Advanced Technology Report
DS
06
THE TASTE CUBE
EXPLORATION STUDY SZETO YAN MAE 13092725 Oxford Brookes University Masters in Architecture Applied Design
Structure / Technology
taste
EEG
Materials memory
Data
performativity Taste City
The Eating Experience
Environment
sushi
blue fin tuna
Sustainability
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00/ Contents
01/ Material
02/ Technology
The Science of Sight: Pixelation
Experiment : EEG Brainwaves Readings vs. Taste
Sight and Colour : Saturated Spaces
EEG input - Arduino : Capturing the Experential
Quantifying visual data Amorphous data
Creating the Visual Medium: LED Cube
Colour Space
03/ Structure
04/ System
05 / Environment
06/ Sustainability
Wearable device: Sensing Technology
London Tasting v.01: Rhino Simulation
Urban Mapping: Taste City
Global Network: Food Economy
Visualizing Taste
Documenting ‘Taste’
The Taste Realm
Process: A Sensorial Cycle
Tracking the The Act of Gestation
Urban Agenda : The Sushi Network
Tracking : Alternative Inputs
Urban Mapping: Taste City ‘Tangible Taste’
Collaborative project: Sight, Smell, Taste
Performativity of Taste :Taste Alchemy
Food and Colour Representation
Taste Mapping: Performativity
Comparmentalisation of Smell: ‘Smell’ Cube
Mapping Taste to a Form
Scents and Commercial (Colour) Perceptions
Timmy’s Journey : A Tuna’s Narrative Globalisation of Japanese Cuisine Speculating the Future of Sea Industrialization Future Strategies : Architectural Contingencies Brief: Tectonic Intervention
“The environment we perceive, it is our invention” as postulated by H.v Forster, the investigation begins with a perceptual journey, to create personal maps of existing places (Sense).
The journey begin with a focus of sight, and then smell and ended with an amalgation of sight and taste. The quantification of the senses creates a vivd sketch of momentary spaces, (Map)ping the human experience.
OxfordDS6 This studio will explore the the future of urban networks whether for people, information or matter; creating projects that rethink, augment and mutate existing conditions. Developing novel technologies and innovative design strategies with the core philosophy:
The device (Wear) functions as an “interpretant” of space. It is an functioning artefact that embodies the aesthetic and ethic criteria and our way of thinking about the [city]space. It contains within itself, names, places, situations, and all the contradictoriness and complexity. The symbolism of this real, physical environment which surrounds us and affects our senses can beused to contruct new possible scenarios in the future (Speculate), new ways of interpreting layers of the city. In the speculative future, building are reconstituted into a new entity, via a self organising algorithm, that consist not only of objects, but also events, ideas, activities. A speculative algorithm that is can be used and re-used to design new system of networks, boundaries, borders and constraints. Exploring relationships between physical objects and the flows around them (Transient), a new system of relations, a new kind of infrastructure will emerge - towards a new multiplicity.
Sense
first you look inside then you look outside.
Wear
Map
Speculate
06
01 /
Material
I am interested in the link between art, science, and technology, how the eyes and brain prioritize, and reality as a subjective experience vs. an absolute truth. As a visual artist, I cannot think of a topic more stimulating and yet so basic, than the act of seeing - how the human brain makes sense of the visual world. - Devorah Sperber
Studio View: “After Vermeer 2,� 2006, by Devorah Sperber, 5,024 spools of thread, stainless steel ball chain and hanging apparatus, clear acrylic viewing sphere, metal stand Six Eye-Centered Portraits, 2006 by Devorah Sperbert
Whilst getting started on the exploration of sight, I was intrigued by the idea of pixelation and was drawn to the works of Deborah Sperber. Inspired by Sperber, visual abstraction and pixels as a concept of visual information layering.
To explore this, I recorded and studied the factors that were involved whilst partaking a journey down the colourful corridors in John Henry Brookes Building.
