Probing Integrated Household Information Systems for Integrated Food

Practices

Dennis Lawo

1,2 a

, Margarita Esau

1,2 b

, Thomas Neifer

1,2 c

and Gunnar Stevens

1,2

Information Systems, University of Siegen, Siegen, Germany

Institut f

ur Verbraucherinformatik, University of Applied Sciences Bonn-Rhein-Sieg, Sankt Augustin, Germany

Keywords:

Integrated Household Information System, Appropriation, Digital Receipt, Food Practices, Qualitative Study,

Design Probe.

Abstract:

Recent publications propose concepts of systems that integrate the various services and data sources of ev-

eryday food practices. However, this research does not go beyond the conceptualization of such systems.

Therefore, there is a deﬁcit in understanding how to combine different services and data sources and which

design challenges arise from building integrated Household Information Systems. In this paper, we probed the

design of an Integrated Household Information System with 13 participants. The results point towards more

personalization, automatization of storage administration and enabling ﬂexible artifact ecologies. Our paper

contributes to understanding the design and usage of Integrated Household Information Systems, as a new

class of information systems for HCI research.

1 INTRODUCTION

Food consumers face various challenges. On the

one hand, they are expected to consume sustainably

and reduce their food waste (Ganglbauer et al., 2013;

Prost et al., 2018). On the other hand, they aim to

reach their personal health or diet-related (Eikey and

Reddy, 2017; Prost et al., 2018) goals, or just en-

joy more hedonism and the positive aspects of food

(Grimes and Harper, 2008). Therefore, some con-

sumers are already using a variety of information sys-

tems, such as apps to track their diet, to check the in-

gredients of a product or just to use a digital shopping

list (Lawo et al., 2020b, 2019).

Accordingly, the digitalization of food consump-

tion practice offers new opportunitites to reduce ef-

fort and enable practices in line with the personal

goals (Lawo et al., 2020b). At the same time, the

ﬂood of information (Stevens et al., 2017), the work

of maintaining personal data (Eikey and Reddy, 2017)

as well as planning and tracking the home inventory

(Fuentes et al., 2019) adds new challenges for the con-

sumers. Instead of adding the data just once or re-

ceiving data from the producers, consumers are bur-

https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2848-4409

https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5179-7361

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7146-9450

dened with connecting different apps and information

by hand (Lawo et al., 2019).

This causes a mismatch with food practices which

are acknowledged to be connected as integrated and

dispersed (Ganglbauer et al., 2013), or entangled

(Nicolini, 2009; Lawo et al., 2020a; Shove et al.,

2012), while food data and applications (Lawo et al.,

2019; Aspray et al., 2013) are not. To resolve this mis-

match concepts of integrated Household Information

Systems (IHIS) were proposed. Inspired by research

on integrated business information systems (Becker

and Sch

utte, 2004), these concepts attempt to over-

come data silos and artiﬁcial separation of services,

by integrating data, connecting consumers to the sup-

ply chain, and offering personalized services (Angara

et al., 2017; Holmstr

om et al., 1999; Stevens et al.,

2017).

Although ﬁrst concepts (Angara et al., 2017;

Holmstr

om et al., 1999; Stevens et al., 2017) and

explorative research (Bossauer et al., 2018; Stevens

et al., 2017) on added values exists, there is no de-

sign study that explores appropriation ’in-the-wild’.

Therefore, we still miss a nuanced understanding of

useful combinations of different services and data

sources and which design challenges arise from in-

tegration. In short, the question whether integration

of applications and data is the answer to support inte-

grated practices remains unanswered.

Lawo, D., Esau, M., Neifer, T. and Stevens, G.

Probing Integrated Household Information Systems for Integrated Food Practices.

DOI: 10.5220/0010643600003060

In Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Computer-Human Interaction Research and Applications (CHIRA 2021), pages 15-23

ISBN: 978-989-758-538-8; ISSN: 2184-3244

Therefore, in this paper we research the usage and

design of IHIS with a 3-week design probe with 13

participants. While there is no complete system avail-

able, we searched for an app that covers a broad range

of functions and is as close to this kind of hands-on

experience. We decided for the app Foodoholic, as it

already covers the integration of storage data, recipes,

meal plans, and a shopping list. Still, a connection to

the information of the supply-chain (Holmstr

om et al.,

1999) or a digital receipt (Stevens et al., 2017) are

missing as a feature.

