HCI & Sustainable Food Culture: A Design Framework for Engagement by Eli Blevis Jaz & Hee-jeong Choi

HCI & Sustainable Food Culture:A Design Framework for Engagement

Mert Kulaksız11.03.2014

Where Goes The DailyID 501 Advanced Project Development in Industrial DesignMiddle East Technical University, Department of Industrial Design

Eli BlevisJaz Hee-jeong Choi

Introduction

“Urban / suburban / and peri-urban environments are particularly problematic in their segregation from rural areas where the natural food sources are grown and harvested.”

“The current food practices around the worldraises concerns for food insecurity in the future.”

“Engagement”

“… HCI researchers to create actionable knowledge through identifying, testing, and building on technical opportunities that can be augmented and realized to cultivate urban food cultures that are environmentally, socially, and health-wise sustainable.”

HOW?

“…people living in urban … increasingly see food as objects of consumption or the ‘final products’ to be consumed.”

Problem Definition

HCI & Sustainable Food Culture: A Design Framework for Engagement Eli BlevisJaz, Hee-jeong Choi

•” Engagement across disciplines: The perspective of transdisciplinarity – transcending disciplinarity and values orientation”

•” Engagement with and amongst users/non-users: The domain of urban informatics at the intersection of people, place, and technology – participatory, context-aware, and interactive networks”

• “Engagement for sustained usability: The perspective of design – design criticism and critical design”

Introduction “How to”, Suggest Solutions


TRANSDISCIPLINARITY:TRANSCENDING DISCIPLINARITY & VALUES ORIENTATION

Transdisciplinarity is not a method, but a principle or approach that seeks to create new overarching knowledge through integrative research

“…transdisciplinarity allows the researcher to flexibly yet rigorously explore and integrate research methods from various disciplines to result in coherent knowledge rather than united knowledge across disciplines”

“…sustainable HCI has been growing as a unique—nevertheless broad—domain of study in recent years. However, despite the complexity of what constitutes the notion of sustainability, the majority of studies remain within specific disciplines…”


TRANSDISCIPLINARITY:TRANSCENDING DISCIPLINARITY & VALUES ORIENTATION

“…diversity of role that food plays in everyday life and its impact that is also diverse in type and scale…”

…designing HCI for urban food sustainability thus must seek ways to utilize ubiquitous technology’s flexibility in scale of application (for example, on the continuum of individual / collective, private / public, and local / global) to improve the health, social, and environmental bottom-lines of everyday human-food interaction at the intersection of people, place, and technology.”

Transdisciplinarity for food sustainability research is an essential perspective as it provides dialogic knowledge development that can tackle real life problems that are inherently multi-faceted.


THE DOMAIN OF INTEREST OF PEOPLE: PARTICIPATORY CULTURE

… usable and efficient human-computer interaction (HCI) design to bring about changes needs to be innately supportive and persuasive in guiding user’s actions rather than exerting control and leverage.

The users transform the virtual ‘space’ into ‘places’ by embedding values and meanings through social interaction

The question for HCI designers is to find efficient and engaging ways to utilize technical resources to allow for collaborative information sharing, knowledge production, and user-led innovation.


Slow Food International

a non-profit group focusing on preservation of the cultural, culinary, and artistic local traditions


THE DOMAIN OF INTEREST OF PLACES: CONTEXT AWARENESS & CONTEXT SPECIALISATION

“as evident in food culture today, simply providing people with environmental data and educational information in now all-too-familiar places—via mass media such as print and TV, or micro-communications such as sensor networks—does not necessarily trigger sufficient motivation for behavioral change towards an ongoing health- and earth-friendly lifestyle.”

“Instead, it is necessary to develop a better understanding about how to go beyond just informing and into motivating and encouraging positive changes in action and perception.”

“As such, innovations in understanding of what makes technology persuasive and motivational.”

“…we can find additional and perhaps more effective benefit in ubiquitous technology’s capacity to streamline the vigorous management process particularly through real-time context awareness.”



