Background

“Play is the space within which we experience the world above and beyond utility” [17]. Food invites play: play with flavours, textures and appearance; play as part of the preparation, delivery and presentation; play as part of the act of eating and drinking; and more. Thus, the consumption of food is far more than a utilitarian act—food nourishes the soul as much as it feeds the body.

Conversely, the consumption of food and drink is bound and regulated by social and cultural norms [19] which at times are in conflict with the notions of play [6]. This is starkly exemplified by the old exhortation to children not to play with their food [12], so as not to waste precious food or time. Thus, outside of the playful flair exhibited by cooks, hosts, and waiters, or where it has become part of tradition (e.g. hiding the Afikoman during a Passover dinner [18]), playing with food has traditionally been constrained to the (hidden) margins where boundaries are broken, such as the feeding of small children [14] (e.g. “here comes the aeroplane”) and parties.

This inherent tension between play and cultural norms in the consumption of food provides a lens through which we can explore the interaction between humans and artefacts (be they the product of technology or not) as well as address the health and nutrition challenges associated with the consumption of food.

In particular, in this workshop we will focus on children’s eating practices, where parents face the intertwined challenges of: getting their children to eat at meal times; engaging them with a variety of foods so that they learn to enjoy and appreciate their properties and values; conveying to them the complex set of social norms and cultural traditions that surround the dinner table.

The rituals surrounding the consumption of food [19], the role of food in popular culture [15] and the nature and culture of play [6,10] have long been the subject of study. However, as playing with food has long been a taboo, its study has also been shunned. For the same reason, few elements have been specifically designed to support playing with food. The few examples that exist are limited to: cutlery for the feeding of children; moulds and cutters that shape food in playful ways; and toys that either dispense candy, such as the PEZ dispenser, or are encapsulated in candy like the kinder egg, thus reflecting the marginal nature of the activity.

The advent of digital technology has not bypassed the preparation and consumption of food and has led to the rise of research in Human Food Interaction (HFI) [2,11] and to novel explorations of playing with food and augmenting dining experiences (e.g. [4,5,8,13]). Despite the great diversity and innovation exhibited in these various approaches and applications the majority do not utilize food itself as an element of play [4]. More importantly, those that do, do so in the established paths of the culinary arts and game design, in which the cook continues to play with the flavour, texture and presentation of the food albeit with the addition of digital technology and the game designer starts using real apples, straws and chocolates but continues to relate to them as symbolic tokens instead of making use of their inherent potential for play [4].

We believe that much remains hidden in the myriad of playful personal habits, family practices and cultural traditions that have remained largely unexplored. Furthermore, we believe these insights hold a large and untapped potential for the design and development of new forms of culinary experiences, as well as compelling interventions geared towards addressing the feeding, nutrition and other challenges faced by children and adults. In this workshop we aim to uncover that potential, exploring how culturally grounded play-food can inform the future of Human-Food Interaction design.

Aim and methodology

Our aim is to explore the personal and cultural practices and traditions surrounding the preparation and consumption of food as a means of unravelling the untapped play potential of various cooking and dining practices. The workshop we are proposing is part of a series of initiatives that explore this space. We began exploring the playful personal and cultural practices and traditions surrounding the preparation and consumption of food at a workshop we conducted at the 2019 Human Computer Interaction in Play (CHIPlay) Conference [1]. We invited interaction and play designers to share examples of playful food traditions from their own cultural backgrounds, which we then played with and analyzed to uncover their “play potentials”, i.e. “existing playful dynamics that are already meaningful in context” and thus can be used “as a starting point for designing for situated and emergent playful engagement” [3]. We have since conducted two additional workshops, one at the 2019 Animal Computer Interaction Conference (ACI) [7], in which we sought examples from researchers working with non-human animals, and another in the 2019 International Food Design and Food Studies Conference (EFOOD) [9] where we explored the intersection between play, food, and culture with chefs and food designers. Though they brought together different types of stakeholders with different perspectives and professional interests, all those workshops involved, and focused on, adults. Here we propose to turn to children and their natural inclination to play to expand the palette of play experiences and sensitivities embraced by our research.

Our aim in this workshop is twofold: First, we want to further advance our methodological inquiry of how the notion of chasing play potentials [3] in culture and traditions can serve as a source of inspiration for playful technology design. Here, in particular, we will focus on how children’s natural affinity to play can be leveraged in co-design explorations such as FUBI [16] aimed at chasing play potentials in foods and food related practices. Second, by analyzing and playing with playful food traditions provided by the participants from their own lived experiences, we intend to expand the repository of play-food potentials that we initiated at CHI Play ’19 and EFOOD ‘19, in this case with a focus on children-oriented play forms. To respond to those aims, in this workshop we will unpack and make designerly use of cultural manifestations of play to inspire technology design.

