Enhancing Desirable Food Behaviors by Increasing or Decreasing Disgust: Designing and Testing Infographics

For health and environmental reasons, humanity should reduce the consumption of animal-based products, whereas vegetable consumption should be increased. We created stimuli (drawings with texts) that may be able to increase or decrease the purchasing of mushrooms, cheese, and meat. During the design process, we identified four aspect...

Blueprints: Systematizing Behavior Change Designs-The Case of Social Comparison Theory

To improve people's lives, human-computer interaction researchers are increasingly designing technological solutions based on behavior change theory, such as social comparison theory (SCT). However, how researchers operationalize such a theory as a design remains largely unclear. One way to clarify this methodological step is to clearly state...

Food in motion: Lively display of freshness or last spasms of living beings?

The movement of food may suggest the food is very fresh but may also indicate the source of food is still alive. In this study, we explore the responses that different kinds of food movements can evoke among consumers. In an online study, we presented participants with 14 videos in which a food product changed shape or moved, before or while...

Manta and Cactaceae: Rehabilitative smartphone accessories for people with chronic mild stroke impairments

Stroke causes damage to the brain, often resulting in weakness or paralysis on one side of the body. Everyday objects such as smartphones can play an im-portant role after a stroke facilitating participation in daily activities. However, commercial smartphones can be challenging to use, and people with stroke of-ten adjust their behavior to...

The three-step persuasion model on YouTube: A grounded theory study on persuasion in the protein supplements industry

Persuasion can be defined as an active attempt by a person to change the behavior and attitudes of others. The purposive attempt to influence one’s behavior can originate from different areas, and people who are able to do so are often referred to as influencers. Social media platforms such as Instagram or YouTube have become crucial platforms...

Commensality or Reverie in Eating? Exploring the Solo Dining Experience

Commensality, the act of eating together, is commonly associated with many benefits. Dining solo, in contrast, is frequently connected to adverse effects on a person. There is a growing interest in human-computer interaction (HCI) and design in how innovations can enhance eating experiences by, for example, facilitating commensality. The...

Mattpod: A Design Proposal for a Multi-Sensory Solo Dining Experience

The consumption of a meal is not just a bodily requirement but can also carry significant symbolic meaning. Solo dining is often contrasted to a shared eating experience and portrayed as an inferior way of eating a meal due to lacking essential social and normative qualities. Human-computer interaction research increasingly explores different...

Finding what fits: Explorative self-experimentation for health behaviour change

Changing a specific health behaviour can be highly com- plex and is often influenced by many personal, social, and environmental factors. Therefore, interventions that aim at behaviour change cannot be one-size-fits-all solutions, and no behaviour change technique is effective for everyone. One potential solution could be to support individuals...

An exploratory study using graphic design to communicate consumer benefits on food packaging

Commercial food packages may contain multiple messages. Packaging designers try to integrate all messages into a coherent design. Designers may use text, images or stylistic features, but these mediums may differ in their suitability to communicate specific product benefits. To evaluate the usefulness and effectiveness of these three mediums,...

Setting the Stage: Disgust as an Aesthetic Food Experience

Disgust is commonly understood as an emotion of aversion. However, people seem to eat certain food items not despite containing disgust eliciting features but because of them. In this paper, we introduce the term aesthetic disgust to capture this phenomenon. We outline in our manuscript how designers use different techniques to stage the food...

Solo Dining at Home in the Company of ICT Devices

The consumption of a solo meal is often subject to negative associations. Studies indicate that solo diners use information and communication technology (ICT) devices such as smartphones, to mitigate negative experiences such as boredom and loneliness, especially when dining in a public context. However, we know less about the motivation to use...

The Playful Potential of Digital Commensality: Learning from Spontaneous Playful Remote Dining Practices

With one-person households being increasingly common and Covid-19 lockdown policies forcing people to stay home, remote dining has become common practice for many, who take it as an opportunity to connect with others in times of loneliness. Sharing meals online, also known as digital commensality, is a rich form of interaction, where people...

Between attraction and aversion: How designers can use the concept of disgust to influence food consumption

Disgust is a strong emotion of aversion. In the context of food, it is often referred to as a guardian of the mouth, preventing close contact with pathogens and the accidental consumption of poisons. However, disgust can also create a certain level of attraction and be part of positive experiences, even in the context of food. In this article,...

Operationalizing behavior change theory as part of persuasive technology: A scoping review on social comparison

Theories from psychology or the social sciences are commonly used as a starting point when designing persuasive technologies that aim to evoke a specific behavior change. Ideally, using these theories would (1) help guide the design of the persuasive technology and (2) help evaluate and inform the theory. In this paper, we focused on the first...

Bringing disgust in through the backdoor in healthy food promotion: a phenomenological perspective

Obesity has been pointed out as one of the main current health risks leading to calls for a so-called “war on obesity”. As we show in this paper, activities that attempt to counter obesity by persuading people to adjust a specific behavior often employ a pedagogy of regret and disgust. Nowadays, however, public healthcare campaigns that aim to...

The use of ICT devices as part of the solo eating experience

An increasing number of people tend to eat alone due to social changes and an altered attitude towards cooking and eating practices. Anecdotal reports indicate that solo diners tend to use information and communication technology devices, for example, the smartphone, as part of the eating experience. While lab studies suggest that the devices...

Conveying information through food packaging: A literature review comparing legislation with consumer perception

Although governments have implemented regulations to inform consumers on important product properties and protect consumers from deceptive information, empirical research on how consumers perceive, interpret and experience food packages have shown frequently that consumers may be misled by how information is presented and packages are...