When I’m running on a treadmill, I usually end up staring at one of 3 numbers on its monitor to keep going. Broadly speaking, all the parameters on the screen can be segregated into one of two groups––they either help you set your goal (i.e. speed, distance and intensity of workout). Or, they tell you what that goal is costing you. The three measure metrics in that latter bunch are: time elapsed, time left, and caloric burn. At the moment I am functioning on a nasty caloric intake of 4 hours/day, on instagram.
I’m cooked.
She ate.
I binged.
Just go in and browse through the menu. The food or the app?
While on the treadmill, I was snacking on a 7-minute TechCrunch podcast about a company building an AI tool that enables you to text-search inside videos. They spoke about how videos today were manually impossible to cull through at the speed same as their rate of production, being a medium that lends itself to be one of the fastest growing archives. They claim that this new tool enables you to dissect-skim through videos by asking questions like ‘when did the man in the red shirt enter the screen?’. They foresaw the effectiveness of this feature in many ways, such as systematized ad placement. They named this tool Marengo–– which I misheard as Merengue. I was running, so naturally, my subconscious was thinking about food. But at that moment, I did pause over the peculiarity of the name and I looked it up. Turns out Marengo is also a food term.
Data consumption habits are gluttonous, of course. But it is amusing to see how we are gliding through a cascade of systems that enable us to first accumulate unprecedented amounts of data, after which we circle back to developing counter systems to be able to traverse through the sea of that material, only to annotate it further with more material. In doing so, the plot gets comedically eerie as one starts to spot the peculiar tendency of digital tools borrowing names from various foods as a means to either describe their infrastructures or to, in fact, make their very consumption more palatable.
Say, how many web cookies do you treat yourself to in a day? While the concept borrows its design from the seemingly harmless fortune cookie meant to carry small bits of information, you must bite into it to get what you desire. The cookie then ingested into your system sits like stubborn calories in a belly––hard to hide and harder to get rid of. But everyone knows that no one can resist a little cookie. Just like Cupcake, Donut, Eclair, Froyo, Gingerbread, Honeycomb, Ice cream sandwich, Jelly bean, Kitkat, Lollypop, Marshmallow, Nougat, Oreo, Pie, Quince Tart, Red velvet cake, Snow cone, Tiramisu, Upside down cake, Vanilla ice cream. Namely, these are Android OS versions 1.5 through 15, coined after desserts in alphabetical order to appear equally harmless as indulgent.
Now to metabolise all that.
When does the focus shift from preparing something to consume, to one’s potency to metabolise?
Sneaking and eating have had a curious relationship. There is sneak snacking, which most of us do, and the masking to factor for the food item’s desirability/undesirability. For example, as a child I could never swallow pills. So my mother used to crush the pill into powder and pour a sherbet syrup on top for me to eat it without sensing any bitterness. Phil from Modern Family used to play a cheeky game with his friend––every time they got together for dinner, they used to compete over the number of crickets they could respectively sneak into their wives’ meals without them finding out. Whoever snuck lesser insects had to pay the bill. Sometimes you sneak nutrients, sometimes leftovers but you always sneak the unwanted bits, oftentimes by refashioning them.
Spare parts of pork and ham are often ground up, canned, cooked and vacuum sealed. As they cool down, it forms a gelatinous binding that allows for it to stay consumable for longer. For flavour these spare parts are often mixed with salt, sugar, potato starch and water. This sneak-tactic became particularly popular as it began featuring as the only source of meat for American soldiers in World War II, due to their ability to survive extreme transportation conditions with minimal upkeep. However, because of their excessive availability, they became unwanted. Every meal, every day consisted of this tin shaped meat-dish. The issue became so rampant that soldiers started writing letters to the President to get it removed from their meal plan. Its association with undesirability became so prominent that the name of this dish soon transcended to everyday vernaculars pertaining to unwanted/unsolicited activities and phenomena. Even today it continues to be produced in excess in spite of its unsavoury reception. The Spam sits in contradiction, both in the aisles of our grocery stores and in our mailboxes, indestructibly so.
Prolonging of stay is another commonality between systems designed for eating and digital interfaces. The length of the stay is directly proportional to the quantity of consumption. Prolonged engagements produce an impression of inflated traffic and are often achieved by exaggerating portion sizes. When you get someone to stay for longer, you have more to offer and vice versa. It goes back to the initial theory–––produce a stream of material to annotate it with more material. Hotels offer endless meals or buffets. Digital interfaces offer endlessly circulating content. They both, in their own ways, call it the feed.
Foods and forms. Forms of food. Form as food.
Someone once suggested that the best way to eat a pizza was to invert it. Keep the cheese side down on the tongue. This way you get to taste the cheese, toppings, and sauce first, and it doesn’t burn the roof of your mouth. Pizza as an image is more associative as a slice than as a pie. There are studies that show that triangular foods are considered trendier, while rounder foods are presumed to be sweet. Did you know what other item of food came into markets as a by-product of the wars in the bid to stay edible for as long as possible? M&Ms. They look the way they do because the hard candy coating allowed for the chocolates to survive longer in tropical climates. They were evidently sold with the tagline––the chocolate that melts in your mouth, not in your hands. While a lot of foods could attribute their peculiar shapes to solving for longevity in circulation, that form most often, inherently comes to become the very identity of that consumable. Case in point, Pringles, known most for their unique hyperbolic paraboloid shape. They were designed this way to enhance structural integrity for each chip to resist from breaking. But today the very silhouette of the chip produces the brand recall value and sets it apart from all the other chips in the market. And yes, I did sneak in another edible/digital chip-chip analogy.
When you encounter these food items as digital terms, there is an associative consumption. You consume the form of the food. The design now is heavily reliant on the recognisability of that form. This is where intuition in design comes from. Recognition is recognisability that comes to be called intuition. This concept could also be flipped wherein alien forms induce memory of food forms. This food-form-flip is often used in interface designs. Here the form gives way to the naming which gives way to more form iterations.
In all the menu icons, for example––hamburger, kebab, bento, meatballs, club, dorito, breadsticks, spaghetti, skillet, waffle house, deconstructed spaghetti and meatballs.
Or the small alert boxes with brief notifications, also known as snackbars.
The little square symbols between texts that appear when a system/font is not able to recognise a character, is also known as tofu. The popular Google font Noto (“no tofu”) was developed to support as many writing systems as possible to prevent these tofu blocks.
How big is your byte? Mega, Giga or Tera?
Remember, I am still running on that treadmill. I am still incessantly staring at those 3 numbers to keep myself going. I stare at them because the flipping digits incentivise my stay thereby prolonging it. Food is always on the mind because the feed is always in sight.
Purée that. Bon Appetit.
About the Author:
Aarushi Surana is a creative practitioner with an allergy to templates. She enjoys short-circuiting and jump-starting factory presets by swapping default systems to analyze the misalignments.
On a given day, she has been found designing alarm clocks, localizing film/TV posters for Netflix, sneaking monobloc chairs in fonts, spelling out ramen with ramen, encoding tapestries, remodeling car & tuktuk interiors for 360 degree VR films, splicing out ‘like’ from audio clips, smuggling Chindōgu inventions in exhibition invitations.
She hopes to tame her ways, or not.