Our results emphasize the opportunities of align-

ing the various applications and data silos with the

connectedness of practices. Thereby, we clearly see

how such an integrated approch might resolve com-

mon issues with current food apps and enable a net-

work of ICT artifacts that support consumers in their

food practices.

Our work contributes to the relatively new ﬁeld of

IHIS, as it provides a ﬁrst empirical account of the us-

age of design ‘in-the-wild’ showing how participants

embed IHIS in their daily practices. Furthermore, we

draw attention to automatization, personalization, and

ﬂexibility as essential features of future IHIS design

to support food pracitces.

2 RELATED WORK

2.1 From Integrated Food Practices...

From a practice-based perspective, it is acknowledged

that practices are interconnected, integrated and dis-

persed (Ganglbauer et al., 2013), entangled (Nicol-

ini, 2009; Lawo et al., 2020a; Shove et al., 2012), or

chronologically ordered (Ng et al., 2015). By follow-

ing food along a chronological cycle, we see various

practices from procurement to disposal and how they

are accompanied by artifacts (see Figure 1).

Thereby, consumption is accompanied by keep-

ing track. For example, household budgets are used

to keep track of ﬁnances (Comber et al., 2013) and

diet and nutrition are tracked with diet trackers and

food diaries (Achananuparp et al., 2018; Ahmad et al.,

2016; Comber et al., 2013; Graf et al., 2015). Buy-

ing food products is usually done in supermarkets but

also on farmers markets or through online delivery

(Ng et al., 2015). Within shopping, lists are com-

monly used to prevent over-buying and ensure com-

pleteness of the basket (Ganglbauer et al., 2013, 2012;

Ng et al., 2015). Thereby, shopping lists are often

created in front of the fridge, ensuring to buy only

necessary products (Ng et al., 2015). Besides, shop-

ping is sometimes aligned to offers or vouchers (Ng

Figure 1: Food Lifecycle.

et al., 2015). There are also ’wild’ procurement prac-

tices, where consumers use gardens to grow vegeta-

bles (Ganglbauer et al., 2013; Heitlinger et al., 2018),

forage (Chamberlain and Grifﬁths, 2013) or do food

sharing (Burton et al., 2017; Comber et al., 2012;

Ganglbauer et al., 2014). “Most food brought into

the home was not consumed immediately but was in-

stead stored for later use” (Ganglbauer et al., 2013).

Consumers attempt to keep an overview (Ganglbauer

et al., 2013) or record the expiry dates (Comber et al.,

2013). The preparation of food includes cooking

(Ganglbauer et al., 2013; Ng et al., 2015) or grilling

(Chamberlain and Grifﬁths, 2013), as well as alter-

native modes like fermentation (Dolej

sov

a and Kera,

2016). Recipes are used for inspiration or learning

new dishes (Ng et al., 2015). Eating includes practices

of in-home eating, but also eating-out (Ng et al., 2015;

Warde, 2018). Consumers tend to share their eating

experiences on social media or schedule with meal

planners (Ng et al., 2015). Food exits the household

in multiple ways, e.g. through composting (Ng et al.,

2015) or the trash bin (Ganglbauer et al., 2013, 2012).

But, disposal also merges to procurement again, e.g.

through food sharing (Ganglbauer et al., 2014). Over-

all, disposal itself is hardly accompanied by artefacts

as interventions focus on the earlier stages.

2.2 ... to Integrated Household

Information Systems

To account for the entangled nature of practices by

breaking data silos and offering personalized services,

concepts of IHIS were proposed (Angara et al., 2017;

Holmstr

om et al., 1999; Stevens et al., 2017). Based

on the idea of integrated data storage and business to

customers data exchange, those concepts try to trans-

fer the idea of Integrated Business Information Sys-

CHIRA 2021 - 5th International Conference on Computer-Human Interaction Research and Applications

tems (Becker and Sch

utte, 2004) into private house-

holds. What they have in common, is the data trans-

fer through digital receipts and the idea of a shared

data storage. They differ, however, in their con-

cepts of integration of services. Explorative research

found the provision of additional product information,

comparing products and identifying product alterna-

tives warnings about allergy/diet relevant products

and best before date reminder, food information shar-

ing, budget accounting, and historical data as well as

inventory-based recipe recommendation to be neces-

sary features of such systems (Bossauer et al., 2018).

While Foodie Fooderson (Angara et al., 2017) com-

bines various services in one application, the house-

hold resource management approach of Stevens et al.

