This project was designed to enhance people’s understanding of food. To do this, we developed a context-aware system that would allow people to interact with each other through a system that exists primarily on mobile and portable devices and passes relevant information when and where it is the most relevant. The system is not real time and, instead of being location based, it functions in spaces and times that are most relevant to the information being thrown around between users.

This project was designed and built in collaboration with Daniel Lara.

Research

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Some lettering specimens from the signage used at the farmer’s market

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The best form of promotion: delicious samples. (Works for the farmers. Works for the DJs).

The project that we have defined for ourselves is to develop a system that helps people learn about food. In the process, I have been learning a great deal about food myself. In order to research the value of knowing where food comes from, I joined a Community Supported Agriculture coop. The pictures below are of the first box received through the system. The box is ordered online and a drop-off location is selected at the time of purchase. Each drop-off location has a different day/time specific to that location. You do not get to choose what is in the box. Each box is (essentially) the same for that week.

What was interesting about this endeavor is how much produce the box contained that I would have never bought on my own. Once I had the box, it was very exciting to look up each new food item and find ways in which these new vegetables and greens could be used in cooking.

This lead us to start thinking about ways in which we could interrupt people’s normal progression with new ideas of things for them to cook with and eat.

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Distance Display

This idea of the distance a food has traveled is good but we’ve quickly realized that knowing this once you are in the kitchen is not very valuable since you’ve already bought it and brought it home. It needs to happen earlier in the process, before a purchase has been made.

Farm Coop with Dynamic Recipe Options

The idea here is that initial pink block knows what is in your bag from the farm coop. Once placed on the counter, recipes would be displayed and filtered based on what items from the bag are selected by placing them near the block.

We liked this idea of a system in which recipes are presented based on what you have available. However, as evidenced by my small apartment counter top, counter space is incredibly valuable during cooking. Updated displays need to exist as a different model that remains flexible and reactive to the cooking process.

This is a series of gesture and networking possibilities that we are exploring with some object forms that we discovered on a research trip. We were engaged by these 12 identical pieces and curious as to what inspiration we could draw from their form. What opportunities are presented when holding, stacking, resting or combining many objects with this form?

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The Informed Kitchen (a useless prototype)

This project looks at how unhelpful a great deal of information will be when associated with mundane objects as corporations look to infuse every act with a chance for communication. Consider this inline with the today’s quality of search results and data aggregation. If unchecked or under-considered by designers, it is easy to imagine how our world will continue to present us with information that is of little or no value.

Daniel Lara and I decided to pair our projects together in order to explore how the ridiculous could become even more so. By taping into my sensor data, his system could know what he was touching. By accessing his sensors, I used the information from a person in the space to determine scale and audio volume of the videos so that closer meant larger and louder.

This exploration that I’ve created for the New Ecology of Things (NET) looks at ways in which normal use and gesture can become interface. The parameters of the project are to create a useless network that pokes fun at the idea of the information cloud in some clever or interesting way. This is not that project. This is simply my initial technical sketch to get my wiring correct so that it properly senses the individual touching of multiple objects.

The audio loops being controlled in this demo are some results from my bent keyboard experiment.

The earlier, fruitless version of my sensing setup: