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| Main Authors: | , , , , , |
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| Format: | Preprint |
| Published: |
2025
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.06507 |
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| _version_ | 1866910045597335552 |
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| author | Wang, Ziming Wu, Yiqian Zheng, Qingxiao Zhang, Shihan Barker, Ned Fjeld, Morten |
| author_facet | Wang, Ziming Wu, Yiqian Zheng, Qingxiao Zhang, Shihan Barker, Ned Fjeld, Morten |
| contents | What if future dining involved eating robots? We explore this question through a playful and poetic experiential dinner theater: a tangible design fiction staged as a 2052 Paris restaurant where diners consume a biohybrid flying robot in place of the banned delicacy of ortolan bunting. Moving beyond textual or visual speculation, our ``dinner-in-the-drama'' combined performance, ritual, and multisensory immersion to provoke reflection on sustainability, ethics, and cultural identity. Six participants from creative industries engaged as diners and role-players, responding with curiosity, discomfort, and philosophical debate. They imagined biohybrids as both plausible and unsettling -- raising questions of sentience, symbolism, and technology adoption that extend beyond conventional sustainability framings of synthetic meat. Our contributions to HCI are threefold: (i) a speculative artifact that stages robots as food, (ii) empirical insights into how people negotiate cultural and ethical boundaries in post-natural eating, and (iii) a methodological advance in embodied, multisensory design fiction. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_06507 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2025 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | A Meat-Summer Night's Dream: A Tangible Design Fiction Exploration of Eating Biohybrid Flying Robots Wang, Ziming Wu, Yiqian Zheng, Qingxiao Zhang, Shihan Barker, Ned Fjeld, Morten Human-Computer Interaction What if future dining involved eating robots? We explore this question through a playful and poetic experiential dinner theater: a tangible design fiction staged as a 2052 Paris restaurant where diners consume a biohybrid flying robot in place of the banned delicacy of ortolan bunting. Moving beyond textual or visual speculation, our ``dinner-in-the-drama'' combined performance, ritual, and multisensory immersion to provoke reflection on sustainability, ethics, and cultural identity. Six participants from creative industries engaged as diners and role-players, responding with curiosity, discomfort, and philosophical debate. They imagined biohybrids as both plausible and unsettling -- raising questions of sentience, symbolism, and technology adoption that extend beyond conventional sustainability framings of synthetic meat. Our contributions to HCI are threefold: (i) a speculative artifact that stages robots as food, (ii) empirical insights into how people negotiate cultural and ethical boundaries in post-natural eating, and (iii) a methodological advance in embodied, multisensory design fiction. |
| title | A Meat-Summer Night's Dream: A Tangible Design Fiction Exploration of Eating Biohybrid Flying Robots |
| topic | Human-Computer Interaction |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.06507 |