Cyborg Cook – Häusliche Nahrungszubereitung im digitalen Zeitalter
Zusammenfassung der Projektergebnisse
One main finding of the project is the fact that women – especially mothers – are so called early adopters of digital kitchen technologies and thus should be considered as pioneers in human-machine interaction. This finding contrasts with the public perception that smart technologies are predominantly associated with men and the figure of the technical tinkerer, as also the scholarship on everyday smart technologies finds and as the PI could confirm in discussion with the audience at the mayhaus performance. Developers and designers of digital and so-called smart technologies should develop domestic technologies in collaboration with their potential users, in particular with women, who proved to be more open towards new technologies than men. Another finding is that immersive fieldwork in domestic everyday life is highly suited to studying digital practices and their embeddedness not only in material, but also social, economic, political and ecological infrastructures. By placing digital technologies within broader networks of humans and non-humans, this finding allows to decenter the role of technologies towards a more holistic understanding of the social construction of technology. More ethnographic fieldwork could fruitfully be applied to understanding the complex processes of human-machine interactions across a diversity of fields from the home to local or national governance. An unexpected result during the project was the ubiquity of digital technologies in everyday food work, from smartphones to digital kitchen robots. On the one hand, this discovery confirmed the central hypothesis of the Cyborg Cook project, namely that digital technologies are already increasingly enmeshed in everyday life. On the other hand, the project revealed a surprising gap between the awareness of this ubiquity among even the most prolific users of these technologies. While kitchens are long since smart, the cooks (and their machines) who make them smart do not self-identify as such, begging further analysis. ‘Digitalisierte Ernährung: Ethnografische Erkenntnisse aus smarten Küchen’, blog contribution, Highways to Health, 11/2023, https://highways2health.de/blog/digitalisierte-ernaehrung.html?
Link zum Abschlussbericht
https://doi.org/10.21248/gups.91521