(2017) is open for integrated as well as third party ser-

vices. Still, none of the concepts have been deployed

nor evaluated.

3 METHOD

3.1 Design Probe & Interview Study

To investigate the use of IHIS-like systems as sup-

port for daily practices, we conducted a design probe

study (Arnold, 2004) with ‘Foodoholic’, which is fur-

ther described and motivated in section 3.2. For this

purpose, we recruited a qualitative sample of 13 par-

ticipants. The main criteria for inclusion in the sample

was that they were mainly in charge of their house-

hold’s food practices. Moreover, we aimed for a sam-

ple that covers a broad range of demographic char-

acteristics, such as age and education. The sample

is aged between 22 and 54, covering a range of ed-

ucational backgrounds from apprenticeship to a uni-

versity degree. Due to the focus on the main respon-

sibility in the household, our sample reﬂects the un-

evenly distributed work in households and includes

11 female and only 2 male participants. The living

situation is diverse as well. We selected participants

that live alone, in a shared-ﬂat as well as families with

children to consider their different food practices.

After a ﬁrst meeting where the app was intro-

duced to the participants, we asked them to use it for

the next 3 to 4 weeks until the session of the post-

interview. There we conducted semi-structured in-

terviews (Ayres, 2007) including a reﬂection on their

current food practices and the role of ICT, the appro-

priation of the Foodaholic app and the IHIS-Pracitce

alignment as well as exploring future design and us-

age scenarios. The interviews were transcribed and

Table 1: Participants of our Study.

# Gender Age Education Living

P1 male 36 Univ. Degree alone

P2 female 49 Sec. School w/ family

P3 female 23 High School w/ family

P4 female 24 High School alone

P5 female 23 High School w/ partner

P6 female 52 High School w/ family

P7 female 22 High School shared ﬂat

P8 female 22 High School shared ﬂat

P9 female 34 High School w/ child

P10 female 24 Univ. Degree shared ﬂat

P11 male 24 High School shared ﬂat

P12 female 54 Apprenticeship w/ partner

P13 female 46 Sec. School w/ partner

coded using MaxQDA

. The interview data were an-

alyzed using inductive thematic analysis (Braun and

Clarke, 2006).

3.2 Foodoholic

For the probe, we selected the app Foodoholic as this

is freely available and already covers various func-

tions along the food lifecycle (see Figure 2).

This

includes a shopping list, a virtual fridge, recipe rec-

ommendations, a meal planner, and health and budget

information. The fridge and the shopping list are con-

nected so that procured items are shown in the fridge.

All services share an integrated database.

Related to the food lifecycle, the shopping list

and the budget and health information support the

consumer primarily in the procurement phase, espe-

cially in the context of planning and executing shop-

ping. The integrated database enables the exchange

between the shopping list and the virtual fridge, which

displays the products purchased and thus supports the

storage phase. Based on the available products in

the virtual fridge, recipe recommendations and a meal

planning function are offered to support the prepara-

tion, taking into account the respective food in stock.

By knowing the stock in the virtual fridge as well as

their own consumption, the consumer can draw con-

clusions about possible remaining stocks that are no

longer being used. Moreover the system provides

health and budget information to support the personal

goals of consumers. Additionally, the recipes and

the meal plan are adaptable towards sustainable diets

such as vegetarian.

MAXQDA is the world-leading software for qualitative

and mixed methods research. (https://www.maxqda.com)

https://apps.apple.com/de/app/foodoholic/id13293755

Probing Integrated Household Information Systems for Integrated Food Practices

Figure 2: Functions of Foodoholic along the food lifecycle.

4 RESULTS

4.1 Current (Digital) Food Practices

Before the introduction of the IHIS, our participants

food practices were supported by a variety of apps,

services, and artifacts. For example, 5 participants

wrote already shopping lists on their smartphones for

the planning of the shopping trip. The other 8 partic-

ipants, however, still used a piece of paper and a pen

for this task.

”So I buy what I see and what appeals to me,

and I probably get inspired by what I cook

when I’m shopping myself.” –[P7]

However, it must also be noted that the younger

participants tend to shop more spontaneously, while

those with partners and families do more planning.

This effort is made to buy the right products for all

household members and keep an overview. Never-

theless, most participants try to follow a healthy diet

through targeted shopping. This is associated with

fresh and healthy foods such as vegetables, even if

sweets end up in the cart from time to time, either

planned or spontaneously. Besides planning, P10 ex-

plains how she uses a different app for food sharing

and leftover procurement.

