International Journal of Food Design - Volume 1, Issue 1, 2016

Contemporary food systems promote the consumption of highly processed foods of limited nutrition, contributing to overweight and obesity, diet-related disease and significant financial burden on healthcare systems. In part, this has resulted from highly successful design, development and marketing strategies for processed foods. The successful application of such strategies to healthy food options, and the services and business plans that accompany them, could assist in enhancing health and alleviating burden on health care systems.

Product designers have long been aware of the importance of intertwining emotional experiences with new products. However, a lack of theoretical precision exists for applying emotional design beyond food products, to the food systems, services and business models that drive them. This article explores emotional design within the context of food and food systems and proposes a new concept – Emotional Food Design (EFD), through which emotional design is integrated across levels of a food system. EFD complements the dominating deductive view of food systems research with an abductive iterative design approach contextualized within the creation of new food products, services and business models and their associated emotional attachments. This paper concludes by outlining what EFD can offer to reorient food systems to successfully promote healthy eating.

The sense of smell has been recognized as an important factor governing our emotions and memory. Nevertheless, it remains the most underexplored sense and is still a relatively new modality in the domain of Human–Computer Interaction. In this article, we report on initial findings from our ongoing research to find support for the significance of smell next to and above other senses as a medium of digital communication. Firstly, we examine the effect of olfactory cues on the emotional perception of digital images on mobile devices with a hardware tele-smell device, Scentee. The preliminary results reveal that the addition of scent significantly modulated the emotional perception of the images, with the effect especially noticeable when scents had a contrasting emotional valence to the image content. We also introduce the application of Scentee as a virtual multi-sensory dining experience aimed at sharing the experience or preparing dishes and scents more publicly.

This article considers a practice-led design research project that asks ‘To what extent can autonomy, circularity and self-reference inform design methods and direct interdependent design outcomes?’

In the project ambient audio recordings are translated into intimate physical experiences. Through parallel iterations of sound recordings, sound spectrum analysis, generative model making, additive manufacturing methods and traditional chocolaterie techniques temporarily intimate representations of the personal world surface.

The potential of Second Order Cybernetics is explored to develop novel experiences that synthesize sound and visual components into dynamic material forms. The individual samples do not act as quotes; instead the patterns operate as generative material for systemic combination. The aim of the research is to obtain a better understanding in systems in which the outcome is unpredictable and individual, and the makers/observers are always present to analyse the act of design as a circular, interdependent investigation into a continuously changing environment.

In a future investigation this dynamic goes beyond imitation to integration, dissolving boundaries and synthesizing new hybrid typologies. The incorporation of living organisms inside the design process is key. The proposed design process inquires into the incorporation of both artificial and natural methods of artefact creation.