Rob Comber

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.

Designing beyond habit: opening space for improved recycling and food waste behaviors through processes of persuasion, social influence and aversive affect

Disposing of waste is a common part of our everyday life, yet we do not pay much attention to the process. For many it can be considered a habitual, unconscious process. Disposed goods and materials, however, do not simply disappear. This issue has been approached widely and in a variety of disciplines and arenas, including HCI. We add to this growing literature by considering recycling and food waste as habitual behavior and investigate the potential to design toward conscious reflection on waste disposal intentions and behaviors through social influence and aversive affect. That is, we aim to design beyond habitual performance of waste disposal behavior in two phases of (1) awareness raising and (2) supporting subsequent intentions for behavior change. We present results of a rich qualitative and explorative evaluation of the BinCam system, a two-part persuasive technology, which replaces an everyday waste bin with one enabled to capture and share images of disposed of waste on an online social network. Findings suggest that awareness raising leads to self-reflection and re-evaluation. The re-evaluation causes feelings of shame, where individuals perceive a disparity between their attitudes and their behaviors. Results also highlight the importance of a person’s perceived behavioral control (e.g., a person’s recycling competences or facilities) for enabling behavioral change and confirm the significance of providing “signal triggers” to individuals to remind them about performing the desirable behavior in its required context. Furthermore, as the present research extends its focus beyond the lone individual, it contributes to our understanding and study of social influence processes and group movements.

A pool of dreams: facebook, politics and the emergence of a social movement

In this paper we present insights from an empirical analysis of data from an emergent social movement primarily located on a Facebook page to contribute understanding of the conduct of everyday politics in social media and through this open up research agendas for HCI. The analysis focuses on how interactions and contributions facilitated the emergence of a collective with political will. We lay out an exploration of the intrinsic relationship between cultural memories, cultural expression and everyday politics and show how diverging voices co-constructed dynamic collectives capable of political action. We look at how interactions through the Facebook page challenge traditional ways for conceiving politics and the political. We outline possible research agendas in the field of everyday politics, which are sensitive to the everyday acts of resistance enclosed in the ordinary.

Temporal, affective, and embodied characteristics of taste experiences: a framework for design

We present rich descriptions of taste experience through an analysis of the diachronic and synchronic experiences of each of the five basic taste qualities: sweet, sour, salt, bitter, and umami. Our findings, based on a combination of user experience evaluation techniques highlight three main themes: temporality, affective reactions, and embodiment. We present the taste characteristics as a framework for design and discuss each taste in order to elucidate the design qualities of individual taste experiences. These findings add a semantic understanding of taste experiences, their temporality enhanced through descriptions of the affective reactions and embodiment that the five basic tastes elicit. These findings are discussed on the basis of established psychological and behavioral phenomena, highlighting the potential for taste-enhanced design.

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.

FeedFinder: A Location-Mapping Mobile Application for Breastfeeding Women

Breastfeeding is positively encouraged across many countries as a public health endeavour. The World Health Organisation recommends breastfeeding exclusively for the first six months of an infants life. However, women can struggle to breastfeed, and to persist with breastfeeding, for a number of reasons from technique to social acceptance. This paper reports on four phases of a design and research project, from sensitising user-engagement and user-centred design, to the development and in-the-wild deployment of a mobile phone application called FeedFinder. FeedFinder has been developed with breastfeeding women to support them in finding, reviewing and sharing public breastfeeding places with other breastfeeding women. We discuss how mobile technologies can be designed to support public health endeavours, and suggest that public health technologies are better aimed at communities and societies rather than individual.

Food practices as situated action: exploring and designing for everyday food practices with households

Household food practices are complex. Many people are unable to effectively respond to challenges in their food environment to maintain diets considered to be in line with national and international standards for healthy eating. We argue that recognizing food practices as situated action affords opportunities to identify and design for practiced, local and achievable solutions to such food problems. Interviews and shop-a-longs were carried as part of a contextual inquiry with ten households. From this, we identify food practices, such as fitting food, stocking up, food value transitions, and having fun with others and how these practices are enacted in different ways with varied outcomes. We explore how HCI might respond to these practices through issues of social fooding, the presence of others, conceptions about food practices and food routines.

Telematic dinner party: designing for togetherness through play and performance

There is an increasing desire to remain connected when physically distant and computer-mediated communication (CMC) is one means of satisfying this desire. In particular, there is a growing trend for individuals to use commercially available technology to connect with friends and family in social and leisure settings. Drawing on this trend, performative arts and existing telecommunications research, we identify the social practice of sharing a meal together as ripe for reinterpretation within CMC. We explore the opportunities to design a technology platform that supports remote guests in experiencing togetherness and playfulness within the practices of a traditional dinner party. Through both visual and aural channels as well as remote agency, the dinner guests were able to share a holistic telematic dining experience comparable to a traditional co-presence dinner. Based on the findings, we propose that one must consider the social structure and cultural background of users to inform the design of a technological intervention.

Contesting the City: Enacting the Political Through Digitally Supported Urban Walks

We present a method for the situated discovery and articulation of issues at the intersection between the politics of place making and city planning. We describe the construction and use of designed tools, such as historical political archives; counterfactual maps; and cards to invite situated dialogue between the social and institutional practices and mechanisms that produce our cities. Grounded in an account of the political as vernacular and embodied, our analysis advance understandings on the politics of design, and on the complex interrelationship between places and political spaces. We outline how HCI can adopt methods and develop sensitivities to support democratic practices and publics envisioning their urban futures.

Editorial: Designing for human-food interaction: An introduction to the special issue on 'food and interaction design'

With this special issue, we draw attention to the growing and diverse field of HCI researchers exploring the interstices of food, technology and everyday practices. This special issue builds on the CHI workshop of the same name (Comber et al., 2012a), where we brought together the community of researchers that take food as a point from which to understand people and design technology. The workshop aimed to ‘to attend to the practical and theoretical difficulties in designing for human–food interactions in everyday life’ identifying four thematic areas of food practices – health and wellbeing; sustainability; food experiences; and alternative food cultures. These practical and theoretical difficulties are evident in the papers that we present here, though the distinction between our four themes, premised by complexities of food practices, is a little less evident. Thus, in the papers that follow we explore how the social, technological, cultural and methodological intertwine in the field of human–food interaction.