Gastronomy: A source of inspiration for UX design

MISSION ACCOMPLISHED!!

Today, I delivered my presentation at the EuroIA 2010 in Paris on the relation between my two passions: gastronomy and user experience design.

FoodUX served its purpose as a collection of background materials for the presentation. In future times, I will keep maintaining @CompCook as much as possible. So, keep tuning in once in a while.

“A crazy topic with a scary video clip of a positive eating experience”, I said in my impersonation as Lars Von Trier!

Food Design Weblog

16-32couple.png

The blog Food Design for the KNL Program supports the Food Design course at Industrial Design Department of Delft University (The Netherlands). The course is an experimental activity.

“Why Food Design? The underlying focus of the joint master program is cultural identity, that can be defined as a person’s self affiliation (or categorization by others) as a member of a cultural group. Since cultural identity is a very broad theme, we are proposing to focus more narrowly on cultural identity through food.

The course exploits food as a cross-cutting concern of all human societies in all times to stimulate the students to design from the micro to the macro scale in ways that are sensitive to cultural identity.”

The Best Meal You Have Ever Had

It’s always interesting to hear people’s stories of their most memorable dining experience(s). Which experiences shaped them for the rest of their lives? This Meal in Venice from 1978 by Rick and Teel Sale made them really, really happy. They’ll never forget. “Papa! Papa you did it! You made it!

It’s (still) a far cry from having this kind of UX. [via Jason Kottke]

Tim Brown on Designing The Dining XP

Tim Brown, of IDEO fame, posts a thought on an unique diner experience.

“We were finally taken into the chef’s office where a table had been laid for us to eat dinner. Instead of a stuffy stateroom we were deep in the private domain of the chef surrounded by his cookbooks, favorite wines, favorite music and the clutter of a large-scale culinary operation. What followed was a perfectly delivered meal where we chatted with the chef about the locally sourced food and how he cooked it as well as having great conversations amongst ourselves. Every piece of the experience felt like the chef and his staff designed it personally for us.”

Sounds unforgettable.

Visual Thinking and Cooking

VizThink community member and owner of Frog Commissary, Steve Poses is taking visual thinking and cookbooks to the next level. He has just launched the in development version of the companion website for his new book. (…) I can’t wait to see the results of these collaborations when the book and website launches in the spring. My kitchen is already warming up testing recipes! – sez the VizThink blog. – Link

The Usability of Mineral Water

This may seem like a ridiculous price-proposition. For € 1,50 you get half a liter of Spa Blue and for half the price you get three times that amount of water. (…) So here, ease of use is valued over content.