By layering the information processed by the human visual system, colours and frames of sight is extracted according to ďŹ xed point of the corridor. The human vision while in motion goes through a tunnelling process of receiving frames and identifying points of interest. During this brief exploration, the RGB colour cube, a medium that is frequently used in computer graphics, is adopted to express colours in motion. The colours in frames are recorded, and pixelated as a means to abstract information and identify patterns of colours in motion.
Keywords: Colour and Sight, Corridor Frames, Quantifying points of colour, moving,transient data form, RGB values
Transition frames and pixelation through the corridor.
Visual Structures Patterns and anatomy 08
Demosaicing
Geometry of photosensors
Taken from The Million Dollar Homepage (http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com/)
09
Quantifying visual data Amorphous data
Physical point in a raster image.
Quantifying visual data points
Amorphous, transient data
Visual Structures Colour Definitions 010
The 3D Scope Mapping Colours
Luminance and Chrominance
Quantifying the visual image using video scopes
Colour Space (IPT)
The 3D Scope Geometry created by colour properties Journey through town and colour space IPT (post production using Adobe Premiere Pro).
Colour Spaces / Categorical Perception A vectorscope measures the chrominance (color components) of a video signal, including hue and saturation. A vectorscope maps a video’s color information onto a circular chart. The traditional waveform monitor is useful in measuring the brightness, or luminance component, of a video signal. In Premiere Pro, the waveform monitors can also display chrominance information. The waveform monitor works something like a graph. The horizontal axis of the graph corresponds to the video image from left to right. Vertically, the waveform displays the luminance levels, and optionally, the chrominance levels. Colour Spaces are three-dimensional geometric constructs in which points representing colors or color stimuli are arranged according to some principle, forming solids. In this exploration study, quantification of colour in a frame is explored via categorical perception. In this exercise, the intention was to capture a non-obvious colour dimension and amorphous data in a journey through town.
012
Collaborative project: Sight, Smell, Taste
Experiment B An investigation about the influence of Colour effects the Perception of Taste Whilst doing a collaborative project that merges the fields of sight, smell and taste, we decided to explore how the perception of food colouring affects taste and smell. We conducted experiements investigating the intricacy of colour perception and its influence on the perception of taste and smell.
To investigate the influence of colour of the environment and individual physiological reaction to taste. This is done while smelling, biting and ingesting lemons. Conclusion: There is a common trend of reactions from different primary colours.
Experiment A To investigate the influence of colour of food to taste Multiple attempts were done in trying to record reactions to different food colourings. Inconclusive as variables and conditions of tasting experiment varied.
Food and Colour Representation
Commercial representation of different colours Using colour mapping methodology used previously, scents, fragrances and odours are captured and categorised accordingly in a RGB cube. It’s representation of colour inspired by its marketed hue.
Filter bags containing ingredients arranged according to its corresponding colour.
The goal of this design object is to map and unify different ingredients, to identify association between scents and colour.
Sense Wear Map Speculate
014
Comparmentalisation of Smell: ‘Smell’ Cube
Inspired by the RGB Cube, and Colour Space investigation done previously, we set out to map out the sense of smell to different colours as they are marketed. We tried to capture the dimensions of different smell within a single object-a compartmental categorisation of smell/scents.
COMPARTMENTALISATION of Smell
Scents and Commercial (Colour) Perceptions
TASTE
pepper
adjectives
citrus
coffee
thyme
lemon
basil
cheese
worchestershire sauce
salty
coriander
lime
curry vanilla
spicy
apple
green tea
orchid
smoky
rose
bitterness sweet
talcum
peach
milky
detergent
bubblegum
savory
mint
cherry
creamy fresh acidic
blackcurrant
strawberry
minty
blueberry
chilli
fermented raspberry
fizz bittersweet stale zesty
mapping senses with the medium of colours description ; materials / ingredients used in reference to the colour cube experiment.
savoury
lemony
mint
fruity
woody/resinous
floral
sour
salt
pungent
medicinal
fragrant
bitter
antiseptic
acrid
adjectives
herb
SMELL
citrus
syrup
Taste and Sight Exploration Taste Representation Dimensions of Taste The concept of the Chomp Cube started with the merging of visual and taste. We wanted to focus on the dimension of taste, as it was an uncharted, fresh and subjective territory. After many discussions, we agreed that we wanted to explore the following:
How do we record taste objectively? Can we replay taste? Is there an alternative way to DESCRIBE/REPRESENT taste?
