Taste Your Emotions: An Exploration of the Relationship between Taste and Emotional Experience for HCI

Taste offers unexplored opportunities for novel user experiences in HCI, however it is difficult to design for. While most lab research has shown basic tastes are consistently associated with positive or negative emotional experiences, the value of these mappings for user experience is less explored. In this paper we leverage 3D food printing technologies to report an experimental study investigating the relationship between taste and emotional experience for use in HCI. We present four real-life inspired scenarios: product rating, sports match results, experiential vignettes, and website usability, to explore the understanding and expression of emotional meaning through tastes. Our findings extend previous emotion mappings for sweet and bitter tastes to applied scenarios. We also draw out fresh insights into the role of taste, flavor, and embodiment in experience design, reflecting on the role of 3D food printing in supporting taste interfaces.

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