Immersive Sustainable Food Experience Design

The design of experiences that are immersive to consumers can be generated focusing on alternative tools that can stimulate physical, mental and emotional processes of consumers. Recent advances in immersive technologies provide promising opportunities to facilitate immersive experiences through technological capabilities. In this project, we developed and tested an immersive experience offered through Microsoft HoloLens 2 to create an interactive content narrative based on design criteria aimed at facilitating immersive experiences. These facilitators occur simultaneously, and it is challenging to isolate one facilitator from another as they are often experienced together. The ability to trigger empathy seems to be a key condition in opening consumers towards engaging in immersive experiences. This psychological mechanism suggests opportunities in the design of food environments to not only consider the environment to be perceived authentically, but also relatable to consumers. Triggering curiosity in this process seems to be highly effective in activating consumer interest and stimulating them towards certain choices over others that consumers perceived to be familiar.
Co-creative narrative designs are a valuable approach for the design of immersive experiences in this context. Multiple design approaches and tools exist that can be used as guidelines in the co-creative process. However, a consumer-driven co-creative approach creates the fundamental challenge that consumers often have limited expertise regarding potential technological solutions. In the context of immersive technologies, it needs to be recognized that the media context changes fundamentally between individual steps, thus potentially creating friction between the initial narrative design driven by consumers and the technological tool to support the narrative. We proposed a stepwise back-loop validation process in this project which not only facilitates a structured design approach with consumers, but also allows each individual design step to be validated to increase the transferability of results towards each next step and final outcome.

Our world is changing rapidly as a result of societal and technological developments that create new opportunities and challenges. Extended Realities (XR) could provide solutions for the problems the world is facing. In this project we apply these novel solutions in food and hospitality. It aims to tackle fundamental questions on how to stimulate a healthy and vital society that is based on a sustainable and innovative economy.
This project aims to answer the question: How can Extended Reality (XR) technologies be integrated in the design of immersive food experiences to stimulate sustainable consumption behavior? A multidisciplinary approach, that has demonstrated its strength in the creative industry, will be applied in the hospitality and food sector. The project investigates implications and design considerations for immersion through XR technology that can stimulate sustainable consumption behavior. Based on XR prototypes, physiological data will be collected using biometric measuring devices in combination with self-reports. The effect of stimuli on sustainable consumption behavior during the immersive experience will be tested to introduce XR implementations that can motivate long-term behavioral change in food consumption.
The results of the project contribute towards developing innovations in the hospitality sector that can tackle global societal challenges by exploiting the impact of new technology and understanding of consumer behavior to promote a healthy lifestyle and economy. Next to academic publications and conference contributions, the project will develop a handbook for hospitality professionals. It will outline steps and design criteria for the implementation of XR technologies to create immersive experiences that can stimulate sustainable consumption behavior. The knowledge generated in the project will contribute to the development of the curriculum at the Academy for Hotel and Facility at Breda University of Applied Sciences by introducing a technology-driven experience design approach for the course Sustainable Strategic Business Design.