1 Chutney and Relish: Designing to Augment the Experience of Shopping at a Farmers’ Market Ann Light Sheffield Hallam University Sheffield, S1 a.light@shu.ac.uk Ian Wakeman, Jon Robinson, Anirban Basu, Dan Chalmers University of Sussex ianw@sussex.ac.uk ABSTRACT We report on designing augmented reality (AR) applications to support the practices of going shopping, using an accompanied shopping and reflection technique to assess the key points of engagement among shoppers and producers at a farmers’ market. Our goal was to deploy innovative mobile technology in a low-tech context so that it supported everyday behaviour. The paper documents how a short research intervention was decisive in shaping the applications designed for the AR tool and explores how stories told as part of the market and in interview were used to help organise our insights. Author Keywords Fun, shopping practices, farmers’ markets, narrative, augmented reality, mobile, experience, QRCodes ACM Classification Keywords H5.m. Information interfaces and presentation (e.g., HCI): Miscellaneous. INTRODUCTION “Clearly the personality of everybody there is 90% of what you are getting, of the whole fun experience: it’s great. And I’ve come away with a goat’s cheese, for goodness sake, which is really unlike me.” (In, shopping at a farmers’ market, southern England, 2009) Shopping is more than the utilitarian act of buying: it involves complex practices and a range of associated experiences. Technology to support shopping practices must be embedded into these. We set out to experiment with the potential of a particular AR approach that provides a means to prioritise information at hand from trusted sources. At outset, the nature of this information was not clear, but it was assumed, in the words of one developer, that the potential of the tool to save and show comments in an order ranked by shoppers would be ‘used to determine the trustworthiness of particular stalls and sellers through the provision of a ratings and comment mechanism such as that used by eBay and Amazon’ (Wakeman, team notes, 2010). In fact, observation and interview showed a different role emerge for exchange of information in the market, and, by extension, for the tool. In this paper we document the way that our process revealed insights about relations in the market between people, information and objects. And we draw attention to narrative as an organising principle, both for our participants engaged in a series of rich experiences while shopping, and for deciding how to intervene effectively. We used the context of a farmers’ market as a form of extreme testing. First, these markets are places where shopping is expected to be full of diverse pleasant experiences (Bullock 2000). Markets are increasingly thrown into contrast with online retail, which extends the role of digital technology to mediate between buyer and seller and stresses the utilitarian aspect of buying. With this contrast, we might expect an increasing focus on aspects of being there in a marketplace. Second, it is a low-tech situation where there may be no centralized power supply but many mobile devices. If digital tools are becoming ubiquitous, then they will be available in future in just this kind of environment across the world. So we asked: Can we augment shopping in this context in a way that is useful without destroying the pleasure? BACKGROUND: STUDIES IN SHOPPING Much research has gone into online marketing, buying and selling. Far less is known about how to support the practices of going shopping electronically. Farmers’ markets appear only for a day a week/month, are often open air and stock only a few of the goods that make up a typical monthly shop, so clearly they are not attended for their ease of use. Instead, the market fulfils a different role. In this section, we review insights from existing studies of shopping and the tools designed to augment it. Markets and shopping experiences In a world of increasing internet commerce for standard or bulky items such as washing powder, books and electronics, buying food in a situated, occasional form has special appeal. Shopping at the local grocery store used to be an opportunity for shoppers to chat while waiting to be served and comment on the clerk’s remarks and product quality (Esbjerg and Bech-Larsen 2009: 421). Market shopping preserves and builds on these relations. Friends of the Earth identify (Bullock 2000) many reasons why shoppers might use this source: indirect benefits to farmers, the environment and the local economy, the atmosphere and experience; fresh, healthy produce at competitive prices, often where there are no alternative sources; and building up social connections through shopping locally. The sociologist John Sherry famously studied a flea market and challenged the prevalent view that shopping can be reduced to the analysis of purchasing and selling (1990). He describes markets as OZCHI 2010, November 22-26, 2010, Brisbane, Australia. Copyright the author(s) and CHISIG Additional copies are available at the ACM Digital Library (http://portal.acm.org/dl.cfm) or ordered from the CHISIG secretary (secretary@chisig.org) OZCHI 2010 Proceedings ISBN: x-xxxxx-xxx-x