? new way/system of experiencing a meal?
Ingredients and Taste Representations
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02 /
Technology Engaging the brain Electroencephalography (EEG) as a tool to quantify sense of taste satisfaction during a meal. -To measure the microstructure of a meal, reflecting hunger, palatibility and satiation. Signal processing
IdeallyEMOTIV EPOC
NEUROSKY MINDWAVE
HARDWARE
Relaxed, without blinking
Relaxed, signals indicate blinks
Signals indicate minimal jaw movements
Relaxed, changes in signal indicates eye blink
Signals indicate minimal jaw movements
Signals indicate chewing motion
Relaxed, signals indicate blinks
Signals indicate minimal jaw movements
SIGNAL OUTPUTS
Signals indicate chewing motion
020
EEG Emotive Mapping Brain Activity Neuroimaging the Taste Experience.
Neutral state; resting state
Neutral state; relaxed state
-memory is triggered Intake
Pause / Swirl in mouth Gulp / Swallow
-memory is triggered
neutral
GESTURAL SCORE// The act of mastication, is further dissected while taking in context of eating as a gestural score of the tongue. Pulses, rhythm and tongue movement were studied as an additional element in the process of tasting. Mae and Jun looked into methods to track movement and multiple dimensions of taste, e.g. texture,
intensity, continuity, temperature, etc.
The movement of mastication were explored by means of a magnetic headset and heat mapping device to direct and inform a potential additional output of the Taste Cube.
The interface has two components: A customized headset that functions as a sensor receiver and a magnet that provides sensor input. Magnetic field sensors are attached at the end of the headset, positioned in front of the mouth and the participants affixes magnets to her tongue with Fixodent. As participant moves her tongue, this creates varying magnetic fields, which are received and used to map movement of tongue while eating.
024
Tracking: The Act of Gestation
Tracking : Alternative Inputs
Arduino Coding + Visual Platform / Taste Impulses
Arduino Coding + Architecture
Firmitas, Utilitas, Venutus 1/3 of Vitruvius’s elements for a well designed building
“Venutus”
026
03/ Structure
EEG input - Arduino : Capturing the Experential
VISUAL PLATFORM “MAKING THE INVISBLE PROCESS VISIBLE”
Eating as a transient process
Process / Taste Experience
028
Wearable: Sensing Technology
The device (Wear) functions as an “interpretant” of space. It is an functioning artefact that embodies the aesthetic and ethic criteria and our way of thinking about the [city]space. It contains within itself, names, places, situations, and all the contradictoriness and complexity.
Sight
Taste Cube Neuronal feedback
Taste
Visual output
-developing taste as an visual sensory explosion -AIM: to spatially record and map every food process in tokyo
Chomp// The dimensions of taste is a vast one, in which includes the basic tastes, flavour, palatability, temperature, continuity, aroma, texture, etc. It is also established that visual image of food plays a big role in a user’s taste palette and acceptance of food. The cube harnesses values from RGB chrominance graphs and maps visual information of the food accordingly while capturing the pulses one experiences in the act of tasting. Inspired by the pattern of pulses to the mind that originates from the simple act of tasting, Mae and Jun sets out to create a taste cube that visualises the simple act of eating: Chomp. Pulses on the cube, mapping the different sensations one experiences in the act of eating. The waves of data, both visual and taste are represented and coded accordingly using a LED cube, transforming the experience of taste, from a mostly private experience, to a public one, hence allowing the act of ‘tasting’ to be a shared experience.
Visual Structure Creating a 3D visual platform
Constructing the cube 1. LED x 64 2. Resistors x 16 3. Arduino x 1 4. Perforated PCB 5. Soldering Iron 6. Drill (for the jig) 7. Cardboard template (for a jig)
Error
030
Creating a Visual Medium: LED Cube
Visual Medium: 4 x 4 x 4 LED Cube -A 3d visual display experimentation -depicting patterns -patterns informing users different dimensions of taste -taste and lighting configuration data is explored. Contemplating the “wearable” The TASTE CUBE >>> CHOMP A data cube of one’s experience while tasting food. - Allows other people to “experience” and imagine the taste of the food consumed by the people around us. Data cube encapsulates different dimensions of taste, from the basic sweet, sour, salty, bitter and umami to the mouthfeel (texture, temperature, crunchiness or chewiness etc.) of eating the food. Data is presented onto the cube with LEDs representing different taste on different corners of a surface, the LEDs on each corners light up and pulse when a taste is detected on the tongue, mimicking the signals that the taste buds send to the brain when they bind with the molecules of the food. The mouthfeel elements such as temperature change and texture will also be showed on different sides of the cube. - Aim to obtain data from EEG and use it as the input to control the pulsing and locations of the LEDs being lighted up.
Systems Data Acquisition
Data Analysis
Filtering Mechanism
Aggregation
Coding, Pattern Interpretation
Mapping data on 3D display LED
Acquisition Data from Neurosky
Mindwave
Signal Processing and Classification
Acquisition Server
Binary Patterns
OpenVibe Designer
Microcontrollers
Varying binary sequences according to different bandwidth signals, different taste experiences
Electrode Localisation
Beta
Topographical Mapping 2D/3D Vortex
filtered waveforms
Arduino
inconclusive,
Theta Delta
+
.csv writer .gdf writer
as of yet...
Compatible Baud Rate
data filters
WEARABLES Flora Neopixels LED Conductive Thread LIly Pad Ada fruit LED Display
Alpha
Processing / MatLab
CSV Data file
Frequency threshold
}
Display Signal
frequency bandwidth Serial Communication between dual
microcontroller platform
Transferring text values to arduino
sending serial data...
Acquisition: Taste Pulses
Information Differentiation
LED 4x4x4 Display
EEG
Coding
loading...
2 Different Devices, Using the same technology
Signals
Form Finding
Rhythm of light play were used to simulate different types of flavour experienced during the transient act of tasting. This is done via coding sequences to represent different light play compatible to the sensation of flavour.
Bitter
Sour Form finding and rhythm
Salty
‘Tangible Taste’
Sweet
032
Sense Wear Map Speculate
Mapping Taste Rhino/ Grasshopper / EEG
Visual Structures in Architecture
Future Cities Lab A.
Ix Surface Prototype
Future Cities Lab project
034 Form Finding via Rhino/ Python / EEG
Importing csv. data from excel into python and rhino.
Mae eating Katsu Chicken.
The taste data grows as EEG data retrieved streams during eating.
Layering and colouring making up a unique form for each unique experience.
Jun Yu eating ramen noodles.
However, data lacks systematic filtering, and is ineffective in accurately representing taste and flavour.
Form Finding via Rhino/ Grasshopper / EEG
Pros : -Livefeedback from EEG Headset -Filter manipulation to differentiate different bandwidth of brainwave/ -calibrating sampling rate to obtain data at intervals
05/ Environment 036
037
Taste City
Taste Mapping: Performativity
038
Our eyes let us “taste” food at a distance by activating the sense memories of taste and smell. Even a feast for the eyes only will engage the other senses imaginatively, for to see is not only to taste, but also to eat. The chef’s maxim, “A dish well presented is already half eaten,” recognizes that eating begins (and may even end) before food enters the body. Television cooking shows—there are now entire channels devoted entirely to food—are a way of eating with the eyes by watching others prepare, present, and consume food, without either cooking or eating oneself. Cookbooks, now more than ever, are a way of eating by reading recipes and looking at photographs. Those books may never see the kitchen. Indeed, experienced readers can sight-read a recipe the way a musician sight-reads a score. They can “play” the recipe in their mind’s eye. While not unique to the experience of food, visual aspects of food are no less essential to it. First, the eyes play a critical role in stimulating appetite. Visual appeal literally makes the mouth water, gets the juices going, starts the stomach rumbling—in other words, sets the autonomic reflexes associated with digestion in motion. These responses—salivation, secretion of gastric juices, hunger pangs—are involuntary, spontaneous, instinctive, though the cues are ones that we learn. Second, the eyes are bigger than the stomach. Visual interest can be sustained long after the desire to taste and smell has abated and appetite has been sated. Perhaps for this reason, the most spectacular displays are likely to come at the end of the meal.
