Mindfoodness.

Mindfoodness exists of a coaster which rotates the plate when the user is distracted during their dinner, to guide the attention back to the enjoyable dining experience. By drawing the attention of the user it tries to enable the user to let them experience more fulfilling dining experiences and develop relationships by creating mindfulness moments in the everyday life.

 

The Siemens Design Award is a design competition held every two years. This year’s design challenge for Siemens BSH focuses on a vision to try and relieve the tension fields between sustainability and user experience, or health and self-performance. Throughout the process, utilizing semi-structured interviews and experts, insights were gained regarding the trends within eating and its importance in daily life. In a second iteration, a user journey was performed to explore dining as everyday practice, where we saw an opportunity for integrating mindfulness into the practice of eating. Using these opportunities, a vision was conceived that the stress brought by high self-performance expectations can be reduced and at the same time health can be enhanced by embedding mindfulness in the practice of eating.

 

To converge the vision into a design, a coaster was created to integrate mindfulness moments in the practice of eating. First, we had to make focus measurable to guide the users attention back to the food. By implying that when the user is not touching the plate for a certain amount of time means that the user is distracted. While, on the other hand, when the plate is touched often, it was implied that the user is eating too fast, thus not eating with attention. 

 

To create the prototype electronics were integrated into a 3D-printed model of a plate and the interaction was altered following the user evaluation. Because of the duration of this project, the longevity of the design could not be tested. Therefore, it was not determined whether the attention to the plate is an effect that will stay on the long term and can thus be considered a state of being, rather than a trait.