”I have an app called ”TooGoodToGo”, where

you can buy food or dishes or something from

supermarkets or restaurants that would other-

wise be thrown away. Bundles in principle,

with things that will soon expire or no longer

look good, but are still edible. And this for

little money.” –[P10]

Regarding the overview of the storage of pur-

chased goods, there is also a difference between the

younger participants, who tend to be more indepen-

dent, and those who are responsible for the household

stock and organization. The former shop more fre-

quently and have less food at home, which makes it

easy to keep track.

”Approximately, I have in my head what I

have at home, but we also have a lot at home

that I have already forgotten that we once

bought it.” –[P7]

While for the other participants it is often difﬁcult

to reliably know which products they already have

at home, especially when they go shopping without

extensive planning. In those situations, they some-

times forget to restock certain goods or re-buy prod-

ucts although they are still in their fridge. Similarly,

most of the participants are not aware of the shelf-

life or decay of their food products, such that they

have to dispose some of the food from time to time.

P12, here, guesses that around 10% of the food is

wasted by her household. Against this background,

some participants anticipate a huge chance arising

from better technologies, as they might help with a

better overview and make things more easy.

”And that it’s about making things easier with

technologies, which is actually very positive.

Because then you don’t have to think about it

as much and maybe it works better.” –[P5]

The most commonly used technologies are actu-

ally found in cooking. Here, most participants use

various websites to search for recipes. As P6 explains,

it is also apparent that consumers sometimes search

speciﬁcally for recipes for the remaining ingredients.

”I use that with a recipe app sometimes, that if

I somehow have some leftovers where I have

no idea what I can fabricate with it, then you

can enter a few ingredients there and then a

recipe comes up that ﬁts it.” –[P6]

For 3 participants, eating is accompanied by diet

trackers, where the calorie balance is tracked or nutri-

ents are monitored for ﬁtness. Here, all food must be

recorded manually.

In summary, current food practices are already

making use of various digital and non-digital arte-

facts. While the participants value the simplicity and

positive experience with the support of such apps,

CHIRA 2021 - 5th International Conference on Computer-Human Interaction Research and Applications

some practices are not supported and for others a

manual transfer of data is needed, e.g., leftovers to

the recipe website to get a recipe recommendation or

the receipt to the diet tracker to keep track about the

healthiness of ones diet.

4.2 Appropriation of the IHIS

Overall, the participants described the app mostly as

a rather interesting and new experience. Interest-

ingly, most participants described their consumption

practices as routinized but saw substantial beneﬁts

for planning concerning consumers with less time or

less experience. Still, participants wished for a more

automized system that recognizes their consumption

patterns like frequently bought products and prefer-

ences to get improved recommendations of recipes

and supermarket offers.

”Such an app could, if I use it for a longer

time, recognize my preferences, what I like to

cook or so. Then it would have to somehow

combine this with the supermarket nearby and

what is currently on offer. If there are a lot of

things from the recipe on offer, the app tells

me: ’Okay, you have to go to this supermar-

ket, because 3 out of 10 ingredients are on of-

fer and then you save ﬁve euros’.” –[P1]

This automated personalization was also evident

in the participants’ desire for even more data integra-

tion. According to their ideas, for example, ﬁtness

data, budget speciﬁcations, knowledge about local su-

permarkets, and their own recipes should be included

and evaluated to a greater extent. It reﬂects the pos-

itive aspects of the general idea of data integration,

offering the mentioned opportunities for better plan-

ning and better services.

4.2.1 Shopping

Within the app, shopping lists were only available as

a means of procurement with no online purchase op-

tions involved. Most of the participants already used

lists to better structure their grocery shopping. They

appreciated the function to directly transfer the ingre-

dients of a recipe to the shopping list, excluding the

items already stored in the virtual fridge. This new

experience was welcomed since planning is usually

based on a recipe or some idea of a meal.

”I liked to use it because it was so handy when

you had a recipe, for example, the spring rolls

or whatever they are called and that you only

have to buy the ingredients. I also knew that I

already have these items, but not that item. It

was very, very practical.” –[P5]

This quote shows the general appreciation of the

practical aspects of combining both the data of recipes

and the shopping list. In particular, the ease of just

’checking’ the goods already added to the basket is re-

peatedly mentioned. Some participants were already

used to this kind of practice by using pen and paper

in the store. However, some participants like P2 re-

ported disliking the idea of handling a smartphone

during their grocery shopping, because of the need

to carry bags in the store or a perceived socially inap-

propriateness.

At this point, we observed deliberate trade-offs by

our participants. Some of them preferred to stick to a

paper-based list, others synchronized both lists. Still,

others used the digital version for information needs

and then transferred the items on a paper-based list for

the shopping trip.

4.2.2 Eating

The app offers a detailed meal-plan with one recipe

per mealtime a day. Participants value the pre-

planned eating routine as well as the inspiration they

get.

”Usually I think about what I’m going to eat

over the week in advance. With the app it’s

easier, you already get a weekly plan. And

then I shop accordingly and try to follow the

plan. The app has made everything a bit more

creative.” –[P2]

However, some participants wish for more ﬂexi-

bility. They would like to adjust the week plan to-

wards personal preferences, diet choice, ﬁtness goals,

and budget. For example, P5 reports that he used diet

tracking before to optimize his nutritional input and

was missing this kind of feature in the app. Con-

sequently, participants reported on the gap between

their personal routine and the meal plan. By ignoring

breakfast suggestions, P4 represents a typical devia-

tion from the plan. Most participants eat bread for

breakfast, but the app recommends a variety of meals,

ranging from muesli to porridge, to fruit salads for a

change. Moreover, spontaneous eating-out, cravings,

or leftovers lead to the deliberate adaption of the plan.

4.2.3 Preparation

Highly integrated with the meal plan is the provi-

sion of recipes for preparation. Participants value the

recipes provided by the app as an inspirational source.

However, they would further prefer to include their

own recipes as well as other recipe resources, such

as the popular German recipe website ’chefkoch.de’,

which was repeatedly mentioned.

Probing Integrated Household Information Systems for Integrated Food Practices

”I don’t think you can add, your own recipes

in the app. For example, when I say: I would

like to make a chicken curry, I need 200 grams

of chicken and so much rice and so much rice

that you can maybe add it.” –[P4]

Further, most of the participants were reluctant

to appropriate the recipe recommendation feature for

leftovers. As the major issue was remarked that

the recommended recipes did not match the physical

fridge content, as the maintenance of the virtual en-

tries was too time-consuming. Thus, they felt they

had to buy too many additional ingredients to cook.

”And that you get dishes suggested that you

can cook from the leftovers, such that you do

not have to go shopping again to get some-

thing.” –[P7]

Even though the feature was not extensively used,

the provided inspiration for leftover-based recipes and

the general idea was appreciated especially in the light

of sustainability and food waste. As with all recipes,

participants adapted them to their personal taste and

ingredients available.

4.2.4 Storage

The most critical feature of an IHIS is the storage.

Participants mentioned the virtual fridge and its po-

tential for food waste reduction repeatedly as a future

strength of the app design.

”I think it’s very positive that when you’re out

and about, you can look at your smartphone

and see what’s missing in the fridge without

having to go home ﬁrst. Or also not buy-

ing things too much anymore in terms of food

waste that you already had at home.” –[P11]

However, adding and deleting items of the fridge

content was one of the barriers to the appropriation of

this particular feature, claimed as time intensive and

annoying.

”I should just simply transfer the stuff I bought

into the app. It would have to work digitally

somehow.” –[P1]

Asked for ’what could make the virtual fridge

more attractive’, participants articulated a need for au-

tomatization and trade-offs between the best-possible

data and heuristic assumptions by ’some algorithm’.

This can be, for example, just working with some left-

overs that need to be used, rather than all of them. At

this point, some participants also indicated that the

integration of best-before data or assumptions by the

system could further improve the value of the virtual

fridge.

While the app only supports one user, participants

asked for multiple user support. This was most evi-

dent regarding the fridge and the shopping list, where

multiple household members contribute to shopping

and take on their products, such as snacks, from the

fridge.

”If you have entered the contents of your re-

frigerator and, as in our case, several people

have access to it, one of them grabs a yo-

gurt from it and you are convinced it is still

there. In principle, everyone who uses the

fridge should also maintain the app.” –[P6]

In the current version of the app, the user has to

keep track of the behavior of others, rather than al-

lowing them to co-maintenance of the virtual fridge

content.

5 DISCUSSION

While various IHIS concepts were proposed in re-

search, to the best of our knowledge, there is a lack

of research focusing on the appropriateness of these

systems to support consumer practices. Moreover, the

question arises if the integrated enterprise information

systems are a useful role model for consumer prac-

tices. Against this background, we aim to discuss the

observed usage of the probe as well as the reﬂection

on it towards design implications.