“The contexts of food culture vary widely from one place to another. Just as each continent and country may have its own values and practices associated with food, each place however small it may be.”

“Therefore, the opportunities that network technology imparts for cultivating sustainable urban food culture is essentially two-fold:

first, assistance in understanding and navigating through the food-layer of the given place;

second, encouraging sustainable food practices, which in turn shapes the city.”

Building a food culture toward a more sustainable future is thus an iterative and evolutionary process involving interactions amongst people, place, and technology.



SourceMap a system that promotes geospatial context awareness in the domain of food.

THE DOMAIN OF INTEREST OF TECHNOLOGY: NETWORKS & INTERACTIVITY

(i) Food production and source tracking: As an issue of both sustainable supply and food safety, interactive systems can allow various groups of people to adapt to changing suitability of particular regions for growing particular crops and other forms of food production.

(ii) Dashboard earth: As an issue of preparation and adaptation to changing climate, interactive systems can help ensure planning and preparation for how people in urban environments can respond to changes in food and water supplies and even to threats to the inhabitability of—particularly—coastal urban and other environments.iii) Orderly absorption: Urban environments are in some sense dynamically changing places—interactive systems can offer infrastructural support that allows urban policy makers to provide for the orderly immigration to or emigration from urban environments in the face of the effects of climate change.

(iv) Living with fewer resources: Interactive systems can assist people in urban and other environments with understanding and practicing how to live with fewer resources, either as a matter of sustainable practices or as a matter of adapting to climate change or both.

(v) Saving life: Social mechanisms—especially those that rely on interactive technologies—can play a role in fostering relationships between people at various levels of organization in order to ensure that as many people as possible have access to safe environments, with food and drinking water and that people are actively engaged in helping others.


Perceptively, technologies provide useful ways to help cultivate sustainable food culture from the individual to the global level.

However, we must at the same time remember that network technologies are part of the broader contemporary influences shaping the ecology.

‘performing two Google searches from a desktop computer can generate about the same amount of carbon dioxide as boiling a kettle" or about 7g of CO2 per search’ Alexander Wissner-Gross

This ‘statistic’ may in fact be controversial at best – nonetheless, the point that not even Google searches are without environmental impact holds.

design criticism and critical design as complimentary activities that are necessary companions in design processes

THE PERSPECTIVE OF DESIGN: DESIGN CRITICISM & CRITICAL DESIGN


“…the design needs to ensure participation of users in perpetual recreation of the technology and must also incorporate anticipation for the technology’s socio-cultural, health, and environmental impact.”


Design Criticism Critical Design“to understand and interpret

present ways of being”“to ensure that our actions lead to sustainable future ways of being.”

strategic tactical

mutual dependent



“(i) look for and apply design criticism to various forms of the design of ubiquitous technologies for sustainable food culture that we may uncover by observation or from secondary sources”

“(ii) suggest the design of new forms of interactivity that inspire sustainable food practices—while still preserving the joy of urban experiences.”

With the help of this bi-valent approach, aim is to:


Discussion Points

What kind of tool can be provider for designers who are working for positive behavior change to

make them sure that what they are changing is right?

Creating a society dependent on motivation which is designed sounds fragile. It sounds when the

stimuli is gone, everything will be returned to its initial position. How can we create motivations

aimed for self-dependent individuals and accordingly society. Should we even try for that?

How can we take the advantage of real-time-context awareness side of ubiquitous technology

while keeping on the mind the issue of not being so much manipulative?

How much we can integrate taken-for-granted effects of digitalized technology in terms of

carbon footprint( not only during production of it but also the usage)?

Thanks for Listening

HCI & Sustainable Food Culture: A Design Framework for Engagement by Eli Blevis Jaz & Hee-jeong Choi

Design

design framework

food plays

food insecurity

urban food sustainability

engagement eli blevisjaz

disciplines sustainable

engagement hci researchers

urban food cultures