Gastrointestinal sounds are a constant part of human physiology, offering potential insights into digestive functions and everyday bodily awareness. However, these sounds are rarely noticed and often socially stigmatised, remaining underexplored in HCI despite calls to recognise the gut as a site for embodied awareness. We extend HCI’s engagement with involuntary biosignals by positioning gut sounds as a uniquely generative context for interoceptive interaction design, where systems can scaffold awareness, reflection, and care. We conducted a week-long in-the-wild qualitative study with ten participants, which showed how making gut sounds audible reshaped bodily awareness, provoked affective responses, and prompted acts of reflection and tinkering. From these insights, we contribute four bodily perspectives – Registering, Reacting, Reflecting, and Responding- that capture the oscillatory nature of interoceptive engagement and offer design strategies that position biosignals as sites of curiosity, care, and awareness that are socially situated.

Sounds play a crucial role in shaping dining experiences. Recently, designers have increasingly integrated them into interfaces that connect diners with food. Yet, little is known about how sounds can function as culinary materials to enrich chefs’ creativity, particularly in creating meaningful auditory interactions that resonate with their culinary creations. Hence, we present GastroConcerto, an auditory dining system that combines a magnetic contact microphone equipped under the plate with a companion mobile application. This system delves into the interactive space between diners and their food to introduce a novel interactive mechanism of dining–sound pairing, enabling chefs to design specific auditory interactions that respond to diners’ individual interactions with the food on dining containers. Through a within-subjects study and field deployment, we examined how GastroConcerto enriches chefs’ creative practices in crafting "sonic dish" experiences. Ultimately, our goal is to shift the ownership of auditory interaction design from interface designers to chefs, thereby supporting their culinary creativity.

Experts emphasise that maintaining a healthy gut microbial balance requires the public to understand factors beyond diet, such as physical activity, lifestyle, and other real-world influences. Games as experiential systems are known to foster playful engagement and reflection. We propose a novel approach to promoting activity engagement for gut health and its reflection through the design of the Go-Go Biome game. The game simulates the interplay between friendly and unfriendly gut microbes, encouraging real-world activity engagement for gut-microbial balance through interactive visuals, unstructured play mechanics, and reflective design principles. A field study with 14 participants revealed that important facets of our game design led to awareness, playful visualisation, and reflection on factors influencing gut health. Our findings suggest four design lenses– bio-temporality, visceral conversations, wellness comparison, and inner discovery, to aid future playful design explorations to foster gut health engagement and reflection.

There is an increasing interest in combining interactive technology with food, leading to a new research area called human-food interaction. While food experiences are increasingly benefiting from interactive technology, for example in the form of food tracking apps, 3D-printed food and projections on dining tables, a more systematic advancement of the field is hindered because, so far, there is no comprehensive articulation of the grand challenges the field is facing. To further and consolidate conversations around this topic, we invited 21 HFI experts to a 5-day seminar. The goal was to review our own and prior work to identify the grand challenges in human-food interaction. The result is an articulation of 10 grand challenges in human-food interaction across 4 categories (technology, users, design and ethics). By presenting these grand challenges, we aim to help researchers move the human-food interaction research field forward.

The fast-paced lifestyle and the conveniences of urban food storage contribute to an increase in domestic food waste, wherein we end up not consuming everything that we buy. This issue has been tackled within HCI through different awareness tools; however, the design of domestic food storage in itself has received limited attention from designers. We present FoodChestra, a smart open pantry that displays perishable food items in shared households. FoodChestra supports multimodal interactions and offers timely feedback to help users understand and reflect on their shared shopping and eating practices. In this pictorial, we present the key design decisions that were undertaken to develop the five main components of FoodChestra. Through this work, we aim to inspire new design thinking for reimagining the food storage systems of urban households that can encourage people to reflect on their food consumption practices.

Our eating practices are increasingly overshadowed by the presence of screen-based media technologies that conflict with the ideologies of mindful eating. However, little is known about whether and how screens influence our eating behaviors. To contribute to this understanding, we present a rich account of dining practices of ten participants with and without screen. Our study revealed that eating with screens was found more enjoyable than eating alone. Screens can influence one's awareness of hunger and other behaviors like chewing rate and food gaze, whereas screen-media did not trigger any judgements for food. Drawing on the study insights, we highlight the role of technology to support bodily awareness, savoring, a non-judgmental attitude to eating and on rethinking distractions as companions. The outlined considerations encourage a creative yet careful take on making mindful eating more accessible within the realities of screen-based dining cultures.

Our gastrointestinal health is influenced by complex interactions between our gut bacteria and multiple external factors. A wider understanding of these concepts is vital to help make gut-friendly decisions in everyday life; however, its complexity can challenge public understanding if not approached systematically. Research suggests that board games can help to playfully navigate complex subjects. We present Gooey Gut Trail (GGT), a board game to help players understand the multifactorial interactions that influence and sustain gut microbial diversity. Through the embodied enactment of in-game activities, players learn how their habits surrounding diet, physical activity, emotions, and lifestyle influence the gut microbial population. A qualitative field study with 15 participants revealed important facets of our game design that increased participants' awareness, causing them to reflect upon their habits that influence gut health. Drawing upon the study insights, we present five design considerations to aid future playful explorations on nurturing human-microbial relationships.