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.

Maintaining work focus when on a computer is a major challenge, and people often feel that they use their time ineffectively. To improve focus we designed meTime, a real-time awareness application that shows users how they allocate their time across applications. In two real-world deployments involving 118 participants, we examined whether greater awareness of time use improves focus. In our first deployment, we provided awareness information using meTime, to both office workers and students. Exposure to meTime reduced use of social media, email, browsing and total time online. However increased awareness didn't affect time spent in productivity applications. A second educational deployment largely replicated these results and showed that meTime also reduced users' perceptions of their ability to focus effectively. Changed perceptions were associated with higher class grades. We discuss practical and theoretical implications as well as design principles for use of time applications.

The deployment of technology interventions, such as public displays and mobile apps, in community settings has been found to engage people in sharing and comparing their opinions. Our research is concerned with how to extend this to community-wide participation by devising and deploying multiple voting devices and visualisations. We present an in-the-wild study where a number of shopkeepers along a street participated by placing a novel voting device in their shops to collect locals' opinions. Results were displayed outside the shops, on the pavement. This distributed set-up was found to promote public debate on local issues, particularly around the perceived divide between people on either end of the street. We outline our design process and describe the impact of distributing voting devices and situated visualisations in a local community. \

Meeting participants can experience cognitive overload when they need both to verbally contribute to ongoing discussion while simultaneously creating notes to promote later recall of decisions made during the meeting. We designed two novel cuing tools to reduce the cognitive load associated with note-taking, thus improving verbal contributions in meetings. The tools combine real-time automatic speech recognition (ASR) with lightweight annotation to transform note-taking into a low overhead markup process. To create lightweight notes, users do not generate the notes' content themselves. Instead they simply highlight important phrases in a real-time ASR transcript (Highlighter tool), or press a button to indicate when they heard something important (Hotspots tool). We evaluated these markup tools against a traditional pen-and-paper baseline with 26 users. Hotspots was highly successful: compared with handwritten notes, it increased participants' conversational contributions and reduced their perception of overload in the meeting, while improving recall of the meeting two months later. Highlighter also improved recall without compromising conversational contributions, although users found it more demanding.

Lifelogging is a technically inspired approach that attempts to address the problem of human forgetting by developing systems that ‘record everything’. Uptake of lifelogging systems has generally been disappointing, however. One reason for this lack of uptake is the absence of design principles for developing digital systems to support memory. Synthesising multiple studies, we identify and evaluate 4 new empirically motivated design principles for lifelogging: Selectivity, Embodiment, Synergy and Reminiscence. We first summarise 4 empirical studies that motivate the principles, then describe the evaluation of 4 novel systems built to embody these principles. The design principles were generative, leading to the development of new classes of lifelogging system, as well as providing strategic guidance about how those systems should be built. Evaluations suggest support for Selection and Embodiment principles, but more conceptual and technical work is needed to refine the Synergy and Reminiscence principles.

There are a number of mobile shopping aids and recommender systems available, but none can be easily used for a weekly shop at a local supermarket. We present a minimal, mobile and fully functional lambent display that clips onto any shopping trolley handle, intended to nudge people when choosing what to buy. It provides salient information about the food miles for various scanned food items represented by varying lengths of lit LEDs on the handle and a changing emoticon comparing the average miles of all the products in the trolley against a social norm. When evaluated in situ, the lambent handle display nudged people to choose products with fewer food miles than the items they selected using their ordinary shopping strategies. People also felt guilty when the average mileage of the contents of their entire shopping trolley was above the social norm. The findings are discussed in terms of how to provide different kinds of product information that people care about, using simple lambent displays.

Lifelogging technologies can capture both mundane and important experiences in our daily lives, resulting in a rich record of the places we visit and the things we see. This study moves beyond technology demonstrations, in aiming to better understand how and why different types of Lifelogs aid memory. Previous work has demonstrated that Lifelogs can aid recall, but that they do many other things too. They can help us look back at the past in new ways, or to reconstruct what we did in our lives, even if we don't recall exact details. Here we extend the notion of Lifelogging to include locational information. We augment streams of Lifelog images with geographic data to examine how different types of data (visual or locational) might affect memory. Our results show that visual cues promote detailed memories (akin to recollection). In contrast locational information supports inferential processes -- allowing participants to reconstruct habits in their behaviour.

Digital mementos are increasingly problematic, as people acquire large amounts of digital belongings that are hard to access and often forgotten. Based on fieldwork with 10 families, we designed a new type of embodied digital memento, the FM Radio. It allows families to access and play sonic mementos of their previous holidays. We describe our underlying design motivation where recordings are presented as a series of channels on an old fashioned radio. User feedback suggests that the device met our design goals: being playful and intriguing, easy to use and social. It facilitated family interaction, and allowed ready access to mementos, thus sharing many of the properties of physical mementos that we intended to trigger.

Identifying highlights in multimedia content such as video and audio is currently a very difficult technical problem. We present and evaluate a novel algorithm that identifies highlights by combining content analysis with Web 2.0 data mining techniques. We exploit the fact that popular content tends to be redundantly uploaded onto community sharing sites. Our "social summarization" technique first identifies overlaps in uploaded scenes and then uses the upload frequency of each video scene to compute that scene's importance in the complete video. Our user evaluation shows the reliability of the technique: scenes automatically selected by our method are agreed by experts to be the most relevant.

We extend the notion of social tagging to construct social summaries of complex multimedia materials. Our system allows students to apply time-indexed multimedia tags such as handwritten annotations or photos to different parts of lecture recordings. These tags can be used to straightforwardly access different parts of the lecture. The social component of the interface presents information about which tags are most frequently accessed by others: allowing students to infer those parts of the lecture of most interest to others. We demonstrate the utility of the approach in a 6 week fieldwork study. Social summaries are used much more than corresponding systems that do not provide social information. In addition, social tool use was correlated with high course marks.

Our lives are full of memorable and important moments, as well as important items of information. The last few years have seen the proliferation of digital devices intended to support prosthetic memory (PM), to help users recall experiences, conversations and retrieve personal information. We nevertheless have little systematic understanding of when and why people might use such devices, in preference to their own organic memory (OM). Although OM is fallible, it may be more efficient than accessing information from a complex PM device. We report a controlled lab study which investigates when and why people use PM and OM. We found that PM use depended on users' evaluation of the quality of their OM, as well as PM device properties. In particular, we found that users trade-off Accuracy and Efficiency, preferring rapid access to potentially inaccurate information over laborious access to accurate information. We discuss the implications of these results for future PM design and theory. Rather than replacing OM, future PM designs need to focus on allowing OM and PM to work in synergy.