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 Kulaksız
11.03.2014
Where Goes The Daily
ID 501 Advanced Project Development in Industrial Design
Middle East Technical University, Department of Industrial Design
Eli Blevis
Jaz 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 world
raises 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)?

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

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