"A Postcard from Your Food Journey in the Past": Promoting Self-Reflection on Social Food Posting

Zhida Sun1, Sitong Wang1, Wenjie Yang1, Onur Yürüten2, Chuhan Shi1, Xiaojuan Ma1.
1The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, 2Visto Consulting SA.

Paper Presentation

dis_20_teaser

We propose a design that procedurally creates postcards from food posts, encoding nutritional values and the user’s emotional status extracted from photos and texts. Nutritional information and emotional status are visually encoded in the postcards to facilitate non-judgmental self-reflection.

Abstract

Food-posting, a pervasive practice on social media platforms, opens a window for introspection on personal food intake, physical health, and mental well-being. Existing self-reflection tools on food intake usually require manual logging of dietary information and inadequately support retrospective reviews beyond the data. To facilitate in-depth, non-judgmental self-reflection on information hidden in food-posting, we propose a design to transform general food posts into "a postcard from a past food journey". The postcards are procedurally created from food posts, and encode nutritional values together with the user's emotional status extracted from photos and texts. After validating the visual design, we evaluate the auto-generated postcards with 20 participants to explore how they reflect on the data, context, action, and value subjects. Qualitative feedback indicates that our designs encourage users to review their physical and mental well-being differently from conventional visualization. We conclude by discussing issues identified with the non-judgmental postcard design.

The system pipeline

dis_20_pipeline

The overview of the proposed pipeline to automatically generate postcards based on food posts data. The pipeline consists of two core modules, i.e., (A) information extraction, and (B) postcard composition. We demonstrate the pipeline with the food post on Instagram as an example. The dotted line indicates that the textual data could be used to validate the nutrition information if they contain related information. The final output includes a postcard’s (1) backside and (2) front side designs based on the layout templates.

Sample results from our experiment

dis_20_detail

Various examples from participants' generated results. The participants provided qualitative feedback indicating that the postcard designs encouraged them to review their physical and mental well-being differently from conventional visualization methods. The feedback highlighted that the postcards facilitated non-judgmental self-reflection and helped them gain new perspectives on their food habits.

Evaluation Criteria

  • Data: How the nutritional values and emotional status encoded in the postcards influenced their understanding of their food intake.
  • Context: How the postcards helped them recall the context in which the food was consumed.
  • Action: How the postcards influenced their actions or decisions related to food and health.
  • Value: How the postcards helped them derive personal value or insights from their food posts.

BibTeX


                            @inproceedings{10.1145/3357236.3395475,
                            author = {Sun, Zhida and Wang, Sitong and Yang, Wenjie and Y\"{u}r\"{u}ten, Onur and Shi, Chuhan and Ma, Xiaojuan},
                            title = {"A Postcard from Your Food Journey in the Past": Promoting Self-Reflection on Social Food Posting},
                            year = {2020},
                            isbn = {9781450369749},
                            publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
                            address = {New York, NY, USA},
                            url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3357236.3395475},
                            doi = {10.1145/3357236.3395475},
                            booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2020 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference},
                            pages = {1819–1832},
                            numpages = {14},
                            keywords = {visual design, social food posting, self-reflection, postcard},
                            location = {Eindhoven, Netherlands},
                            series = {DIS '20}
                            }