Interacting with social networks of intelligent things and people in the world of gastronomy

Abstract

This article introduces a framework for creating rich augmented environments based on a social web of intelligent things and people. We target outdoor environments, aiming to transform a region into a smart environment that can share its cultural heritage with people, promoting itself and its special qualities. Using the applications developed in the framework, people can interact with things, listen to the stories that these things tell them, and make their own contributions. The things are intelligent in the sense that they aggregate information provided by users and behave in a socially active way. They can autonomously establish social relationships on the basis of their properties and their interaction with users. Hence when a user gets in touch with a thing, she is also introduced to its social network consisting of other things and of users; she can navigate this network to discover and explore the world around the thing itself. Thus the system supports serendipitous navigation in a network of things and people that evolves according to the behavior of users. An innovative interaction model was defined that allows users to interact with objects in a natural, playful way using smartphones without the need for a specially created infrastructure. The framework was instantiated into a suite of applications called WantEat, in which objects from the domain of tourism and gastronomy (such as cheese wheels or bottles of wine) are taken as testimonials of the cultural roots of a region. WantEat includes an application that allows the definition and registration of things, a mobile application that allows users to interact with things, and an application that supports stakeholders in getting feedback about the things that they have registered in the system. WantEat was developed and tested in a real-world context which involved a region and gastronomy-related items from it (such as products, shops, restaurants, and recipes), through an early evaluation with stakeholders and a final evaluation with hundreds of users.

Using game mechanics for field evaluation of prototype social applications: a novel methodology

“…9. The field study (Console et al 2013;Marcengo et al 2012) was conducted on a sample recruited by asking participants to try a novel application for the fair. On the basis of our previous usability test, we segmented the sample in four subgroups through the dimensions of age and attitude towards the new technologies of communication.…”

“…We tested our methodology on WantEat (Console et al 2013), a social application prototype in food domain. We decided to gamify the here described field evaluation, since we tried to evaluate WantEat social features by means of a usability test and of a field trial but without success.…”

“…On the other hand, field evaluations, in order to be effective, have to last for a long time in order to allow the emergence of a spontaneous community of users: this could be so expensive in terms of time, efforts, and costs that it could be unrealisable for a prototype application (Rogers et al 2007), by requiring a stable system 'deployed on a platform that would be widely spread among users in order to achieve a critical mass of users' (Persson, Blom, and Jung 2005). We will describe in the following the evaluation of a social application prototype, WantEat (Console et al 2013), which we unsuccessfully previously tried to evaluate both with a usability test and a field trial.…”

Self-Monitoring of Emotions and Mood Using a Tangible Approach

“…Over the last 10 years, novel design solutions have been explored to allow a serendipitous navigation through data [35,36] or content [37][38][39], and gamification techniques [40][41][42][43][44] have been employed to enhance users' motivation [45] or change individuals' behavior [46,47], foreseeing the use of game design elements in personal informatics context [48]. Building on these attempts for making content and data exploration and management more enjoyable, we here propose the use of tangible interaction to involve people in self-reporting their emotional states.…”

TellEat: Sharing Experiences on the Move

“…This framework is being implemented and tested in the field of traditional gastronomy, with the goal to promote the cultural heritage of the involved territory (the Piedmont region in the north-west of Italy). As a part of this project, the WantEat suite of applications [7] has been developed. The mobile application in WantEat allows users to browse the enhanced social network starting from the objects they have at hand, navigating their relationships and thereby discovering the territory they come from, or are visiting.…”