Technology Studies - DS06 Oxford

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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04

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

018

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.

052

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/