Morphlour

Morphlour: Personalized Flour-based Morphing Food Induced by Dehydration or Hydration Method

Ye Tao, Youngwook Do, Humphrey Yang, Yi-Chin Lee, Guanyun Wang, Catherine Mondoa, Jianxun Cui, Wen Wang, Lining Yao

Publication: Morphlour: Flour-based Shape-Changing Food Induced by Cooking with Dehydration or Hydration Method (ACM UIST 2019) PDF

Role: Machine tool design, user-interface design, computational toolmaking, documentation

In this paper, we explore personalized morphing food that enhances traditional food with new HCI capabilities, rather than replacing the chef and authentic ingredients (e.g. flour) with an autonomous machine and heterogeneous mixtures (e.g. gel). Thus, we contribute a unique transformation mechanism of kneaded and sheeted flour-based dough, with an integrated design strategy for morphing food during two general cooking methods: dehydration (e.g. baking) or hydration (e.g. water boiling). We also enrich the design space of morphing food by demonstrating several applications. We end by discussing hybrid cooking between humans and a design tool that we developed to ensure accuracy while preserving customizability for morphing food

Design and Fabrication Workflow

We provide a user interface to design pasta pieces. This interface stores several recipes that users can choose from. With this tool, users can model their pasta pieces and receive visual feedback in real-time. The pasta pieces are fabricated with a modified gantry system, which has a customized stamping tool installed on its affector. The stamping mold is designed to be exchangeable, such that it is easy to clean and modify.