An Exploration of Taste–Emotion Mappings from the Perspective of Food Design Practitioners

This paper explores taste-emotion mappings and how they may inform the design of user experience in HCI. We report interviews with 7 food industry professionals and discuss the findings against laboratory-based psychology studies. While the sweet-positive affect and bitter-negative affect mappings were confirmed, those for sour, salty and umami tastes were challenged. Our outcomes highlight a more nuanced understanding of taste-emotion mappings, the influence of taste intensity and the importance of narrative and temporality when designing taste experience in naturalistic settings

Taste Your Emotions:An Exploration of the Relationship between Taste and Emotional Experience for HCI

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 in real-life scenarios 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 scenarios: product rating, sports match results, experiential vignettes, and website usability, to explore the understanding of emotional meaning through tastes, as well as the use of tastes to express emotions. Our findings extend previous emotion mappings for sweet and bitter tastes to real-life 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

Exploring and designing for multisensory interactions with 3D printed food

Experience of food is as varied as it is widespread, part of mundane activities but also embedded in rituals and celebrations. Despite its pervasive richness it has yet to be fully exploited to support embodied and multisensory experiences within Human-Computer Interaction. This thesis addresses this shortcoming, drawing on the unique qualities of food experience in combination with novel technology to design rich, affective, and embodied interactions through food. This work approaches 3D printed food as a material to design emotion- and memory-based experiences with food, and 3D printing of food as a technology for crafting multisensory user experiences in everyday contexts. These perspectives are integrated through the design and evaluation of novel interactions with 3D printed food, following a Research through Design approach combined with material approaches. Through this enquiry, novel research tools for HCI were also created for working with food, flavour, and taste. The thesis comprises seven studies that advance knowledge, based on gaps identified, and novel theoretical framings in a systematic literature review. Through a survey of user perceptions of 3D printed food, opportunities for user experience-based applications were highlighted. An identified opportunity for affective interactions through taste was considered through lab-based studies and interviews with chefs and food designers on using 3D printed food. This was extended through a co-design study with couples in romantic relationships to create flavours of 3D printed food to support emotional expression and coregulation. The use of flavours to cue experience was then explored in relation to self-defining memories with older adults. Through both co-design studies, a multisensory probe kit was built and evaluated to support designing with the senses in HCI and to further explore ideas from the study into food and memory and an app prototype designed for creating personalised flavour-based memory cues. Collectively, these studies support applications of the 3D printing of food for emotional and memory-based applications in HCI, as well as theoretical and methodological contributions to multisensory design and design with food and the body in HCI

Combining typeface and color to prime specific taste expectations

The effects of color and typeface on people’s taste expectations have been well documented in the literature on crossmodal correspondences. However, research on the interaction between different visual features when they are collectively associated with specific taste qualities is scarce. Here, an online study is presented that examines the combined effect of color and typeface by simultaneously manipulating the color scheme and font curvilinearity of text stimuli. The findings confirm the main effects of color hue and typeface curvilinearity in terms of modulating the strength of association with the four basic taste qualities (sweet, sour, salty, and bitter). The results revealed that the congruent pairings of color hue and typeface curvilinearity induced stronger taste associations. In particular, the combinations of congruent visual text properties further modified the strength of taste association with sweet (p < .005), sour (p < .0001), bitter (p < .001), and with a borderline-significant effect in the case of salty (p = .054). There was no effect of typeface curvilinearity on sour ratings when the text stimuli were presented in colors that had previously been documented to associate with sourness. Overall, the effects of color and typeface on taste expectations induced by text stimuli follow the documented patterns of hue–taste and curvilinearity–taste correspondences. Although both color and typeface exerted a significant effect on taste expectations, the evidence presented here suggests that the color scheme tends to dominate over typeface curvilinearity when determining the taste quality that people associate with a given text stimulus

Interoceptive awareness:Metaphorical mapping & bodily experiences for insourcing tuning

The growing HCI interest in the role of the body and bodily experiences in design has led to new interactive technologies or design methods harnessing them. Despite this interest, interoceptive awareness has been limitedly explored in HCI research. This paper offers a reflection on technologies and design methods supporting interoceptive awareness that I have explored and designed with my research group, with a focus on how these may support insourcing tuning

Emotions in HCI:Future Research Agenda

The significant HCI interest in emotions is reflected in a breath of technologies and design approaches. This paper offers a brief overview of my HCI work on emotions, with a reflection on the outstanding challenges that future HCI agenda in this space should focus on. The latter emphases the need for stronger theoretical framing of emotions for interaction design, multisensory interaction for capturing and representing emotions, richer set of wearable bio sensors and actuators, operationalization of emotion regulation theories, and increased sensitivity towards the ethics of working with emotions as a resource for design

Towards inclusive multisensory embodied experiences for affective and cognitive health

This paper presents a brief overview of my work on disability focusing on affective and cognitive health for embodied and multisensory interactions. This body of work is used to reflect on how senses can be better leveraged to empower the changes experienced by the dynamic self, and to open up conversations on how to design for inclusive interoceptive interactions

Tip of my Tongue:Eating for Cognition

Our position takes food as a material for interaction design, examining how we eat shapes the way we think and perceive the world around us. Starting from the connections between odor and memory, and between tastes and judgement we describe the potential for food to support novel interactions. Our proposal uses food produced by 3D printing to explore how it can perform the role of memory cue or shape perceptions within interactive experiences. Towards this goal we discuss methods that support designing with the personal nature of the connections between specific odors and memories. In concluding our position, we reflect on questions that arise from taking a holistic perspective on designing for bodily experience and outline some directions in which this proposal should be developed

The taste & affect music database: Subjective rating norms for a new set of musical stimuli

Music is a ubiquitous stimulus known to influence human affect, cognition, and behavior. In the context of eating behavior, music has been associated with food choice, intake and, more recently, taste perception. In the latter case, the literature has reported consistent patterns of association between auditory and gustatory attributes, suggesting that individuals reliably recognize taste attributes in musical stimuli. This study presents subjective norms for a new set of 100 instrumental music stimuli, including basic taste correspondences (sweetness, bitterness, saltiness, sourness), emotions (joy, anger, sadness, fear, surprise), familiarity, valence, and arousal. This stimulus set was evaluated by 329 individuals (83.3% women; Mage = 28.12, SD = 12.14), online (n = 246) and in the lab (n = 83). Each participant evaluated a random subsample of 25 soundtracks and responded to self-report measures of mood and taste preferences, as well as the Goldsmiths Musical Sophistication Index (Gold-MSI). Each soundtrack was evaluated by 68 to 97 participants (Mdn = 83), and descriptive results (means, standard deviations, and confidence intervals) are available as supplemental material at osf.io/2cqa5. Significant correlations between taste correspondences and emotional/affective dimensions were observed (e.g., between sweetness ratings and pleasant emotions). Sex, age, musical sophistication, and basic taste preferences presented few, small to medium associations with the evaluations of the stimuli. Overall, these results suggest that the new Taste & Affect Music Database is a relevant resource for research and intervention with musical stimuli in the context of crossmodal taste perception and other affective, cognitive, and behavioral domains.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio