Studio 2 Folio 1: Reflective Presentation

My inquiry started from the belief in the dignity of independence and role that technology like augmented reality can play in maintaining independence in the face of cognitive and memory lapses, a role as a functional aid. I wanted to explore how visualising procedural information can be an effective aid, when processing information is a challenge.

One of my great loves is food and cooking as a means to food, and this seemed like a meaningful focus to begin exploring.

My motivation wasn't only to spend a semester baking teacakes, when I'm having a high pain day I struggle to process a lot of information at once. So I'm keenly interested in accessibility and the potential for technology to act as a functional aid when I'm experiencing these lapses in cognition and memory.

My inquiry started as: "how could augmented reality reimagine recipes for greater accessibility and ease of use".

12 weeks. Limited knowledge of the toolset Unity and the technology platform for augmented reality. We're gonna need a bigger boat ... or I need to rethink the scope of what I'm tackling.

Digging a little deeper into the meaning and values I identify with food and cooking, it's the sharing and the self-care aspects that strike a chord. The pavlova my nephew made for my 50th birthday party, the cauliflower soup that sustains me when I'm hiding under the doona watching netflix on a bad day or the napoli sauce recipe from a dear friend.

My inquiry has evolved to: How could a mobile app foster more of that personal connection we enjoy when we share recipes.

It's hard to imagine that conventional recipes used to look quite different, enough juice, the right amount of sugar, these were imprecise instructions not meant for the inexperienced. But since Eliza Acton's cookbook in 1847, recipes followed her new, more scientific, format: ingredients with their quantities followed by a step-by-step description of the process. It's a dense format that fits nicely onto pages of a printed book. If we can reimagine the recipe format for a mobile app a world of possibilities opens up, it's interactive, it's not limited to a page, it can include a timer, it can show (not tell) the movement of something like whisking an egg white.

This first iteration, playing with the format was a maximalist approach of putting together a visual static representation of the ingredients, a bubble with the step instructions and video representation of the steps. It was also getting my head around ways that we share videos through social media, posting it on TikTok, a social media platform that gives a clear structure, easy-to-use editing tools and is used to very quickly make and share videos. TikTok users seem to adopt patterns quickly, each video riffing on variations of common themes that spread virally fed by the platform's canny artificial intelligence driven algorithms.

Thinking about the properties of a mobile app, I created a prototype, firstly just showing the steps as text scrolling, then introducing interactivity, to swipe through the steps with icons from the Noun Project, then realising swiping doesn't work so well for floury hands so the prototype I have now lets you swipe or click on buttons to move forwards or backwards through the recipe.

This mockup of the next iteration gives a sense of how animated fade-ins could direct attention and do more to reduce the cognitive load of all the information appearing at once. And a context sensitive menu to record the personalised audio of the steps.

I'm pleased I have a working prototype I can actually use on my mobile phone, and yet I feel conflicted about the prototype. I haven't been able to reconcile my intent to make it easy to share recipes, a la Tik Tok, with the design of the app: I suspect this scope is unrealistic but I don't yet feel ready to accept that I can't reconcile my aspiration with a realistic timescale. The design feels coldly inconsistent with the warmth of my feelings for the skill and activity of cooking for myself and others. The colours were taken from William Morris' works, whose designs have captured my imagination and feel like a touchstone to the era of Eliza Acton, and yet the aesthetics come nowhere close to doing this justice, but I feel comfortable that this is something I can work hard on, and work towards, over the remainder of the semester. With each iteration, I'm becoming more confident in my approach, that my process is robust enough to keep working through the deficiencies and weaknesses evident in the prototype as I work on building my design and development skills.