“Taste” Origin Latin Tangere (‘To touch) Gustare (‘To taste’)
Old French Tast Taster
(Touch, Try, Taste)
Taste (‘touch’)
Taste in its most materialistic form in relation to architecture can define areas within a macro context in terms of districts, where the aroma and mere flavour of a certain cuisine can help initiate place-making and memorable journeys. Mnemonics and genus loci quality of the sense of taste is one that exists unconsciously in the collective thought process of the masses, and not confined to the few individuals actually paying attention to it. The sensation of flavour is different to each person, as is the perception of a space to its varied user, to each their own appetite. Common terms of taste experience include relishing, tang, savouring. An individual appreciation of the burst of ingredients merging together to form a singular emotional experience of pleasure, indifference or dislike. The qualitative of taste, is expressed by the device, coded by quantitative data. It is in its representation of sensation that runs in line with experiencing architecture. Architects, in a nutshell, are always trying to define the intangible aspects of either society, culture, community into building design by trying to abstract them into form and space. Justification of use of tools at hand, using tangible sources like ingredients and architectural elements to provide an intangible experience. With the device, we can finally complete the full circle, by recreating it into a tangible result, completing the experience, both sensorial and spatial. Taste can also help the architecture discipline and its practice extend to domains varying “from the physiological to the atmospheric, from the sensorial to the meteorological, from the gastronomic to the climatic. In a world where more and more skeptics and cynics are born everyday, a want for a interactive building that transforms and projects the internal physiological experience, the need for justification and visual confirmation is an actual qualification for future architecture. An architecture or system that engages the senses of the users, whilst retaining its covert functions and ambience.
039
Sense Wear Map Speculate
040
Globalisation of Japanese Cuisine
The Industrialisation of Taste
042
Tsukiji Fish Market , Tokyo
-Tsukiji Fish Market isn’t just a market it is a three ring aquatic circus. Situated on a piece of reclaimed land in Tokyo Bay and officially known as the Tokyo Metropolitan Central Wholesale Market (Tokyo Chuo Oroshiuri Ichiba), it is the largest fish markets in the world, accounting for 90 percent if the seafood that passes through Tokyo and a third of the seafood that passes through Japan.
The seafood arrives daily from 60 different countries: crab from Alaska and Russia, frozen torpedo-like tuna from Spain and Croatia, seas urchin from Oregon and Australia and anchovies from Peru. Most of the sea creatures are still alive and it is not unusual to see octopus slide out of buckets and crawl across the floor. The seafood is moved through the market in handcarts and motorized carts that buzz around in all directions and get snarled in traffic jams. Because the seafood passes through the market so fast there isn’t much of a fishy smell.
Five million pounds of seafood, worth $28 million, is sold in the market every day, 11 times more than the Fulton Fish Market in New York City and seven times more than the Paris’ Rungis Market (the world’s second largest wholesale market). Moving the fish in, selling it, auctioned it off, preparing for delivery to fish wholesalers and restaurants, and moving it out is work force of 60,000 people aided by 32,000 vehicles---trucks, vans, hand carts, bicycles, and tree-wheeled wagons and turret trucks that are narrow enough to maneuver down the narrow aisles.