5.1 Enable an Ecology of IHIS Artefacts

Integrated management information systems often

consist of a variety of software that support the dif-

ferent processes of the organization Zhang (2016).

For example, there are dedicated software systems

that support production planning, automate supply

chain management or standardize customer relations.

Thereby, the different systems are integrated by a

central database as well as software overlapping pro-

cesses.

For the example of food consumption practices,

we see a similar ecology of ICT artifacts, although

the probe itself offered various services in one app.

Our participants used artifacts, ranging from recipe

apps to diet trackers to paper-based shopping lists.

For all these artifacts, they have their reasons, either

because they better ﬁt their practices or simply be-

cause they offer better usability or services. There-

fore, future IHIS design should respect the individual

artifacts choices, but still enable a common data and

service platform for integration. This is important as

integration is perceived as an key feature that reduces

CHIRA 2021 - 5th International Conference on Computer-Human Interaction Research and Applications

effort and increases usability. However, for some con-

sumers special apps might be better suited rather than

enforcing the services of the IHIS, e.g., for vegans

Lawo et al. (2020b). For the same reasons, manage-

ment information systems offer ﬂexible architectures

that allow for a selection of the best ﬁtting software

packages. A similar architecture is already used for

ﬁtness apps (Gay and Leijdekkers, 2015), where a sin-

gle platform offers interfaces and data storage to ex-

change data within an ecology of artifacts.

5.2 Diverse Practices Rather than

Optimal Processes

Integrated Business Information Systems are de-

signed to provide optimal processes and therefore

have a rather imperative character (Becker and

Sch

utte, 2004). Although the selection of software

packages or their customization allows a certain adap-

tation to own processes, the best-practices of software

manufacturers are often adopted. Thereby, the intro-

duction of systems is often combined with a restruc-

turing of processes and the organization.

The variety of practices and diverse personal situ-

ations, however, make it very unlikely that users ap-

propriate an imperative IHIS design. This is, for ex-

ample, resembled in consumers who just go shopping

without extensive planning, as they value ﬂexibility

over efﬁciency or reduction of food waste. More-

over, our results indicate that even the IHIS is adapted

towards the own routines rather than the other way

around. To account for this variety, future IHIS design

should be ﬂexible to serve a variety of practices and

routines, rather than enforcing ’optimal’ food con-

sumption processes. Participants also articulated the

wish for a stronger personalization and consideration

of the personal situation. This, on the one hand, cov-

ers the personalization of their taste preferences, com-

monly bought groceries, budget, or diet goals. But

on the other hand, also more personalization towards

the context, for example, the inclusion of supermar-

ket offers and what is avilable in their neighbourhood

(Lawo et al., 2021).

5.3 Data Exchange Instead of an Extra

Exercise

In the enterprise domain, integrated information sys-

tems are usually integrated into a data exchange

scheme along the whole supply chain. Master data of

products as well as transactions of are exchanged with

connected organizations Becker and Sch

utte (2004).

This enables those organization to make better plan-

ning decisions and streamlines the processes of the

whole supply chain.

In our IHIS probe, consumers need to track and

manage their household stock by hand. Moreover,

other research shows that a lot of applications come

with a manual scanning of data, the search for prod-

uct information, and tedious tracking of consumption

Lawo et al. (2020b). In the IHIS context, the vir-

tual household storage is an essential feature (Angara

et al., 2017; Stevens et al., 2017). However, the time-

consuming work to maintain the fridges content is a

barrier to appropriation. Therefore, future IHIS de-

sign focus on two mutually related areas. First, as

Stevens et al. (2017) propose, IHIS should be con-

nected to the information supply chain of the retail-

ers and producers, e.g. digital receipt to transfer

the master as well as the transaction data. Second,

IHIS should automatize inventory maintenance, e.g.

through machine-learning. The focus should be on

making trade-offs between completely accurate data

and anticipated effort (Fuentes et al., 2019).

6 CONCLUSION

New IHIS concepts offer opportunities to account for

the integrated nature of food practices. In this paper,

we have been concerned with probing IHIS ’in-the-

wild’, to understand the future design and appropria-

tion of this new class of systems within HCI. Results

of our research show how participants embedded the

system in their routines rather than adopting prede-

ﬁned practices. Furthermore, we draw attention to the

automatization and personalization of IHIS design.

