, and found or bought food items and we collaboratively crafted an HFI Zine. The Zine is not a manifesto or fixed set of guidelines but rather a humble set of ideas and suggestions on what HFI could do in the future.

More details available on the workshop website.

publication: Dolejšová, M; Altarriba Bertran F., Wilde, D. & Davis, H. (2019). Crafting and Tasting Issues in Everyday Human-Food Interactions. In Companion Publication of the 2019 on Designing Interactive Systems Conference 2019 Companion (DIS ’19 Companion). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 361-364. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3301019.3319994

Our workshops at CHI PLAY 2019 and IDC 2020 brought together designers and researchers from diverse backgrounds to discuss how personally relevant cultural traditions can serve as a source of inspiration for play design. To facilitate nuanced discussion, we narrowed the scope of our enquiry to food-based traditions, motivated by three factors: i) there is increasing interest in food-related research in the CHI and CHI Play communities; ii) food rituals often have elements of play; and (iii) food is culturally rich and food practices universally relatable.

Through hands-on co-creative activities, we shared and analysed playful, culturally situated food traditions, and creatively experimented to create novel and interesting play experiences. We unpacked and made designerly use of cultural manifestations of play to inspire technology design. We identified strategies to reflect on the socio-cultural and ethical implications of making use of cultural play in design, ensuring cultural sensitivity and ownership, avoiding over-simplification, stigma and stereotype. We explored mechanisms through which ideas can be vetted by people from the culture of inspiration, and promoted discussion of how to avoid distortions in culturally-grounded play design.

As a result, we produced a pictorial that presents an annotated portfolio of play-food potentials, i.e. interesting design qualities and/or interaction mechanisms that could help promote playful and social engagement in food practices. The pictorial highlights play forms and experiential textures that are deeply rooted in food culture and traditions yet underexplored in Human-Food Interaction (HFI) research. It is intended to inspire designers to broaden the palette of play experiences and emotions embraced in HFI.

More details available on the CHI Play ’19 and the IDC’20 workshop websites.

publications:

[workshop outcomes] Altarriba Bertran, F., Duval, J., Márquez Segura, E., Turmo Vidal, L., Chisik, Y., Juanet Casulleras, M., Garcia Pañella, O., Isbister, K. & Wilde, D. (2020, July). Chasing Play Potentials in Food Culture: Learning from Traditions to Inspire Future Human-Food Interaction Design. In Proceedings of the 2020 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference (pp. 979-991). DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3357236.3395575

[IDC’20 workshop proposal] Chisik, Y., Bertran, F. A., Schaper, M. M., Segura, E. M., Vidal, L. T., & Wilde, D. (2020, June). Chasing play potentials in food culture: embracing children’s perspectives. In Proceedings of the 2020 ACM Interaction Design and Children Conference: Extended Abstracts (pp. 46-53). DOI: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3397617.3398062

[CHI Play’19 workshop proposal] Altarriba Bertran. F., Duval, J., Isbister, K., Wilde, D., Segura, E. M., Panella, O. G., & Leon, L. B. (2019). Chasing Play Potentials in Food Culture to Inspire Technology Design. In Extended Abstracts of the Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play Companion Extended Abstracts (CHI PLAY ’19 Extended Abstracts). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 829-834. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3341215.3349586

At the Designing Interactive Systems (DIS) 2020 conference, we co-organised a two-day online workshop Experimental Food Design for Sustainable Futures (July 6-7 2020). The workshop experimented with food as bio-design material and socio-culturally potent, aesthetically rich starting point from which to critically reflect on social and ecological uncertainties. Participants co-designed scenarios, prototypes and artifacts, engage in foraging ‘walk-shops’ in their kitchens and pantries, and proposed diverse imaginative approaches to nurture transformations towards positive sustainable futures.

More info available here on the workshop website.

publications: 

Markéta Dolejšová, Sjef van Gaalen, Danielle Wilde, Paul Graham Raven, Sara Heitlinger, and Ann Light. (2020). Designing with More-than-Human Food Practices for Climate-Resilience. In Companion Publication of the Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS ‘20 Companion). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3393914.3395909

Hilary Davis, Danielle Wilde, Ferran Altarriba Bertran, and Markéta Dolejšová. (2020). Fantastic(e)ating Food Futures: Reimagining Human Food Interactions. In Companion Publication of the Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS ‘20 Companion). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3393914.3395906

Our open panel Feeding Food Futures: From Techno-solutionism to Inclusive Human-Food Collaborations was held virtually at the EASST+4S 2020 conference, August 18-22, 2020.

The panel included three thematic sessions:

🥕Session 1: Food, Biotechnology & New Meats
Tuesday 18th, 10am CEST
Recording available (for a limited time) here

Program:
Presentation 1: We Are Eating Our Own Genius! Looking At »Clean Meat« Through Symbolical-Relational Lenses (Sandra Matthaeus)

Presentation 2: Genes, Food and Metabolic Health: Configuring Environment and Food in a Biotech Lab (Stathis Arapostathis)

Presentation 3: Replacing Unsustainable Food Cultures? How Meat Alternatives Defend ‘Good’ (i.e. Meat-based) Food (Malte B Rödl)

🥕Session 2: Experimental Food Design Methods
Friday 21st, 10am CEST
Recording available (for a limited time) here

Program:
Presentation 1: Datafication on the Farm: The Emerging Role of the Precision Agriculture Software Platform (Sarah Marquis) / pre-recorded talk here

Presentation 2: “It’s about mass production”: Making Sense of CRISPR-CAS9 Food Futures in Bavaria (Amy Louise Clare, Ruth Müller, Julia Feiler)

Presentation 3: What if everything was edible? (Danielle Wilde)

🥕Session 3: Feeding Food Future [free-range edition]*
Saturday 22nd, 10am-1pm CEST.
*cost-free session open to all, organized as collateral to the official conference program. Recording of the session available here

Program:
Presentation 1: Algorithmic Food Justice (Sara Heitlinger, Lara Houston, Alex S. Taylor)

Presentation 2: “Zoönomic Futures”: Exploring Co-created Responses to Speculative Technologies in Multi-species Food Futures (Sjef van Gaalen)

Presentation 3: Spilling My Socialized Guts On Kitchen Labs (Andrew Gryf Paterson)

Presentation 4: Disrupting (More-than-) Human-Food Interaction: Experimental Design, Tangibles and Food-Tech Futures (Marketa Dolejsova)

Presentation 5: Eating our way forward (Danielle Wilde)