The Tsukiji Market, center, is seen in this aerial photograph taken in Tokyo. Photographer: Tomohiro Ohsumi/Bloomberg As the distributional center for the domestic and international fishing industries that feed Japan as an entire nation, the market provides an interface between multinational suppliers and producers, the small-scale shopkeepers that still hold a large stake in Tokyo’s food retail, and members of the public. For this reason Tsukiji as it is now appears doubly paradoxical in the context of contemporary urban economic logics: it is both distributional warehouse and farmer’s market exactly where we would not expect to find them: in the center of the city.
044
06/ Sustainability
Sense Wear Map Speculate
045
Global Network: Food Economy
The Sushi Economy
Embodied Energy within Lifecycle Analysis in Sushi 046
Primary Resource Extraction
Processing and Manufacturing
Delivered Energy
Transport Final Product
Embodied Energy
Assembly
Maintenance (Recurring)
Demolition / Recycling
Lifecycle ; ‘Cradle to the Gate’
Primary Energy
Resource Extraction
Transport Unfinished Product
Embodied energy spent on : • Transport Fuel (to and from work) • Embodied energy of transport (to and from work) • Energy of services (health, legal, accounting) • Energy to produce food to feed the workforce (transport, agriculture, refrigeration)
Processing and Manufacturing
Transportation of Final Product
Assembly
Demolition/ Recycling
4
Lifecycle Analysis : In the Case of Timmy the Blue Fin Tuna
Processing and Manufacturing 3
Transport Unfinished Product
5
Transportation of Final Product
1 Primary Energy 6 Assembly 2
Resource Extraction
7
Demolition/ Recycling
048
Environmental and Health Issues: Radioactivity
Sense Wear Map Speculate
049
Speculating the Future of Sea Industrialization
050
Move to contaminated soils The Tokyo government decided in 2001 to relocate the market from Tsukiji to a less cramped facility being built on reclaimed land in Tokyo Bay about four kilometers (2.5 miles) away. The move has been delayed in part because of toxic soil that needs to be removed from the new site.
Tsukiji plays host to a spatial consolidation of the multiple stages of exchange in urban food supply: stages that are elsewhere growing increasingly separate, disparate, and invisible. Tsukiji’s connection to trade at all levels and its openness to the public still play a crucial role in its urban identity as both guardian and heir to a conception of preindustrial mercantile Tokyo.
Move to a New Market The relocation to Toyosu represents the erosion of market workers’s ability to pursue an occupation situated within an all-embracing social world. Although some of the positive aspects of the current market buildings appear to remain in these outline proposals for the new inner market buildings at Toyosu (for example the abundant storage space seen in the image above), the rigid concrete shells will make for an altogether different kind of occupation. The requirement for intensified refrigeration and total air conditioning will increase rental prices significantly, and relocation will therefore have different consequences for different types of traders. While larger wholesalers supplying restaurant chains or supermarkets may be relatively unscathed, the move will gravely affect those smaller traders supplying local restaurants and shopkeepers, for whom economies of scale do not enter in and adjacency plays a key role in the development of social ties and the elimination of transport costs.
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References Books: Bestor, T. (2004). Tsukiji The Fish Market at the Center of the World. USA: University of California Press Issenberg, S. (2008) The Sushi Economy: Globalization and the Making of a Modern Delicacy. USA: Gotham Books Lee, S. (2011). Aesthetics of Sustainable Architecture. Rotterdam: IOI Smith, C. and Ballantyne, A. (2012). Architecture in the Space of Flows. Abingdon : Routledge Websites: http://www.truce-project.eu/uploads/1/8/3/4/18347763/7-bio-inspired_computing_chrisantha_fernando.pdf http://www.etoolglobal.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/Embodied-Energy-Paper-Richard-Haynes.pdf https://www.labviewhacker.com/doku.php?id=projects:lv_epoc_interface:lv_epoc_interface http://www.ediblegeography.com/listening-to-what-the-tongue-feels/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Erb-N3OD6nc http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/courses/plin/plin2108/week7.php https://www.globalpolicy.org/component/content/article/162/27556.html http://www.fao.org/docrep/005/t1817e/t1817e13.htm http://www.techmadeeasy.co.uk/2013/01/21/make-your-own-4x4x4-led-cube-with-an-arduino/7/