A Meat-Summer Night's Dream: A Tangible Design Fiction Exploration of Eating Biohybrid Flying Robots

Paper Title

A Meat-Summer Night's Dream: A Tangible Design Fiction Exploration of Eating Biohybrid Flying Robots

Publication Info

• Topic area: Speculative design and Human-Food Interaction (HFI) through tangible design fiction.
• Keywords: Biohybrid robots, edible robotics, speculative design, Human-Food Interaction, ethics, cultural rituals, sustainability, multisensory design, design fiction, post-natural eating.

Background and Problem

• Problem / challenge: Existing studies on synthetic food and edible robotics often lack multisensory, embodied engagement, focusing instead on textual or visual speculation. Ethical, cultural, and sensory dimensions of hybrid food systems remain underexplored.
• Significance: Understanding how biohybrid food technologies might reshape cultural practices, ethical reasoning, and sensory experiences is crucial as these technologies approach feasibility.
• Motivation and related work: Prior research in HFI and speculative design has explored food-tech innovations but has not deeply engaged with the cultural and ethical implications of hybrid organisms as food. This study builds on speculative design and multisensory methods to address this gap.

Solution

• Proposed approach: A tangible design fiction titled A Meat-Summer Night’s Dream, staged as an immersive dinner theater in a fictional 2052 Paris restaurant where participants consume biohybrid flying robots.
• Novelty:
  1. Development of a multisensory, embodied speculative artifact exploring edible biohybrid robots.
  2. Empirical insights into how participants negotiate cultural, ethical, and sensory boundaries in speculative food futures.
  3. Methodological advancement in design fiction through tangible, participatory formats.
• Procedure and key techniques:
  • Designed a speculative dining experience incorporating props (e.g., a flying drone, 3D-printed anatomical model, and edible quail surrogate).
  • Participants role-played personas in a staged narrative, engaging with sensory and cultural rituals.
  • Post-event interviews and thematic analysis captured reflections on ethics, culture, and technology adoption.

Results

• Concrete findings:
  • Participants expressed curiosity, caution, and concern about biohybrid food technologies.
  • Ethical considerations included sentience, suffering, and relativist moral boundaries.
  • Cultural and symbolic dimensions influenced acceptance, with participants mapping biohybrids onto existing rituals and traditions.
  • Multisensory design enhanced engagement and provoked emotional and reflective responses.
• Advantage over baselines: The tangible, multisensory approach elicited deeper ethical and cultural reflections compared to traditional speculative design methods relying on text or visuals.
• Experiments / evaluation:
  • Six participants from creative industries engaged in a staged dinner theater.
  • Data collection included video recordings, field notes, and semi-structured interviews.
  • Thematic analysis identified key themes: technological feasibility, ethics, cultural symbolism, and the role of multisensory design.
• Limitations and future work:
  • Small, culturally specific participant group limits generalizability.
  • Future work should explore diverse cultural contexts, compare methods (e.g., VR, text-based design fiction), and develop higher-fidelity prototypes.

Summary

This study introduced a tangible design fiction, A Meat-Summer Night’s Dream, to explore the imagined consumption of biohybrid flying robots. Through an immersive, multisensory dinner theater, participants engaged with ethical, cultural, and sensory dimensions of hybrid food systems. Findings revealed dynamic imaginaries of biohybrid foods, highlighting ambiguity as a resource for ethical and cultural reasoning. The study advances HCI by demonstrating how embodied speculative design can provoke critical reflection on emerging biotechnologies poised to reshape everyday practices like eating. Future research should expand participant diversity and compare speculative modalities to deepen understanding of public engagement with hybrid food futures.