Many people remember a specific food they enjoyed as children, whether it’s a special pie made by a grandparent, a once-a-year tasty treat for a holiday or spring rolls from a street vendor. But while the memory of the experience is readily available, the recipe to make that food is not. Even with access to recipes online or passed down through generations, it’s hard to balance the complicated process of cooking with the sensory details from a memory.

What if we could use technology to take some of the pain out of re-creating recipes? Maybe a thermometer to keep tabs on the temperature or a stirrer to continuously mix ingredients? That way, a cook could focus all of their attention on the details in their memories: the taste, the texture or the smell.

, a 91̽»¨ doctoral student of human centered design and engineering, developed a toolkit of sensors and controllers that helped her re-create three dishes from growing up in China: rice wine, tofu and spring roll wrappers.

Luo April 25 at the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. , 91̽»¨associate professor of human centered design and engineering, and , 91̽»¨assistant professor of human centered design and engineering, are also co-authors on this paper.

91̽»¨News sat down with Luo to talk about this research.

What inspired you to do this project?

Danli Luo: It all started when my advisers and I were brainstorming scents and spices. There’s a very special spice, called litsea oil, that I don’t think is common in Western culinary tradition or even in Asian culinary tradition. It’s very specific to a region that my parents are from, thousands of miles away from here. So the inspiration for this project was to develop a toolkit that could help us re-create culturally meaningful dishes — all three of the dishes I made for this paper used different spices from my childhood. I had to dig around the internet quite a lot to find the litsea oil. And it’s still a bit different than what’s in my memory.

Why do the foods have to be personally significant to use this method?

DL: If you haven’t tried a dish ever, how can you re-create a personal experience from it? This toolkit works more with something that you have eaten but never made before — such an ancestor’s recipe — and you just can’t figure out the process.

The toolkit helps us simplify that process. And then we use our memory to gauge the final product. During the process of re-creating these dishes, we can extract the joy and the connection to our family and loved ones.

How does your toolkit compare to other “precision cooking” techniques, such as an Instant Pot or a bread maker?

DL: Instant Pot is a great tool, but it automates everything. If something goes wrong, you won’t understand what happened. You just have to do it again, and you still don’t know why or how things went wrong because you are not part of the experience. And most of the time I don’t think people have agency over the recipe that they’re going to try.

We want to celebrate the cooking effort, that connection, that ritual of eating together with family and friends. So it’s not like we want a toolkit that just takes care of the cooking for us. We would love to see people enjoying cooking with a little help from the tool to make the cooking process less complicated.

So how does the toolkit work?

DL: The toolkit comes in after a period of trial and error. We find that there are certain things that we can quantify or digitize.

When people from my hometown are making the kinds of food we made for this paper, they don’t use a thermometer or a precision oven. They still use older techniques that have been perfected over centuries. But if you were to move this whole setup to another place, everything changes — for example, the humidity is different, crops have different protein content and water has different alkalinity.

There are so many reasons why a recipe might not work, and having a toolkit helps people with that. It can alleviate some of the pain by automating things such as temperature control so that you can focus on the flavor, on the chemical reaction, on the changes between molecules.

We wanted to elevate people’s sensitivity during the process of cooking with some degree of help from simple automation.

In your paper, you said the first time you tried to make the rice wine, it turned out to be vinegar. Tell us about the process.

DL: For the rice wine, I found this database online where people have written scientific papers about wine fermentation. So I followed their conditions, but it just didn’t turn out. Then I had to debug. The problem wasn’t with the thermometer I was using. I had to figure out other environmental factors that we didn’t predict.

In this case, I didn’t take into account that the chemical reaction of the rice and yeast mixture could change the temperature. The change was so slight that the thermometer didn’t detect it and adjust accordingly. I changed the temperature of the water bath that the reaction was sitting in to finally successfully make rice wine instead of vinegar.

How did it feel to make and then eat these foods from your childhood?

