This project focused on iteratively designing a novel food experiencing concept and probing it in-the-wild through walk, talk and eat tours.
The design process started with ideation with pen and paper, based on previously collected user insights and design directions. After finalizing the concept on paper in the ideation, I continued the design iterations through paper prototyping with clay and cardboard, and then moved on to 3D printing. I also developed an instruction manual along with the final version of the prototype to help complete the speculative probe.
With the final version, I deployed this model in real travel contexts and collected data from travelers in seven cities in Turkey, United Kingdom and Bosnia and Herzegovina.
#travel #foodexperiences
Methods Walk, talk and eat tours; speculative enactments; 3D printing
Tools Rhinoceros 7.0; Adobe Indesign, Illustrator and Premiere; Procreate; Taguette
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Motion Master
Design Research Society Conference 2024
A speculative wearable apron concept for maintaining traditional food-making gestures.
Despite the growing concerns about how fully automating food-making alienates the user from the tacit food knowledge, how this might infer social food practices and traditions is unknown. The discovery of users cherish the traditional hand and body gestures that mediate the cooking process steered the project direction to integrate the existing know-how in the kitchen. By supporting users to complete cooking tasks by themselves, the aim was to enable the joy in cooking, when the digital and physical worlds meet.
Motion Master (MM) focuses on a food-making activity that previous research participants reported enjoying: mimicking one’s mother’s movements. MM is a wearable food-making apron that steers the user’s movements and extrudes supplementary food materials based on the recipe. It mainly focuses on replicating the moves to revive tangible memories.
This concept is one of the three speculative concepts that emerged from earlier design and user research I conducted as part of my PhD. I pursued the prototyping of the MM concept by framing it as an undergraduate final project and acted as a mentor for the student.
Methods Design thinking; cinematic prototyping
#embodiedcookingtech #conceptualprototype
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Playful eating utensils
Koç University Media and Visual Arts – Fall 2022 & Spring 2023
In a semester-long 3D printing course, students speculated new ways of eating today’s food with a playful lens.
I designed the curriculum and instructed a basic 3D printing course for interdisciplinary undergraduate students with an objective of providing explerince in the basics of design, 3D modeling and 3D printing.
In this course, students gained hands-on experience in 3D printing technologies starting from scratch. The course starts by simple hand sketching, then moves on to 3D modeling with Rhinoceros. Mid-semester they were introduced the project topic: redesigning eating experiences playfully. The curriculum follows with introduction of 3D printing machines while students start the ideation of their project. For immersing students in the ideation projects, I designed several activities such as acting as a 3D printer, group ideation with design cards. The semester ended with project presentations.
Despite its potential, 3D Food Printing is still a technology that needs new features and capabilities to fully adapt to everyday settings.
To explore new features and application areas for 3DFP technology, we created the Mobile Food Printer (MFP) prototype. This concept has shown great potential in its applicability in the current kitchen routines (preparation, serving, and eating) and introduce novel dining experiences.
I developed this concept and prototype in collaboration with Taylan Utku Bulut and presented learnings obtained from three focus groups with novice chefs. Learnings from chefs were later iterated by designers in an ideation workshop.