Over the course of a day, we will use diverse hands-on co-creative activities to share and analyse playful, culturally situated food traditions, and creatively experiment with edible and inedible materials to create novel and interesting play-food experiences. We will identify strategies to reflect on the socio-cultural and ethical implications of making design use of cultural play, e.g. how to ensure cultural sensitivity and ownership, and how to avoid over-simplification, stigma and stereotype. We will explore mechanisms through which ideas can be vetted by people from the culture of inspiration and promote discussion of how to avoid distortions in culturally-grounded play design. We will also discuss the ways in which children can be involved in, and even lead, activities aimed at chasing play.

We believe the workshop will be of interest to any scholar interested in designing situated games, play, and playful interventions, regardless of experience with or specific interest in food-related research. Given IDC long-standing commitment to play, games, and design for children we see it as the ideal venue for the continuation of this exploration.

References

[1] Ferran Altarriba Bertran, Jared Duval, Katherine Isbister, Danielle Wilde, Elena Márquez Segura, Oscar Garcia Pañella, and Laia Badal León. 2019. Chasing Play Potentials in Food Culture to Inspire Technology Design. In Extended Abstracts of the Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play (CHI PLAY ’19). ACM, 829–834. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/3341215.3349586

[2] Ferran Altarriba Bertran, Samvid Jhaveri, Rosa Lutz, Katherine Isbister and Danielle Wilde. 2019. Making Sense of Human-Food Interaction. In Proceedings of ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI’19). ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/3290605.3300908

[3] Ferran Altarriba Bertran, Elena Márquez Segura, Jared Duval, and Katherine Isbister. 2019. Chasing Play Potentials: Towards an IncreasinglySituated and Emergent Approach to Everyday Play Design. In Proceedings of the 2019 on Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS ’19). ACM. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3322276.3322325

[4] Ferran Altarriba Bertran, Danielle Wilde, Ernő Berezvay and Katherine Isbister. 2019. Playful Human-Food Interaction Research: State of the Art and Future Directions. In Proceedings of the 2019 Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play (CHI Play ’19. ACM. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3322276.3322325

[5] Ferran Altarriba Bertran and Danielle Wilde. 2018. Playing with food: reconfiguring the gastronomic experience through play. In Experiencing Food, Designing Dialogues: Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Food Design and Food Studies (EFOOD 2017). CRC Press.

[6] Roger Caillois. 2001. Man, play, and games. University of Illinois Press.

[7] Yoram Chisik and Anton Nijholt. 2019. Animals and the (Playable) City: A Critical Perspective. In Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Animal-Computer Interaction (ACI’19). ACM. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/3371049.3371068

[8] Yoram Chisik, Patricia Pons, and Javier Jaen. 2018. Gastronomy Meets Ludology: Towards a Definition of What it Means to Play with Your (Digital) Food. In Proceedings of the 2018 Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play Companion Extended Abstracts (CHI PLAY ’18 Extended Abstracts). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 155–168. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/3270316.3272056

[9] Experiencing Food. 2019. 2nd International Food Design and Food Studies Conference. http://efood.fa.ulisboa.pt

[10] Johan Huizinga. 1955. Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture. Beacon.

[11] Rohit Ashok Khot and Florian ‘Floyd’ Mueller (2019), “Human- Food Interaction”, Foundations and Trends in Human-Computer Interaction: Vol. 12, No. 4, pp 238–415. DOI: 10.1561/1100000074.

[12] Jay Mechling. 2000. Don’t Play with Your Food. Children’s Folklore Review 23(1), 7-24. American Folklore Scoiety.

[13] Florian “Floyd” Mueller, Tuomas Kari, Rohit Khot, Zhuying Li, Yan Wang, Yash Mehta, and Peter Arnold. 2018. Towards Experiencing Eating as a Form of Play. In Proceedings of the 2018 Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play Companion Extended Abstracts (CHI PLAY ’18 Extended Abstracts), 559–567. ACM. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/3270316.3271528

[14] Joan K. Orrell-Valente, Laura G. Hill, Whitney A. Brechwald, Kenneth A. Dodge, Gregory S. Pettit, John E. Bates. 2007. “Just three more bites”: An observational analysis of parents’ socialization of children’s eating at mealtime. Appetite, 48(1), 37-45.

[15] Fabio Parasecoli, Peter Scholliers, Eds. 2015. A Cultural History of Food, Vols. 1-6. Bloomsbury Academic.

[16] Marie-Monique Schaper, Ole Sejer Iversen, Laura Malinverni, Narcis Pares. 2019. FUBImethod: Strategies to engage children in the co-design of Full-Body interactive experiences. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, Vol.132, pp. 52-69.

[17] John Sharp and David Thomas. 2019. Fun, Taste, & Games: An Aesthetics of the Idle, Unproductive, and Otherwise Playful. MIT Press.

[18] Sharon R. Sherman. 1988. The Passover Seder: Ritual Dynamics, Foodways and Family Folklore. In Theodore C. Humphrey, Lin T. Humphrey (Editors). We Gather Together Food and Festival in American Life. USU Press.

[19] Margaret Visser 1991. The Rituals of Dinner. Pennsylvania State University