LeviSense: a platform for the multisensory integration in levitating food and insights into its effect on flavour perception

Eating is one of the most multisensory experiences in everyday life. All of our five senses (i.e. taste, smell, vision, hearing and touch) are involved, even if we are not aware of it. However, while multisensory integration has been well studied in psychology, there is not a single platform for testing systematically the effects of different stimuli. This lack of platform results in unresolved design challenges for the design of taste-based immersive experiences. Here, we present LeviSense: the first system designed for multisensory integration in gustatory experiences based on levitated food. Our system enables the systematic exploration of different sensory effects on eating experiences. It also opens up new opportunities for other professionals (e.g., molecular gastronomy chefs) looking for innovative taste-delivery platforms. We describe the design process behind LeviSense and conduct two experiments to test a subset of the crossmodal combinations (i.e., taste and vision, taste and smell). Our results show how different lighting and smell conditions affect the perceived taste intensity, pleasantness, and satisfaction. We discuss how LeviSense creates a new technical, creative, and expressive possibilities in a series of emerging design spaces within Human-Food Interaction

Facilitating Mobile Music Sharing and Social Interaction with Push!Music

Push!Music is a novel mobile music listening and sharing system, where users automatically receive songs that have autonomously recommended themselves from nearby players depending on similar listening behaviour and music history. Push!Music also enables users to wirelessly send songs between each other as personal recommendations. We conducted a two-week preliminary user study of Push!Music, where a group of five friends used the application in their everyday life. We learned for example that the shared music in Push!Music became a start for social interaction and that received songs in general were highly appreciated and could be looked upon as ‘treats’

Before the consummation what? On the role of the semiotic economy of seduction

The cultural practice of flirtation has been multifariously scrutinized in various disciplines including sociology, psychology, psychoanalysis and literary studies. This paper frames the field of flirtation in Bourdieuian terms, while focusing narrowly on the semiotic economy that is defining of this cultural field. Moreover, seduction, as a uniquely varied form of discourse that is responsible for producing the cultural field of flirtation, is posited as the missing link for understanding why flirtation may be a peculiar case of non-habitus, contrary to the received notion of cultural field as set of goaloriented practices and actionable habituses. This argument is pursued by highlighting the endemic traits of ambivalence and constant reversibility of signs or multimodal semiotic constellations in the discourse of seduction, while seeking to demonstrate that seduction, and by implication the cultural field of flirtation, does not necessarily partake of a teleological framework that is geared towards the consummation of sexual desire. This thesis is illustrated by recourse to a scene from the blockbuster ‘Hitch’

Inside out: men on the Home Front

This paper examines the representation of men as domestic experts in British lifestyle television programmes. It considers contemporary representations of the home, locating these in relation to changes in British primetime programming where a movement towards hybrid TV forms appears to rearticulate the mission to ‘inform, educate and entertain’ and to transform private matters into public spectacle. The paper examines the ways in which contemporary representations of the male domestic expert struggle to negotiate perceived boundaries between the ‘inside’ of private space and the ‘outside’ of the public sphere and between the categories of femininity and masculinity. It argues that in the homes and gardens series, Home Front, the figure of the designer provides a significant contemporary rearticulation of the male dandy, and aestheticism and camp become key strategies for the redefinition of the home and of masculinity as matters of lifestyle.</p

Transformative Expression

The hope that art could be personally or socially transformational is an important part of art history and contemporary art practice. In the twentieth century, it shaped a movement away from traditional media in an effort to make social life a medium. Artists imagined and created participatory situations designed to facilitate potentially transformative expression in those who engaged with the works. This chapter develops the concept of “transformative expression,” and illustrates how it informs a diverse range of such works. Understanding these artworks in this way raises two interesting questions, one about the nature of aesthetic value and the other about the nature of action. Answers to these questions lie in understanding the social and aesthetic character of our capacity to distance ourselves from our commitments and act in the expressive, playful, spontaneous, or imaginative ways that participatory art invites

Representing camp: Constructing macaroni masculinity in eighteenth century visual satire

This article asks how ‘Camp,’ as defined in Sontag’s 1964 essay, ‘Notes on Camp,’ might provide a valuable framework for the analysis of late eighteenth-century satirical prints, specifically those featuring images of the so-called ‘macaroni.’ Discussing a number of satirical prints and contemporary writings on the macaroni, the article reads them against Sontag’s text in order to establish its utility as a critical framework for understanding the images’ complex relationship of content, form, and function.Postdoctoral Research Fellowship, Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, University of Edinburg

Emergence and playfulness in social games

Social Games, built and played on social networks such as Facebook, have rapidly become a major force in the world of game development, and the top social games today claim more players than any other online game on any format. As social games begin to mature from their roots as simple playful social toys and into the products of big business, the patterns and mechanics used in the design have begun to be formalised. In this paper, it is argued that experimentation and playfulness is still a very important part of the play experience and a valuable source of fun. As game designs explore the space opened by the new genre of social games, it is vital for designers to leave “gaps” in the design to allow for playful and serendipitous experiences to emerge from the activities of the players. To support this argument, Caillois’ classification of play is used as a lens through which social games can be examined. Examples of paidic, playful and emergent play are presented from popular social and offline games, and a detailed case study of paidic play in a new social game is presented from the designer’s perspective. Interviews from participants to an open trial are discussed, and their experiences in creating their own playful experiences and goals within the formal structure of the social game design are explored

Exploring mischief and mayhem in social computing or: how we learned to stop worrying and love the trolls

In this paper, we explore the role of mischief as borderline socially acceptable behaviour within social computing applications. Mischievous activity pushes the boundaries of the implicit social contract present in all online social systems, and, we argue, is of vital importance understanding online social interactions. Using examples from games and other applications, we explore mischief as an act of appropriation, which reinterprets mechanics defined by developers in unexpected and sometimes upsetting ways. Although frequently interpreted as negative and anti-social behaviour, we argue that mischief serves a vital social role, and find surprising richness in the chaos