Eat, Cook, Grow: Mixing Human-Computer Interactions with Human-Food Interactions

Tools, interfaces, methods, and practices that can help bring about a healthy, socially inclusive, and sustainable food future.

Our contemporary concerns about food range from food security to agricultural sustainability to getting dinner on the table for family and friends. This book investigates food issues as they intersect with participatory Internet cultureblogs, wikis, online photo- and video-sharing platforms, and social networksin efforts to bring about a healthy, socially inclusive, and sustainable food future. Focusing on our urban environments provisioned with digital and network capacities, and drawing on such bottom-up sociotechnical trends as DIY and open source, the chapters describe engagements with food and technology that engender (re-)creative interactions.

In the first section, Eat, contributors discuss technology-aided approaches to sustainable dining, including digital communication between farmers and urban consumers and a telematic dinner party at which guests are present electronically. The chapters in Cook describe, among other things, smart chopping boards that encourage mindful eating and a website that supports urban wild fruit foraging. Finally, Grow connects human-computer interaction with achieving a secure, safe, and ethical food supply, offering chapters on the use of interactive technologies in urban agriculture, efforts to trace the provenance of food with a Fair Tracing tool, and other projects.

Contributors
Joon Sang Baek, Pollie Barden, Eric P. S. Baumer, Eli Blevis, Nick Bryan-Kinns, Robert Comber, Jean Duruz, Katharina Frosch, Anne Galloway, Geri Gay, Jordan Geiger, Gijs Geleijnse, Nina Gros, Penny Hagen, Megan Halpern, Greg Hearn, Tad Hirsch, Jettie Hoonhout, Denise Kera, Vera Khovanskaya, Ann Light, Bernt Meerbeek, William Odom, Kenton O'Hara, Charles Spence, Mirjam Struppek, Esther Toet, Marc Tuters, Katharine S. Willis, David L. Wright, Grant Young

Jaz Hee-jeong Choi is Deputy Director of the Urban Informatics Research Lab and ARC Australian Postdoctoral Fellow (Industry) at Queensland University of Technology, Australia. Marcus Foth is Founder and Director of the Urban Informatics Research Lab, Associate Professor and Principal Research Fellow in the School of Design at Queensland University of Technology, and coeditor of From Social Butterfly to Engaged Citizen (MIT Press). Greg Hearn is Professor and Director of Commercial Programs in the Creative Industries Faculty at Queensland University of Technology.