Taste Your Emotions

Abstract

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.

Co-Designing Flavor-Based Memory Cues with Older Adults

“…Our findings agree with prior work that flavor-based cues better supported positive emotions than negative ones [10,12], and indicate that flavor-based memory cues are more likely to be successful when prompting memorable positive experiences or events. The elicited self-defining memories were mostly socially shared, one-off events relating to experiences from adulthood.…”

“…The preference for umami and salty type flavors for most of the positive experiences contrasts with previous work which indicated sweet flavors were best used for positive emotional expression and coregulation [10,12]. Flavor-based memory cues were described in terms of ingredients (75%, n = 18, 10 FM, 8 NFM), recipes (58%, n = 14, 7 FM, 7 NFM) and dishes (58%, 8 FM, 6 NFM) often through combinations of, rather than single, ingredients.…”

“…One of the drivers of the growth of food in HCI is the development of new technologies. For instance, 3D food printing has been used to support emotional experience [10] as well as communication between lovers [12] and the potential for flavor-based memory cues has been suggested. Such cues could support narrative and temporal experiences with food [11] curated around personally meaningful memories [10,12].…”

“…Participants first freely recalled each of the 6 memories in as much detail as possible and were prompted further by three questions to capture associated feelings, social context, and event's place and time. Before the co-design of cues for each memory, participants were given samples of 3D printed food similar to the method described in [10], one for each of the 5 basic tastes (sweet, bitter, salty, sour and umami) in order to familiarize participants with them as benchmarks in the co-design process. These small samples were solutions of sugar, coffee, salt, lemon juice and miso paste to represent each basic taste respectively.…”

Sensory Probes: An Exploratory Design Research Method for Human-Food Interaction

“…This work has used technology to improve the experience of eating food through systems that promote healthier eating [5,26,31,38], those employing augmenting sensory experience to improve liking of flavors [34,37] to those supporting social interactions around dining [35,64]. Other strands of work have focused on using food to create new experiences and practices, [20][21][22]29], supporting play [44,61], communicate data [33,49], or explore scientific concepts through embodied experience [15,36]. Despite its breadth, [24], most such work has employed traditional research and design methods, with limited effort towards novel exploratory design research methods tailored to the unique qualities of food as resource for design.…”