Taste and place: design, HCI, location and food

This paper describes the design and envisioning of a novel system that enables anyone interested in cooking and wild food to create menus, locate local ingredients, make recipes and understand the local food culture of an area. The system is the development and evolution of a generic multi-media publishing platform that we are developing, called Placebooks. This incarnation of the platform is called Tastebooks. Within the book we are able to add pictures and live-maps, locate and geo-tag any media, use videos, pictures and even publish our book. This paper demonstrates the system and gives examples of some of the Tastebooks that we have produced. We also offer a development framework for small businesses to use the system to their advantage, by matching up their locally available resources to the trails and recipes in the Tastebook, and this creates its own set of issues.