DL: I think cooking is a process that should be enjoyed and celebrated. For example, when I made the tofu, watching it curdle up was part of the fun. You can see how the chemical reaction happens instantaneously. That’s really enjoyable for me. And that’s an experience we wanted to pass along. You can buy packaged tofu from the supermarket and it tastes OK. But the fun of making it is an irreplaceable experience.

When I tasted the flour skin spring roll, it brought me back to when I was a kid in my father’s hometown. This is street food. It’s in a market and we would walk around and eat it together. It’s a great memory.

This research was funded by the National Science Foundation.

For more information, contact Luo at danlil@uw.edu.

Grant numbers: 2029249 and 2222242

During the Apollo missions to the moon in the 1960s, the LOL, or “little old ladies,” method referred to the women who wove wires through and around small magnetic beads by hand to build core memory objects. These objects, which took the form of ropes or square planes, stored information for the computers that would guide astronauts in space.

This is just one of the hidden histories of design that 91̽»¨ assistant professor of human centered design and engineering explores in her new book “,” published in June by MIT Press. The book highlights the idea that design stories from the past can show today’s designers how to create more inclusive technology.

In the case of the Apollo guidance computer design, Rosner showed that the “worlds of handwork and computing, or weaving and space travel, are not as separate as we might imagine them to be.” To raise awareness of this connection, Rosner and her team developed a “core memory quilt” that they presented at workshops and smaller weaving circles across the country over the past two years. Participants wove their own core memory plane quilt squares using conductive thread and beads. When the participants attached their finished squares to the quilt, it sent tweets and played sound clips from engineers describing the real core memory project. The paper describing the quilt won a at the recent conference.

91̽»¨News sat down with Rosner to learn more about what it means to uncover the hidden figures in the history of technology design.

Your book is called “Critical Fabulations.” What is a fabulation?

DR: For me, a fabulation has been a mode of essentially telling stories that underpin design but that are undertold or silenced.

In retelling those stories, which is the project of the book, you come up with different theoretical commitments which then, in turn, shape your methods. So my book offers a series of case studies that show how retracing design stories produces different presents and futures.

Do you have an example you can walk me through?

DR: I would love to talk about the core memory project. So the canonical view of the Apollo guidance computer is that there are these key innovators that were part of the mission. And we hear their stories through documentaries like “” in which , who was an engineer on the Apollo project, describes the way the computer was constructed. And we get this little view in the documentary of some of the work behind the scenes, but we don’t see very much beyond that.

So you found out about the LOL method from the “Moon Machines” documentary! How did you link the core memory project to quilting?

DR: To get started on this project, we wondered if we could get ahold of any of the original core memory planes. So I went to eBay to see, “Huh, what can I find?”

We discovered this beautiful core memory plane. When I held this in my hands, I thought: “Wow, this is incredibly similar to another form of memory work: the work of quilting.” I thought about the connections to quilting and the histories that I had just started uncovering. Who were these women who were constructing these planes? In particular the raw descriptor of the LOL method, the little old lady method, really drew me in.

I was incredibly lucky to team up with 91̽»¨Department of Communications doctoral student and , who is a quilter who also had a long-standing practice of working with obsolescent technology like old film strips. When we started working on this, we were thinking of it as a way to explore methods of design that allow us to re-presence this history but then also expand what we think of as a design method.

What did you find as you were working on this project?

DR: I found a few things. One of them is that it complicates this separation between cognitive versus manual labor. We see how the material labor, the hands, involves intellectual labor as well. These two can’t be torn apart.

This means embracing those connections throughout a design or engineering project instead of the sort of siloed effects that we have. It also means valuing process in addition to outcome, which is something we just so rarely do in computer science and engineering.

I really like this idea that, from past examples, design actually includes both manual and intellectual labor. Why is it important for current designers to incorporate these elements?

DR: If we think about leaving design up to just certain groups, it’s going to reproduce racial and gendered inequalities. I think that’s a key point. Design seeks to upend these inequalities, but it often contributes to reinforcing or further entrenching them in ways that it just doesn’t see because it doesn’t ask the hard questions.

