Curious Cuisine : Bringing culinary creativity home

Abstract: How could culinary science and technology educate us about food through engagement and reflection? In this project, I proposed to uncover opportunities for design intervention within our near-future scenarios of cooking and eating in a home environment. My intent has been to use interaction design methodology to form social practices that turn the process of making and eating food more pleasurable and inspiring, while developing one’s individual knowledge, without being didactic and prescriptive. The hypothesis has been that culinary science simplified, combined with today’s data-driven technologies, have the potential to foster creativity and experimentation among hobby cooks. The aim has been to discover the consequences of cloud data and connected technologies on experimentation, which is inherently driven by human intuition. My approach has been to explore what behaviors such data-driven systems designed for eliciting creativity could possess, and what kind of inspiration the science of flavor could bring into everyday cooking. The result is a set of design principles for how creative cooking explorations can be fostered through tangible and embodied experiences. It is manifested in a concept that creates a ‘culinary safe zone’ by encouraging experimentation, presenting information on demand, but without overshadowing the cook’s intuition. The concept Curious Cuisine allows non-professional cooks to create their own unique dishes; to explore ingredient pairings, preparation techniques, and fine-tuning flavors.