3.3 Workshop 1: Food-emotion Collages

To kickoff the generative research phase, the team conducted a group workshop aimed to uncover people’s emotions and values they associate with activities around food.

So we invited 8 participants to the workshop. They were each given 5 pictures associated with food: buying, cooking, washing, eating and spending time in the kitchen; and a pile of words, nouns and adjectives. Participants were asked to arrange the pictures in whatever way they want, and putting words next to these pictures to make some collages. They were also free to write words and draw lines as part of the collage. And for the final step, they were asked to talk about their collages.

Through this workshop, we discovered that different people have different mental models toward activities around food. Some people grouped all activities before eating as the experience of preparing food, others grouped cooking and eating together because they view them as ‘I have taken effort and it has paid off’ experience .Despite the variations in people’s mental models, we realized that cooking is not viewed as an isolated action, but an experience. Buying is viewed as preparing for cooking, and eating is viewed as consuming the result of cooking.

In addition, we also found that when people tell the stories of their collages, many people talked about using the cooking experience to bond with their beloved ones. This insight prompted us to think about the target users that might be suitable for this context. We then decided to work with remote families.