Regarding the limitations of this work, ﬁrst, we

conducted no formal evaluation of the usability,

which could extend the results of the interview study

to better understand how to design and integrate the

relevant features. In addition, the consideration of

food retailers as well as the evaluation of the auto-

mated transfer of data via a digital receipt is missing.

We, therefore, aim to extend the analysis of this study,

especially towards a formal evaluation of the usabil-

ity, as well as the quantitative validation of the usage

and usefulness of the functions of an IHIS. Second,

we want to co-create our own user-centered IHIS de-

sign that better ﬁts the expectations and practices of

the users to further study its appropriation.

REFERENCES

Achananuparp, P., Lim, E.-P., and Abhishek, V. (2018).

Does journaling encourage healthier choices? analyz-

ing healthy eating behaviors of food journalers. In

Probing Integrated Household Information Systems for Integrated Food Practices

Proceedings of the 2018 International Conference on

Digital Health, pages 35–44.

Ahmad, Z., Bosch, M., Khanna, N., Kerr, D. A., Boushey,

C. J., Zhu, F., and Delp, E. J. (2016). A mobile food

record for integrated dietary assessment. In Proceed-

ings of the 2nd International Workshop on Multimedia

Assisted Dietary Management, pages 53–62.

Angara, P., Jim

enez, M., Agarwal, K., Jain, H., Jain, R.,

Stege, U., Ganti, S., M

uller, H. A., and Ng, J. W.

(2017). Foodie fooderson a conversational agent for

the smart kitchen. In CASCON, pages 247–253.

Arnold, M. (2004). The connected home: probing the ef-

fects and affects of domesticated icts. In PDC, pages

183–186.

Aspray, W., Royer, G., and Ocepek, M. G. (2013). Food

online: An introduction to a complex environment. In

Food in the Internet Age, pages 1–23. Springer.

Ayres, L. (2007). Qualitative research proposals—part iii:

sampling and data collection. Journal of Wound Os-

tomy & Continence Nursing, 34(3):242–244.

Becker, J. and Sch

utte, R. (2004). Handelsinformationssys-

teme. MI Wirtschaftsbuch.

Bossauer, P., Hanschke, S., and Stevens, G. (2018). Mehrw-

erte auf basis digitaler kassenzettel: eine verbraucher-

informatische studie. In Nachhaltiges Wirtschaften im

digitalen Zeitalter, pages 135–150. Springer.

Braun, V. and Clarke, V. (2006). Using thematic analysis

in psychology. Qualitative research in psychology,

3(2):77–101.

Burton, E., Meier, C., Olarte, R., Skeini, H., and Zahan, F.

(2017). Airshare: a food sharing concept. In Proceed-

ings of the 29th Australian Conference on Computer-

Human Interaction, pages 634–639.

Chamberlain, A. and Grifﬁths, C. (2013). Wild food prac-

tices: understanding the wider implications for design

and hci. Green Food Technology: Ubicomp opportu-

nities for reducing the environmental impacts of food,

Ubicomp.

Comber, R., Ganglbauer, E., Choi, J. H.-j., Hoonhout, J.,

Rogers, Y., O’hara, K., and Maitland, J. (2012). Food

and interaction design: designing for food in everyday

life. In CHI’12 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors

in Computing Systems, pages 2767–2770.

Comber, R., Hoonhout, J., Van Halteren, A., Moynihan, P.,

and Olivier, P. (2013). Food practices as situated ac-

tion: exploring and designing for everyday food prac-

tices with households. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI

conference on human factors in computing systems,

pages 2457–2466.

Dolej

sov

a, M. and Kera, D. (2016). Fermentation guthub:

Designing for food sustainability in singapore. In Pro-

ceedings of the 2nd International Conference in HCI

and UX Indonesia 2016, pages 69–76.

Eikey, E. V. and Reddy, M. C. (2017). ” it’s deﬁnitely been

a journey” a qualitative study on how women with eat-

ing disorders use weight loss apps. In Proceedings of

the 2017 CHI conference on human factors in comput-

ing systems, pages 642–654.

Fuentes, C., Porcheron, M., Fischer, J. E., Costanza, E.,

Malilk, O., and Ramchurn, S. D. (2019). Tracking the

consumption of home essentials. In Proceedings of

the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Com-

puting Systems, pages 1–13.

