Eva Ganglbauer

Negotiating food waste: Using a practice lens to inform design

Ecological sustainability is becoming of increasing concern to the HCI community, though little focus has been given yet to issues around food waste. Given the environmental impact of food waste, there is potential to make a significant difference. To understand everyday domestic practices around food and waste, we took a “practice” lens and carried out a study in 14 households that involved interviews, in-home tours and, in five of the households, a FridgeCam technology probe. The analysis highlights that food waste is the unintended result of multiple moments of consumption dispersed in space and time across other integrated practices such as shopping and cooking, which are themselves embedded in broader contextual factors and values. We highlight the importance of respecting the complex negotiations that people make within given structural conditions and competing values and practices, and suggest design strategies to support dispersed as well as integrated food practices, rather than focusing on waste itself.

Think globally, act locally: a case study of a free food sharing community and social networking

Social networking has a long history of supporting communities online. In this paper we are concerned with a specific community that has formed around free food sharing to save food from being wasted. Specifically, Foodsharing.de is a platform that enables consumers, farmers, organizations and retailers to offer and collect food. Associated with this is the Foodsharing Facebook group where broader community discussions take place. We report on a qualitative analysis of the Foodsharing Facebook group to understand its role in emerging and sustaining the community. The Facebook group is a place where the individual values and motives, socio-political discussions and mass media interrelate and create new social patterns through narratives and local community building. We present our findings as interplay between individual, community, organisational levels, public relations and media, the operational platform Foodsharing.de that enables local communities and the Facebook group where global ideological framing of the community takes place.

Food and interaction design: designing for food in everyday life

Food and interaction design presents an interesting challenge to the HCI community in attending to the pervasive nature of food, the socio-cultural differences in food practices and a changing global foodscape. To design for meaningful and positive interactions it is essential to identify daily food practices and the opportunities for the design of technology to support such practices. This workshop brings together a community of researchers and practitioners in human-food interaction to attend to the practical and theoretical difficulties in designing for human-food interactions in everyday life. Through a practical field study and workshop we explore themes of food experiences, health and wellbeing, sustainability and alternative food cultures.

Creating visibility: understanding the design space for food waste

Support for ecological sustainability is of growing interest and the over-consumption, production and disposal of foods are a major concern for sustainability, ethics and the economy. However, there is a deficit in current understandings of how technologies could be used within this area. In this paper we focus on food waste and report on a qualitative study to understand daily food practices around shopping planning, gardening, storing, cooking and throwing away food, and their relations to waste. The findings point to design-relevant factors such as losing sight and reordering; spatial, temporal and social constraints; trust and valuing food source; and busyness, unpredictability and effort. The main contribution of this paper is to understand food practices and in turn to present seven dimensions of visibility to draw out implications for designing mobile and ubiquitous technologies for this new arena for design. We also present a prototype evolving from our qualitative results, the mobile food waste diary.

Why and what did we throw out?: Probing on Reflection through the Food Waste Diary

Issues of consumer food waste in industrialised countries are becoming an increasing concern and this is paralleled by a growing interest in HCI to support more sustainable consumption practices. In this paper we report on a mobile food waste diary application that was made available on app stores, with the aim of enabling motivated people to reflect on their moments of food waste and to explore rationales. Through analysis of the entries submitted by users of the diary application, we identify instances of reflection located on different levels. The intention of supporting reflection was visible in instances of submitted diary entries where deeper in- sights about the relationships between food waste, previous experiences, habits, knowledge, occurrences and intentions to change were offered.

An activist lens for sustainability: from changing individuals to changing the environment

Design for sustainability is of much interest in Persuasive Technology (PT) and interventions are often targeted to change individuals behaviour. These interventions aim to change lifestyles to be more ecologically sustainable, however the social and economic circumstances individuals live in often counteract these intentions. Activism has been proposed as a way to address such social circumstances. The contribution of this paper is to further develop an activist lens to present strategies for interventions that address policy makers as well as provide insight into how individuals can engage in activism supported by technology to advance change. Our activist lens points to active data generation and perceived agency by individuals and hybrid forms of interventions. We also address the limitations of technology in such approaches. An activist lens on sustainability and PT might provide a useful new entry point for designing change interventions from the individual to the collective.

Green food technology: UbiComp opportunities for reducing the environmental impacts of food

Everyday food and drink consumption makes up a significant proportion of global greenhouse gas emissions (16% of the total footprint for an average UK person [3]). Digital technology offers much scope for helping to reduce this---promoting reflection, increasing transparency of product and supply chain impacts, and so on---but the greatest impacts are predicated on a deep understanding of the configuration of everyday practices. This presents an interesting challenge for Ubicomp, stemming from the deep social and cultural influences on what people purchase, eat and throw away. This workshop brings together participants from a diverse range of disciplines to develop an understanding of existing food consumption practices, and reflect on how this domain can profit from novel Ubicomp technology and interaction designs.

Interaction Beyond the Desktop für Reflektion und Persuasion

Zusammenfassung,,Interaction Beyond the Desktop (BtD)“ ist einer der Forschungsschwerpunkte der Arbeitsgruppe für HCI an der TU Wien. BtD Technologien haben großes Potenzial im Bereich der IKT gestützten Reflexion und Persuasion, da sie sowohl die Erfassung relevanter Informationen, als auch deren Darstellung in Alltagssituationen ermöglichen. Anhand der Beispiele FridgeCam, Choreflect und des TV-Companion wird der Einsatz solcher Technologien zur Reflexion und Verhaltensänderung in verschiedenen Anwendungskontexten dargestellt und diskutiert.

Towards food waste interventions: an exploratory approach

Sustainability is a significant topic in HCI and often framed in terms of energy consumption or sustainable food consumption. However, the sustainable issue of wasted food by consumers is a design arena yet to receive more attention. To understand how the passage from food into waste occurs in everyday life, and if, how and where technology can intervene, fieldwork in 17 households has been carried out. The fieldwork and its implications afford inspirations and reveal stimuli where and how technology could potentially intervene. Selected stimuli are explored with two technology probes and a community platform to inform design.