WantEat and Reward: Slow Technologies for Food Rossana Simeoni Telecom Italia - Research and Prototyping Via G. Reiss Romoli 274 – 10148 Torino Rossana.Simeoni@telecomitalia.it Alessandra Marino, Amon Rapp, Fabiana Vernero Università di Torino – Dip. Informatica c.so Svizzera 185 - 10149 Torino ale-marino86@hotmail.it, amon.rapp@gmail.com,vernerof@di.unito.it ABSTRACT In this paper we provide our vision of slow technology, presenting two interactive systems in the domain of food. Author Keywords Food, package-free purchase, systemic design, 3D printer. ACM Classification Keywords H5.m. Information interfaces and presentation (e.g., HCI): Miscellaneous. INTRODUCTION In their seminal paper, Hallas and Redstrom [2] stated that “slow technology is a technology that amplifies the presence of objects in time and space”. In our vision, slow technology can be interpreted in particular as technology which stimulates people to think over the origin and lifecycle of things, including for example the geographical area they come from, the raw materials or ingredients which are used to create them, and the steps and time required for their production processes. We chose to apply this vision to the domain of food for two reasons. On the one hand, food is an important part of cultural heritage and is deeply rooted in everyday life. However, food can also be seen as a means rather than as an end, and therefore be purchased, prepared and consumed quickly and mechanically: amplifying the presence of food and its packaging might allow to restore the perception of its symbolic and cultural meanings. On the other hand, food has already been the object of a successful rethinking process in the direction of positive slowness on the part of Slow Food [6, 11] and package-free purchase stores [12]. With this respect, while these experiences indicate that a slow approach to food has great potential, the role that slow technologies can play in such a process is still to be investigated. Starting from these motivations, we designed two interactive systems which demonstrate how slow technologies can play a role in the domain of food. The first, WantEat, is the result of a joint project with Slow Food and the University of Gastronomic Sciences [7]. It aims to show how present mainstream technologies can amplify the presence of food with no need to change the current production and distribution processes. The second, Reward, stems from a research project and a master thesis at the University of Turin [13]. It aims to show how niche technologies such as 3D printers can be used to disrupt habitual food purchase behaviours in a way that consumers are stimulated to reflect on the presence and sustainability of food containers and to reuse them. SLOW TECHNOLOGY IS … WANTEAT TO AMPLIFY THE PRESENCE OF FOOD AND ITS TERRITORY. WantEat can be considered as the result of a slow and non- spectacular approach to design, where design embraces a systemic vision -exploiting different disciplines and points of view- to deal with the complexity of networked systems in the gastronomy domain, where products can be linked to e.g. other products, their producers and their production sites, as well as having a very specific identity [3]. The design of WantEat system was inspired by the idea that food items such as wheels of cheese or bottles of wine are silent protagonists and witnesses of the cultural heritage of a territory. Thus, their presence could be easily augmented, and reflection about them could be stimulated, if they were enabled to tell stories about them and about the events in which they were involved. The goal of WantEat system was therefore to use mainstream technologies to give voice to food items in a non-invasive way, with no need to infrastructure either food items or their environment, and without intervening on the current production and distribution processes. In WantEat, knowledge about the gastronomy-related cultural heritage of a territory is represented as a mixed Social Web of Intelligent Things and people, where social relationships can depend on domain knowledge alone or on user behaviour (e.g., a cheese and a wine may be related if many users said that they match well in their comments). Users can get in touch with such a web through an interactive cross-media system, consisting of smartphone, tablet and web applications. More specifically, they can recognize food items by means of a smartphone application with label recognition functionalities: once an item is defined as the current focus of interest, users can both get information about it and explore its social network, discovering similar products, the territory it comes from, the farms which produce it and so on. In this sense, the food item acts as a sort of hub for the exploration of the gastronomy domain. Moreover, users can continue their reflections in different contexts, e.g., at the restaurant, where they can enjoy an interactive tablet menu which allows them to watch videos promoting the cultural heritage related to the dishes they choose, and at home, where they can relive their experiences using WantEat website. SLOW TECHNOLOGY IS … REWARD TO AMPLIFY THE PRESENCE OF CONTAINERS. As “food” is bound to its “territory” in WantEat, Reward highlights the relationship between “food containers” and