Envisioning Future Food, Technology, and Health: Teens’ Perspectives Through Design Fiction

Paper Title

Envisioning Future Food, Technology, and Health: Teens’ Perspectives Through Design Fiction

Publication Info

• Topic area: Teen-centered design fiction for future food and health technologies.
• Keywords: design fiction, teens, food technology, health technology, human-food interaction, speculative design, reflection, play, equity, sustainability.

Background and Problem

• Problem / challenge: Teens are underrepresented in research on food and health technologies, despite being in a critical developmental stage for forming lasting habits. Existing technologies often focus on optimization and tracking, which may not align with teens' emotional, social, and cultural needs.
• Significance: Understanding teens' perspectives can lead to the design of technologies that better support their health, identity, and well-being, while addressing broader societal concerns like equity and sustainability.
• Motivation and related work: Previous Human-Food Interaction (HFI) research has explored playful and reflective food technologies, but primarily from adult perspectives. Studies on teens have focused on tracking and parental control rather than empowering teens to co-design technologies that align with their values. This paper addresses this gap by using speculative design to surface teens’ visions and concerns.

Solution

• Proposed approach: Design fiction workshops engaging teens to envision future food and health technologies through storyboarding and prototyping activities.
• Novelty:
  1. Identification of teen-specific design considerations, including "absence" as a protective affordance for reflection.
  2. Reframing food technologies as sites of family care, sensory delight, and playful identity exploration.
  3. Advancing youth-centered speculative design methods to elicit grounded sociotechnical imaginaries.
• Procedure and key techniques:
  • Conducted workshops with 20 teens (ages 14–17) using two prompts: "Future Self Mirror" (storyboarding) and "Magic Food Machine" (diegetic prototyping).
  • Teens created speculative designs, balancing technological possibilities with emotional, social, and ethical considerations.
  • Data analyzed through thematic clustering and iterative refinement to identify key themes.

Results

• Concrete findings:
  • Teens envisioned technologies optimizing health but emphasized the importance of emotional well-being and enjoyment in eating.
  • Efficiency and automation were welcomed but not at the expense of human experiences like cooking and family care.
  • Teens anticipated commercialization, ubiquity, and energy consumption in future technologies but advocated for equitable access, privacy protection, and sustainability.
• Advantage over baselines: The study highlights teens' nuanced perspectives, which go beyond solutionist or anti-solutionist approaches by negotiating practical, value-driven futures.
• Experiments / evaluation:
  • Workshops involved 20 teens across five sessions, producing 20 storyboards and 12 prototypes.
  • Themes were derived from 1,247 data points, including transcripts, artifacts, and observational notes.
• Limitations and future work:
  • Participants were primarily older teens from the U.S. with exposure to digital technologies, limiting generalizability.
  • Household dynamics and younger teens’ perspectives were not fully explored.
  • Future work should include more diverse cultural and socioeconomic contexts.

Summary

This study explores how teens envision future food and health technologies through speculative design workshops. Teens balanced technological possibilities with emotional, social, and ethical considerations, emphasizing the importance of enjoyment, family care, and equity. Key contributions include identifying "absence" as a protective affordance in reflective technologies, reframing food technologies as playful and identity-driven, and advancing youth-centered speculative methods. These findings provide actionable insights for designing technologies that align with teens' values while addressing broader societal challenges.