Connecting in the Kitchen

Abstract

Recent research has explored the role technology might play in future kitchens, including virtually dining together, recipe sharing, augmented kitchen furniture, reactive cooking utensils and gestural interaction. When people come together in a kitchen to cook it is about more than just production of sustenance -it is about being together, helping each other, exchanging stories, and contributing to the gradual emergence of a shared meal. In this paper we present a digital ethnography of how people coordinate and cooperate in their kitchens when cooking together for the purpose of inspiring the design of social natural user interactions for technologies in the kitchen. The study is based on 61 YouTube videos of people cooking together analyzed using the frameworks of proxemics and Fformations. Our findings unfold and illustrate relationships between people's spatial organization, their cooking activities and physical kitchen layouts. Based on these we discuss the kitchen as a design space and particularly the opportunities for social natural user interaction design.

Designing Kitchen Technologies for Ageing in Place

“…Food production, distribution and consumption have recently attracted growing attention in the field of HCI [7,8,16,[34][35][36]. Cooking is a cross-cultural practice that supports communities by bringing people together, enabling communality, solidarity, and leading to commensality: shared meals and community building [43,44].…”

“…Cooking skills, recipes and techniques are shared with families and networks through informal and formal interactions [44]. Therefore, technology design needs to consider the social, collaborative and experiential aspects of cooking [34][35][36]. To describe the complexity of cooking together with others, Paay et al [35] identified three distinct task-related configurations: working on related tasks, working on independent tasks, and working on shared tasks.…”

“…Therefore, technology design needs to consider the social, collaborative and experiential aspects of cooking [34][35][36]. To describe the complexity of cooking together with others, Paay et al [35] identified three distinct task-related configurations: working on related tasks, working on independent tasks, and working on shared tasks. They also identified four collaboration-oriented actions: observing, checking, helping, and showing [35].…”

“…To describe the complexity of cooking together with others, Paay et al [35] identified three distinct task-related configurations: working on related tasks, working on independent tasks, and working on shared tasks. They also identified four collaboration-oriented actions: observing, checking, helping, and showing [35]. Preparing a meal requires various subtasks that are performed in preparation for the actual food making (e.g., chopping vegetables as a preparation).…”

Towards Proxemic Mobile Collocated Interactions

“…Early work on F-formations focused on interpersonal interactions around large public displays and/or physical structures. Examples of this include the work by Marquardt et al (2012) who observed groups of participants performing joint activities around a tabletop interface in a tourist information center, or the work by Paay et al (2015), who studied F-formations in kitchens, focusing on the architectural design of the kitchen. This first wave of studies revealed that F-formations vary with the task and that physical structures in the space encourage certain formations (Marshall et al, 2011a;Marshall et al, 2011b).…”