THE LIVING COOKBOOK The Living Cookbook aims to

By admin on October 30th, 2007

THE LIVING COOKBOOK

The Living Cookbook aims to cultivate communication and
collaboration in the kitchen by making people s cooking
experiences recordable and shareable in an interactive digital
cookbook. The goal is to preserve cultural and social roots on
the one hand, and stimulate cultural and generational
fertilization on the other. Instead of simply exchanging written
instructions, we capture the whole cooking process with
annotated audio and video and make it available for others so
that they can asynchronously reproduce the dish. When users
give instructions for a recipe, they author a multimedia
cookbook. We therefore rely on people s interest in
communication and story telling, as they are turned into actors
of a participatory theater, who interact with their audience via
technology.
The emotional quality of content created by family members or
intimate friends is expected to be very different in comparison
to the cooking sessions broadcasted on TV shows for a large
audience. This aspect promises to affect motivation and
engagement. People can customize each recipe with personal
tips and tricks, make explicit reference to their well known
target users, and thereby create a very personal experience.
The User Interface of the Living Cookbook is a client
application running on a tablet PC mounted on a kitchen
cabinet. It is implemented in Macromedia Flash and connected
to a server implemented in Java, which in turn controls a
camera for recording video, and a video projector for playing
back the video. Via the client interface a user can insert new
recipes, choose already inserted recipes and control video
recording and playback. The video is projected onto a wall
above the counter in order to provide a good view and still keep
the counter clear of devices. The content of the cookbook is
stored in an XML File on the server side. Video material is
referenced externally from the server s file system. Another
XML file stored on the server side defines all ingredients
including appropriate ranges and units.
Considering that the cooking activity requires extensive manual
work we tried to minimize users gesture based input. Given
that mouse and keyboard are obviously not suitable for kitchen
environments, we chose a touch screen display which can be
controlled by a pen or a finger. Since hands are often dirty
while cooking, the interface design privileged the use of a pen.
This means, for example, that the interactive elements of the
GUI have a size which is more suitable for the tip of a pen,
although interaction with a finger is still possible. Furthermore,
this implies that the user interface provides affordances for
direct manipulation with dragging whenever it makes sense
(e.g., to set a value for the quantity of an ingredient). Our goal
was to minimize the use of the virtual keyboard, which can be
displayed and tipped on the screen of the tablet PC (for entering
the name of the recipe, for example). Opening the virtual
keyboard, entering text by tipping character, and then closing
the keyboard pane is indeed a rather cumbersome activity:
additionally, it implies that the real estate of the display is
halved during the use of the keyboard.