Children play because they have a deep desire to understand the world. While playing, they are developing skills in all areas of development: cognitive, physical, communication, social and emotional. Play allows children to try out new ideas and make connections between their previous experiences and active engagements with their environment.

In this regard, we initiated a workshop series aimed at exploring the use of playful food interactions as a means of uncovering design insights for child oriented food technologies and experiences. First workshop was hold at the international conference of Interaction Design and Children in 2020. The workshop was originally planned as an in- person event in which we could jointly experience the gustatory and olfactory elements of the food items at hand and interact with their tactile properties. However, as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, we converted the workshop into a virtual event in which participants had to convey their multisensory food experiences and ideas through the limited sight and sound capabilities offered by online platforms such as Zoom and Miro. We report on the methods used and reflect on how the constraints of digital mediation and the desire of participants to overcome these constraints shaped the experience and outcome of the workshop

References

Yoram Chisik, Marie-Monique Schaper, Ferran Altarriba Bertran, Ruxandra Lupu, Laetitia Barbu, Laia Turmo Vidal, Erik Nilsen, Saumya Gupta, and Cristina Valero. (2021). Through the Zoom Glass: Drawing Design Inspiration from Mediated Playful Interactions with Food and Child Personas. In Extended Abstracts of the 2021 Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play (CHI PLAY ’21). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 294–300. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/3450337.3483452

Marie-Monique Schaper, Laura Malinverni, and Cristina Valero. (2020). Robot Presidents: Who should rule the world? Teaching Critical Thinking in AI through Reflections upon Food Traditions. In Proceedings of the 11th Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction: Shaping Experiences, Shaping Society (NordiCHI ’20). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 110, 1–4. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/3419249.3420085

Yoram Chisik, Ferran Altarriba Bertran, Marie-Monique Schaper, Elena Márquez Segura, Laia Turmo Vidal, and Danielle Wilde. (2020). Chasing play potentials in food culture: embracing children’s perspectives. In Proceedings of the 2020 ACM Interaction Design and Children Conference: Extended Abstracts(IDC ’20). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 46–53. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/3397617.3398062