HCI research on food has focused predominantly on multisensory experience, embodiment, and meaning, but less on its value for memories. However, consistent findings have shown the importance of flavor in supporting the recall of episodic memories, particularly for older people. We report on a two-month project with 12 older adults from whom we elicited 72 self-defining memories, codesigned their bespoke flavor-based cues, and explored the impact of these 3D printed flavor-based cues on recall. Our findings indicate that 78% of memories prompted by flavor-based cues were recalled with intense feelings of being brought back in time, strong positive affect, and sensorial richness. We advance theory on 3D printed flavor-based cues as flexible resource for design of memory technologies integrating sense data, and highlight their qualities. Our findings led to three implications for the design of novel recreational, and therapeutic multisensory reminiscing, and for body-centric multisensory design methods.

Food experiences integrate multisensory bodily experiences within social interactions infused with rich emotional meaning. This makes food a promising material to be leveraged in the design of novel interactions. However, this richness also raises challenges for food-based design, as current technologies for capturing food experiences have limitedly accounted for their multisensory qualities. We present the design of FlavorDesigner app, a mobile application aimed to support the capture of multisensory food experiences and the crafting of personalized flavor cues to support their later recall. The app interface was evaluated through workshops with 12 participants. Findings outline richer understandings of capturing multisensory experiences, both live and remembered, vocabulary to inform conversations about them, rationale for our app design, and three implications for design and design research including evocative representations for capturing taste and smell; interactive, engaging and valid sensory evaluation scales; and new classes of technologies for food-based multisensory interactions.

Embedded in everyday practices, food can be a rich resource for interaction design. This article focuses on eating experiences to uncover how bodily, sensory, and socio-cultural aspects of eating can be better leveraged for the design of user experience. We report a systematic literature review of 109 papers, and interviews with 18 professional chefs, providing new understandings of prior HFI research, as well as how professional chefs creatively design eating experiences. The findings inform a conceptual framework of designing for user experience leveraging eating experiences. These findings also inform implications for HFI design suggesting the value of multisensory flavor experiences, external and internal sensory stimulation and deprivation, aspects of eating for communicating meaning, and designing with contrasting pleasurable and uncomfortable experiences. The article concludes with six charts as novel generative design tools for HFI experiences focused on sensory, emotional, communicative, performative, and temporal experiences.

Designing interactions with food holds potential for rich multisensory experiences but their pervasiveness can challenge our understanding of them. This paper presents the design and evaluation of Sensory probes, a novel, exploratory design research method aimed to sensitize participants towards their food experiences. We report on workshops with 8 participants for co-designing the probes, followed by iterative revision through two-week diary studies with 18 participants. Findings indicate strong engagement with the sensory probes and how they brought forward the bodily and sensory aspects of these experiences, alongside emotional and social ones. We highlight the design rationale for the sensory probes which has been both empirically- and theoretically-grounded, provide reflections on the value of these probes for enabling novel perspectives on food experiences, and on probes’ ability to capture what we called sensory fragments of participants’ experience reflecting distinct sensory aspects form both internal and external senses.

Interactions with food are complex, integrating rich multisensory experiences within emotionally meaningful social contexts. Yet, the opportunities for food as material resource for emotional communication have been less explored. We describe a two-month project with 5 couples centered on the co-design of personalized flavors for emotional communication. These were experienced through a three-day preliminary study involving a 3D food printer in participants' homes. We discuss the value of our findings indicating preferences for both remembered and imagined positive flavors and their integration in focal intimacy practices to support emotional coregulation. We also discuss material food probes and their value for exploring and inspiring both design-with, and design-around food.

Taste offers unexplored opportunities for novel user experiences in HCI, however it is difficult to design for. While most lab research has shown basic tastes are consistently associated with positive or negative emotional experiences, the value of these mappings for user experience is less explored. In this paper we leverage 3D food printing technologies to report an experimental study investigating the relationship between taste and emotional experience for use in HCI. We present four real-life inspired scenarios: product rating, sports match results, experiential vignettes, and website usability, to explore the understanding and expression of emotional meaning through tastes. Our findings extend previous emotion mappings for sweet and bitter tastes to applied scenarios. We also draw out fresh insights into the role of taste, flavor, and embodiment in experience design, reflecting on the role of 3D food printing in supporting taste interfaces.

Food provides humans with some of the most universal and rich sensory experiences possible. For a long time technology was unable to recreate such experiences but now new innovations are changing that. Using the novel manufacturing technology of 3D printed food, I am developing ‘Edible Interfaces’. My research uses a user-centered research approach to focus on food as material for interactive experience in HCI. This will lead to development of Edible Interfaces that are built on the understanding and application of the experiential affordances of food. Designing with food allows the creation of forms of experience not possible through traditional interfaces. My studies so far have explored the perceptions of 3D printed food and potentials for food to advance affective computing. This knowledge is broadening on-going work in the field of multi-sensory HCI and delivering a new perspective on how we design for experience.