Austrian Designers Turn Corruption into Edible Infographics

The problem with pie charts is that they're generally light on the pie. Recently, however, designers have begun using food as a medium for representing data in the same way that they once used inedible graphs and tables. Call it food for thought: These stat-packed dishes get diners thinking about world issues by placing them directly them in their dinner.

Following in the footsteps of edible interface projects like Data Cuisine or the Data Chef, Veronika Krenn and Vesela Mihaylova combine statistics and cuisine in their Taste of Data series, which recently snagged the Gabriele Heidecker Prize. The two recent graduates of the Interface Culture Lab at the University of Linz in Austria infuse these projects with plenty of tongue-in-cheek humor, using Christmas stollen to analyze holiday spending and depicting the statistics of men's extramarital affairs with a sliced banana.

MUNCHIES spoke with Krenn and Mihaylova about playing with food in the kitchen, the worst-tasting stats, and what inspired them to go from screen to plate.

MUNCHIES: How did this all begin? Veronika Krenn and Vesela Mihaylova: While studying, we met in the university's kitchen and discovered food as a natural language for us. Our first experiments in the field of edible interface finally convinced us to change the medium from the screen to food.

Why edible interfaces? The concepts of ambient displays, tangible interfaces and also edible interfaces have been introduced some years ago, increasing the bandwidth of communication with the other human senses. Our projects involve all the human senses while eating, and this is what attracts us the most. Food can communicate emotions and memories, and this connects the audience strongly to the message sent via the "data tastifications."

Where did the term "data tastification" originate? Our former professor, Martin Kaltenbrunner, categorized our Taste of Data projects [as such] and we took the term over.

At what point did you take the project out of the classroom? In his lectures, Kaltenbrunner introduced us to the concept of multimodal interfaces, in which we experimented with tangible, auditory, and edible interfaces. The projects Taste of Data and Data Slicers haven't been class exercises, but without the multi-sensual input of these lectures, we probably wouldn't be cooking data.

What are your events like? Tasty! Presenting a new data tastification to the audience always includes interesting discussions. We see our edible data representations as a starting point for involving people into social-relevant issues, or as a way to make them think about a certain problem.

What kind of statistics do you base dishes on? We combine local datasets with traditional dishes. As a starting point, we represented the female living situation in the city of Linz, Austria through a Linzer Torte, a famous cake claimed to be originating there. Then we prepared sausages according to the Corruption Perception Index in four countries. Baking the traditional Christmas stollen [fruitcake] is another example. There we embedded data about the Christmas money spending experience of six individuals. All these dishes are prepared with common recipes and their taste, flavor, smell, and consistency is usually recognized by the audience.

Tell me about your Data Slicer. The Data Slicer and the Taste of Data series are based on existing commercial products or traditional recipes, modified by datasets to communicate society relevant issues. The Data Slicers in particular are based on common graphical data design, the pie and bar chart, transforming the apple and banana slicers, which originally slice in equal pieces. We modified the tool so the data can be embedded into edible material.

Why did you choose extramarital affairs as a topic with bananas, of all things? For our second Data Slicer project we decided to communicate datasets about male sexual activities with a banana because the fruit has a strong phallic resemblance. The three banana slicers are based on The Kinsey Report, a pioneering study from 1948 about human's sexual behavior. By using the slicers, you can cut a banana according to the number of extramarital sexual partners from males, the duration of foreplay in marriages and the sources of first ejaculation from males.

How do edible interfaces foster discussion? The audience is very likely to discuss the presented data. People even give us suggestions on how their mothers or grandmothers used to prepare this certain dish. The statistics are based on issues which are relevant to the audience. So, the people gladly debate, question and analyze the results and the mapped value.

Which data dish tastes the best? In our opinion, the Christstollen project tasted the best! The cakes were representing the way people spend money for Christmas. Each of these stollen had advantages, depending on the taste preferences of the eater. Some were more preferred than the others, but all of them were delicious.

And the worst? The sausages were by far the most disgusting and even uneatable project we did so far. Connecting the Corruption Perception Index to meat scandals in the specific countries brought together some inappropriate ingredients into the sausages and made them hard to swallow.

What do you have coming up next? It's important to connect local data and traditional recipes from the area where the tastification is going to happen, so who knows? But we would like to experiment with edible 3D printers in the future.

Thanks for speaking with me.