Ganglbauer, E., Fitzpatrick, G., and Comber, R. (2013). Ne-

gotiating food waste: Using a practice lens to inform

design. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human In-

teraction (TOCHI), 20(2):1–25.

Ganglbauer, E., Fitzpatrick, G., and Molzer, G. (2012). Cre-

ating visibility: understanding the design space for

food waste. In Proceedings of the 11th International

Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Multimedia,

pages 1–10.

Ganglbauer, E., Fitzpatrick, G., Subasi,

O., and

uldenpfennig, F. (2014). Think globally, act locally:

a case study of a free food sharing community and

social networking. In Proceedings of the 17th ACM

conference on Computer supported cooperative work

& social computing, pages 911–921.

Gay, V. and Leijdekkers, P. (2015). Bringing health and ﬁt-

ness data together for connected health care: mobile

apps as enablers of interoperability. Journal of medi-

cal Internet research, 17(11):e260.

Graf, B., Kr

uger, M., M

uller, F., Ruhland, A., and Zech, A.

(2015). Nombot: simplify food tracking. In Proceed-

ings of the 14th International Conference on Mobile

and Ubiquitous Multimedia, pages 360–363.

Grimes, A. and Harper, R. (2008). Celebratory technology:

new directions for food research in hci. In Proceed-

ings of the SIGCHI conference on human factors in

computing systems, pages 467–476.

Heitlinger, S., Bryan-Kinns, N., and Comber, R. (2018).

Connected seeds and sensors: co-designing internet

of things for sustainable smart cities with urban food-

growing communities. In Proceedings of the 15th Par-

ticipatory Design Conference: Short Papers, Situated

Actions, Workshops and Tutorial-Volume 2, pages 1–

Holmstr

om, J., Tanskanen, K., and K

ainen, V. (1999).

Redesigning the supply chain for internet shopping–

bringing ecr to the households. In Proceedings of the

4th Logistics Research Network Conference, Newcas-

tle, pages 261–267. Citeseer.

Lawo, D., Engelbutzeder, P., Esau, M., and Stevens, G.

(2020a). Networks of practices: Exploring design

opportunities for interconnected practices. In Pro-

ceedings of 18th European Conference on Computer-

Supported Cooperative Work. European Society for

Socially Embedded Technologies (EUSSET).

Lawo, D., Esau, M., Engelbutzeder, P., and Stevens, G.

(2020b). Going vegan: The role (s) of ict in vegan

practice transformation. Sustainability, 12(12):5184.

Lawo, D., Esau, M., and Stevens, G. (2019). Same, but dif-

ferent data-towards integrated food & household ser-

vices. In Workshop ”Digital Consumption” at 14th

International Conference on Wirtschaftsinformatik.

Lawo, D., Neifer, T., Esau, M., and Stevens, G. (2021).

Buying the ‘right’ thing: Designing food recom-

mender systems with critical consumers. In Proceed-

ings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors

in Computing Systems, CHI ’21, New York, NY, USA.

CHIRA 2021 - 5th International Conference on Computer-Human Interaction Research and Applications

Ng, K. H., Shipp, V., Mortier, R., Benford, S., Flintham,

M., and Rodden, T. (2015). Understanding food con-

sumption lifecycles using wearable cameras. Personal

and Ubiquitous Computing, 19(7):1183–1195.

Nicolini, D. (2009). Zooming in and zooming out: A pack-

age of method and theory to study work practices. Or-

ganizational ethnography: Studying the complexities

of everyday life, pages 120–138.

Prost, S., Crivellaro, C., Haddon, A., and Comber, R.

(2018). Food democracy in the making: Designing

with local food networks. In Proceedings of the 2018

CHI conference on human factors in computing sys-

tems, pages 1–14.

Shove, E., Pantzar, M., and Watson, M. (2012). The dy-

namics of social practice: Everyday life and how it

changes. Sage.

Stevens, G., Bossauer, P., Neifer, T., and Hanschke, S.

(2017). Using shopping data to design sustainable

consumer apps. In 2017 Sustainable Internet and ICT

for Sustainability (SustainIT), pages 1–3. IEEE.

Warde, A. (2018). Changing tastes? the evolution of dining

out in england. Gastronomica, 18(4):1–12.

Zhang, Y. (2016). Management information system. In

2017 2nd International Conference on Machinery,

Electronics and Control Simulation (MECS 2017). At-

lantis Press.

Probing Integrated Household Information Systems for Integrated Food Practices