Month: January 2016

Noura Howell

I tasted lemon, radish, and almond.

Before trying miracle berries, I had very positive associations with lemon. My mom uses a lot of lemon when making Egyptian-style lentils, a comfort food for me as my mom is half Egyptian. Also sometimes I eat just lemon and salt, which I learned from her. Recently when returning to visit the small town in Florida where I grew up, my mom and I stole some tangerines from a neighbor’s tree that was overflowing with fruit. We both enjoyed them. Then later we heard from another neighbor that nobody every picks from that tree because the fruit is too sour!

I didn’t have strong associations about radishes except that they are fresh, sharp, and certain varieties are referenced in jokes from particular anime I really like. I like almonds but had no strong feelings, just some minor associations with luxury, elegance, water wastefulness, and nutritional value.

Tasting miracle berries was disappointing. I was just waiting for the effects to wear off. Lemons were disgustingly sweet which went against all my personal, familial, and cultural associations with them. Radishes were fine. Almonds were blissfully the same. I felt like miracle berries might be popular because sweet is a popular flavor, and was again reminded that my food preferences are non-normative here for better or worse.

During a one-time occurrence of these perception changes, I sought to maintain my prior associations with lemon because the associations are related to my identity. If the perception changes from miracle berries occurred only rarely, I would probably try to avoid eating lemons during that time in order to preserve my prior associations. If lemons always tasted so sweet, then I’m sure my mom wouldn’t like them and so my associations of them would have been different from the start. I’d probably associate them with fruity candy which I’ve always thought was kind of gross.

Weina Chen

Foods tried:
1. Apple Cider Vinegar
2. Lemon
3. Tomato
4. Peanut Butter
5. Dark Chocolate

Associations with each (before):
1. Sour, acidic, sharp, clean, heard about it as a shampoo substitute
2. Sour, garnish, refreshing, clean, eyes watering
3. Sweet, Italian food, surprisingly a fruit not a vegetable, versatile, gardening
4. Protein, nutty, filling, some people have severe allergic reactions, jelly
5. Bittersweet, romantic, comforting, delicious, deep

Associations with each (after):
1. Sweet after-taste, acidic in stomach, sugar substitutes, unexpected, honey-glazed balsamic sauce
2. Like lemonade concentrate, summer, Popsicles, lemon sorbet, surprise
3. Like sugar sprinkled on tomatoes, home, garden salad, fruit, juicy
4. Exactly like before, expected, everyday, normal, underwhelming
5. Exactly like before, expected, delicious, normal, still a nice treat

I was really excited to participate in this workshop because I was intrigued by how a food can change your perception of taste. Every time I am in a restaurant and the server uses elaborate words like “earthy, woody, musky” to describe food, I am taken aback by how many adjectives people use to detail what they eat. I was curious to see whether this workshop would let me in on some of those insights. As a result, I think I may have been too excited and had too high of expectations for the workshop. While some of the foods did taste differently, I think I expected a bigger change than there was. My associations only changed slightly for the more sour foods and tended to lean towards more dessert-y or summery associations because of the extra perceived sweetness. If food tasted like this once a year, I think I would make it a point to eat lemons on that day (I normally cannot stand the sourness of lemons), but otherwise my behavior might not be so different. If it was like that all the time, I think the novelty would wear off quickly and soon no longer be of interest. As frequency increases, I feel like my perception of excitement and surprise decreases as the feeling settles into normalcy.

Beauty Measurements

Universal Beauty: A newborn baby, A sunny day, David by Michelangelo
Individual Beauty: Toile (the garment), UC Berkeley mug, Shape of a Square
Cultural Beauty: The genre of still life (our example, Still life with lemons, oranges, and a rose by Francisco de Zurbaran, Mayan artificial forehead flattening, Earthen Lamp

With the reading on Universals and its discussions regarding the difficulty of identifying what is truly “universal” or if the concept of “universal” even exists fresh in our minds, we decided to work backwards and start choosing examples of individual beauty before proceeding to the cultural and universal. For the examples of individual beauty, we worked on our personal experience, more specifically, with objects that we found beautiful in some way that we knew, perhaps from personal experience, were not universally considered beautiful. A prime example for this would be toile1, a garment that one of the group members finds rather beautiful, but is occasionally considered kitschy or simply ugly. In addition, other members of the group added examples such as the shape of a “square” (because it is a symmetric shape that was very easy to work with when it came to mathematics) and a UC Berkeley mug (because of its form, colors, and functional aspects). Working our way up from the individual, we next decided to take on the idea of cultural beauty. Just as it was for individual beauty, our personal experience was helpful for forming ideas of what could count as cultural beauty; however, for this group, we attempted to demonstrate a broader, cultural appeal for why we found this object beautiful or explain why this beauty was particular to a certain cultural group. The genre of still life was chosen because, as one of us noted, it required an appreciation and a process of learning how to look at it in order to comprehend why it could be considered beautiful. Although there are numerous examples of different cultural norms of beauty, we chose the Mayan artificial forehead flattening (a process through which infants wore an instrument on their heads to flatten the cranium, thus producing a more desirable look) since it manifests an idea of beauty that most cultures would not understand or recognize as beautiful. Finally, an earthen lamp was selected because of their use as oil lamps throughout India for a variety of purposes, ranging from the lighting at areas where there is no electricity, or by priests during worshipping deities and giving blessings, or in every hindu home during the festival of lights, Diwali2. Returning to the concept of universal beauty after exploring these other two classifications, we first tried to specify why we would possibly mean by this term. Though, for obvious reasons, we do not purport to have found the definition for “universal beauty,” the heuristic we used was that each object contained some quality that would foster some positive, affective response in any possible, sentient human or human-like being. For example, we chose a newborn baby since it represents a new life and the ability of organisms to create life; a recognition that appears concomitant with the visual appreciation of this object. Similarly, a sunny day was selected since it represents life and warmth, thus evoking a positive response in the subject that experiences this object. Finally, though we had our conflicts with putting an example that is so representative of a specific, cultural tradition of art, we chose David by Michelangelo as an example of universal beauty for its faithful representation of the human, male form.

Though our research was done drawing upon our personal experience, we attempted with each example to interrogate our own biases in considering why (or why not) we found this object beautiful, and then considering how others would react to them and if they would consider them beautiful. While we cannot account for every possible being when determining cultural or universal beauty, we made an effort to include the reaction of any plausible group that might interact with this object, including groups whose existence we may not be familiar with currently. This consideration of other possible groups when defining “beauty” was also productive in helping us think about how we could make a user interface beautiful, especially when that user interface is intended to be interacted with by a diverse group of users; specifically, it reminded us to remain cognizant of our personal and cultural biases with regards to how we define “beauty.” Additionally, the exercise lends an interesting perspective towards thinking about objects and their associations. While most of the objects we chose were beautiful because of aesthetics and emotional associations, many of them were functionally great as well. With these ideas in mind, when turning our focus towards a possible design problem, this exercise in interrogating the (various) meaning(s) of “beauty” obliges us to examine every particular detail of a design and consider its cultural and (possibly) universal connotations when viewed by a user. Although we cannot become completely free of our individual and cultural concepts of “beauty,” we must display empathy towards other concepts of beauty when working on a design meant to be seen by others. By striving to make our designs an expression of all three of these concepts of “beauty,” we can hopefully arrive at the ideal combination of personal style and universal appeal.