Designing a Food ‘Qualculator’ Adrian K. Clear and Adrian Friday School of Computing and Communications Lancaster University INTRODUCTION: STUDYING FOOD This position paper seeks to uncover and understand a range of everyday behaviours associated with food shopping, prepa- ration, consumption and waste as a precursor to design. How food is purchased, prepared, consumed and its waste disposed of is of growing interest for those concerned with sustainabil- ity and ‘carbon footprint’ [2, 3]. This topic provides inter- esting and tractable opportunities for research on social be- haviours surrounding food choices, consumption and waste, and the design of applications that may promote behavioural change. Shopping, cooking and eating may be a mundane feature of everyday life, but as part of the work of developing a mo- bile application, we are interested in explicating some of the work involved. This includes the various competences in- volved in deciding what to eat and the considerations that are brought to bear upon this most ordinary of day-to-day con- cerns. We employ a range of techniques—collecting shop- ping lists, observation, variants of auto-ethnography, and un- structured interviews—to try to derive some design sensitivi- ties from people’s routine everyday practices, decisions and choices in their shopping, cooking and waste disposal be- haviour. SCOPING STUDIES: STALKING SHOPPERS & COLLECT- ING LISTS Our participants agreed to engage with an eclectic mix of re- search techniques in order to provide some insights, some ‘sensitivities’ into their shopping, cooking and waste disposal practices. We observed people as they shopped, recording their choices and any comments made, and asking occasional questions ‘why did you buy that?’, ‘why that one rather than this one?’, and so on. As we accompanied them our par- ticipants would often explain what motivated their choices, for example in terms of different children’s preferences or diets, family circumstances, as well as cost or storage or a range of dietary restrictions etc. Our auto-ethnographies in- volved people commenting as they did their food shopping and taking photographs of their everyday shopping, cooking and waste disposal experiences and reflecting on what they felt this said about them. This provided insight not only into the rationale behind shopping decisions and choices but the relationship of these to wider familial, societal and ethical dynamics and issues—for example, surrounding greed, waste and ‘throwing away’ food. Since we imagined our app would be based around a shopping list of some kind we spent some time collecting and studying shopping lists. Our interest was in how exactly shopping lists were constructed and used and their place in the social experience of shopping and cook- ing. We found some considerable variation in people’s shop- ping lists, in terms of what they were constructed from, how and by whom they were assembled, and how they were used, or not used, during shopping. Some lists were drawn with reference to the cooking of specific meals whose ingredients were carefully documented. Other lists appeared to be con- structed around the grouping of foodstuffs or by reference to the physical layout of a specific supermarket. As Basset et al. [1] suggest, grocery list compilation, like the shopping process itself depends on ‘intersecting knowledge about fam- ily, household and grocery store’. For our participants, shop- ping is a complex activity where choices are made between similar items with varying properties, according to a set of diverse preferences and values of often multiple players. Our initial findings point to a range of issues and consequent de- sign opportunities, though none of them are simple. So, with few exceptions, we find there is little direct interest or con- cern with ‘carbon footprint’—instead there is a mish-mash of vaguely related practical and moral concerns, choices and di- chotomies such as processed / unprocessed, local / imported, healthy / unhealthy, balanced / unbalanced, practical / im- practical and so on, reflecting the various ways in which the activities of shopping, cooking and disposal are interwoven with other complex social and familial responsibilities and obligations. People are not entirely unaware or uninformed about ‘carbon footprint’ but there was rarely any direct ref- erence to carbon footprint, except the odd comment about transport and whether food was ‘local’ or imported (“these beans came from Peru”). Instead other issues, familial, fi- nancial, temporal, spatial issues etc. take precedence in the everyday tasks of shopping and cooking. So what is involved here is not mere calculation but ‘qualculation’ (quality-based rational judgment) [4]. IMPLICATIONS FOR QUALCULATOR DESIGN A number of design sensitivities emerged from our research, sensitivities that go beyond traditional ‘public information’ approaches of simply providing users with ever more infor- mation. Our intention is to develop an app that tracks and informs user choice to build a ‘rich profile’ of the impact of their lives in terms of carbon externality which can also be deployed for identifying and informing users of ‘critical mo- ments that have impact’, thereby engaging users in a dialogue to raise awareness and offer resources for understanding their carbon profile; and as a form of ‘nudge’ [5] to facilitate in- formed choice. We believe that it is important that digital as- sistant technologies be designed into existing shopping prac- tices rather than around them (assuming fundamental changes to the underlying activity) if they are to be truly effective. In our studies, shopping lists emerged as a major site for famil-