Talk by Lewis Hyland

This week's lab meeting includes a talk by Lewis on his work with the Open Food project.

'Recipe Work'

I will present some work I have been doing in connection with the open food project that has been on the back burner. In recent years there has been an increasing number of new technologies that have been designed to revolutionise the form and delivery of recipe instructions by reaching further into the user’s kitchen, producing ever more fine-grained instructions based on existing recipe practice. However, there is little research on the lived work of following instructions ‘in the wild’ as a resource for this design. This presentation reports on an ongoing study that seeks to fill that gap and provides an account of one occasion of domestic cooking focusing on the practices of ‘recipe work’. I have discovered that ‘knowing when to know’ competencies are important, which involve not only having knowledge but knowing when to apply it and adapt in the course of recipe work. This suggests that in addition to being able to capture, store and facilitate the deployment of instructions based on existing recipe practice, new technologies also need to be sensitive to the localised production of knowledge. I am currently at the stage of writing the study up and would be very grateful for comments and collaborators.