FORMA DE DISCUSIÓN DE RESULTADOS

The main idea motivating the design of the Living Cookbook appliance is to make people’s cooking experiences recordable and shareable across time and space constraints, in such a format that can foster a sense of presence. Instead of simply exchanging written instructions, with the Living Cookbook people can capture the whole cooking process with annotated audio and video and make it available for others so that they can asynchronously reproduce the dish. In this sense, the appliance is similar to a family photo album, composed of recorded and shareable family “kitchen stories” (Terrenghi et al., 2007a). The high level goal is indeed to support social bindings so as to preserve cultural and social roots on the one hand, and stimulate cultural and generational fertilization on the other.

The design approach draws upon the consideration of the mundane prac- tices of the home and of the artifacts that support these practices. Families grow and evolve as communities of practice (Wenger, 1998), which as such rely on their members, rituals, as well as artifacts. The instruction and ap- prentice of home practices within the family walls happens in a large part through storytelling, performance, observation, and practical routines. Adult family members “play” the model for younger generations in the way they manage domestic activities such as cleaning, tiding up, as well as cooking. When family members are remote from each-other, e.g. a parent is away for work or a child moves out, instructions are mediated via different channels: for example, by text for exchanging recipes, by instruction notes next to home appliances to illustrate how to operate them, and by telephone calls for synchronous communication of instructions.

The focus of the Living Cookbook appliance is on domestic learning of the cooking practice. By exploiting the possibilities offered by digital tech- nologies for capturing, archiving and displaying multimedia instructions “on demand”, its design aims at supporting the collaborative practice of the cooking activity.

5.1. The Living Cookbook

By enabling parents to record their “special pasta” or “unique roast beef” for their children - customizing each recipe with personal tips and tricks - one can expect that very personal experiences can be created and communicated. People often call their parents and friends to ask “What was the recipe of that dish?”; “What does the sauce have to look like?”; “How thick should it be?”. Much of the communication around cooking, such as the exchange of recipes, and especially within families or close social networks, is one-to- one and supported by different media (e.g., paper, telephone, and e-mail), and is a way of tightening social bindings. The emotional quality of content created by family members or intimate friends is indeed very different in comparison to the cooking sessions published in books or broadcast on tele- vision programmes, which are produced for a larger audience. Although TV programmes provide a multimodal presentation of food preparation and take advantage of the popularity of acknowledged chefs, they cannot be consulted on demand as a paper cookbook, nor they can be personalized. Furthermore, TV cooking shows are often watched in spaces and time slots which are de- tached from the actual cooking activity: They are rather watched in contexts which depend on the location of the TV display and on the TV schedule.

The goal of the Living Cookbook appliance is to provide an alternative way for people to personalize their cooking experience and, as a consequence, their communication. To this end, its design draws upon some of the qualities of computing technologies, and in particular:

• storage and retrieval of multimedia content on demand: This allows for a personalization of the creation and consumption of content;

• multimodality: This contributes to augmenting the sense of presence;

• embeddable technology: This provides the possibility of creating and consuming content in context.

Thus, this project explores ways in which technology can support time- spending and engagement in the home which are motivated by the added value of accomplishment, self-expression, and social exchange. In this sense such an approach to ubiquitous computing technologies for the home diverges from the ones focusing on optimization of efficiency, invisibility, automation and time-saving (cf. Chapter 1, Section 1.2.1). One could actually argue that the way in which multimedia technologies have supported time-spending in the home (e.g., home entertainment such as TV or video games consoles) has confined users to a rather passive, and not very creative role.

It is a claim of this thesis that ubiquitous computing technologies also offer a good potential for supporting and motivating creativity and learning,

5 Design of Hybrid Artifacts

which has not been thoroughly exploited by the Ubicomp agenda so far. Put differently, these technologies can also provide rich resources for the design of novel learning experiences, which can be situated in the very space and social context of the home.

In this sense, cooking is here considered as an engaging, collaborative, learning experience, rather than as a mere working activity. Below the evo- lution of technologies for the kitchen is treated in more depth, to characterize the design domain.