Designers have been skilled in making these very pretty pictures of the future. But we’re less good at designing what might go wrong or how. In order to do that, we need to look to the past and the stories we tell.

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For the CHI paper, HCDE senior lecturer is also a co-author. For the core memory project, Rosner has also collaborated with HCDE professor , 91̽»¨Information School doctoral student , HCDE master’s student and HCDE undergraduate students , Kyle Musselwhite, , and Nava Yael.

For more information, contact Rosner at dkrosner@uw.edu.

A new mobile app developed at the 91̽»¨ does the opposite. turns a digital sketch that you draw on your smartphone screen — a heart, maple leaf, raindrop, sailboat — into a walking route that you can send to a friend or loved one. The recipient of the “gift” tells the app how long they want the walk to last and receives step-by-step directions that eventually reveal the hidden shape on a map.

The sender can also include audio recordings, images, inside jokes or other messages that pop up at specified locations along the route to give the recipient hints.

The free app, available from and , was designed by 91̽»¨Human Centered Design and Engineering researchers to explore how GIS mapping technology shapes how we experience the simple act of walking. Trace aims to encourage communication and reflection, rather than focusing on competition or efficiency.

“For some people it was a delight to find that slowing down allowed them to meet new people or see familiar sites in their neighborhood in new ways, but at the same time giving up that control was a stress for other folks who had a routine, ” said project lead , assistant professor of Human Centered Design and Engineering and co-director of the .

Activity tracking apps like FitBit help people reach exercise goals, and routing apps like Google Maps are optimized to send people on the most efficient route to a particular destination. Trace, by contrast, forces walkers to relinquish control, go where the app directs them and in some cases experience traveling through a city quite differently than they’re used to.

In a presented last month in Seoul at the Association for Computing Machinery’s for computer-human interaction, 16 avid walkers in Seattle, Boston and Chicago who used Trace for a week tested more than 150 shapes. Some participants — who included a dog walker, an artist, a Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority employee and a lawyer who works on rights to public space — sent routes to friends while others simply used the app to draw walks for themselves.

In one instance, a woman who met her boyfriend at a French cultural center in Boston sent him a walk that traced the outline of the United States, the country that brought them together. Along the way, she included hints to the mystery pattern, like “The Star-Spangled Banner.” The two walked the route together in downtown Boston on a Sunday afternoon.

Unlike other apps that allow you to share a fixed route that you may have already run or biked, Trace allows a person to begin walking the route from any point in the city. The walker can also make the shape bigger or smaller by specifying how long the walk should last.

Some people found that using Trace introduced a different pace into their daily routines. One found himself in neighborhoods that he usually biked or ran through, but rarely walked. Others discovered new paths to local parks in their neighborhoods, or found time to engage with kids and neighbors as they paused to wait for the next direction. Rediscovering features that they often overlooked in their everyday environments invited unexpected surprises.

On the other hand, participants also found Trace to be deeply disruptive to familiar routines. It forced them to walk without having a clear sense of where they were going, and some shapes forced them to walk up and down the same street more than once, all of which felt disturbingly inefficient.

“We’ve sort of lost interest in exploring the same path two different ways, even though you can retrace your steps and have a different experience,” Rosner said. “That deep-seated need for efficiency says something about what we expect from our tools and what maybe our tools have enabled us to expect.”

In other instances, Trace routed people into neighborhoods that they perceived as unsafe or that made them feel uncomfortable. Those were among the times that people abandoned their walks. As some have begun to experiment with , those algorithms raise questions about what becomes a discriminatory act, Rosner said.

“Our goal for this research wasn’t necessarily to produce the next new app for walking, though we hope people will use and enjoy it,” Rosner said. “It was to use the tool to start asking questions about what we expect from our GIS routing tools and about the role that technology can play in our walks.”

Co-authors are 91̽»¨master’s students and and recent graduate .

The research was funded by Intel.

For more information, contact Rosner at dkrosner@uw.edu.