Why does everyone draw food technology the same?

What comes to mind if someone asks you to draw some fruit? Or a fridge? Emma Atkins, PhD student at CenSoF researching fridge design and food waste, discusses insights from a recent food research workshop. 

Emma Atkins
Emma Atkins

In June, about 20 food geographers from around the country joined a two-day away day in Bristol. We visited a beautiful community garden and had workshops on how creative methods are used in food research, and I had the honour of organising the ice breaker. What came out of it was fascinating and made me reflect on where our food and food technology comes from – not just geographically, but historically as well.

Workshop room
Workshop room

I decided to organise a couple of rounds of ‘relay Pictionary’. It was like regular Pictionary – but a race between teams. We had four tables of around five people each, on which were some flipchart paper and marker pens. At the front of the room was a table with four piles of prompt cards, one for each table.

A participant from each table came up and picked up a prompt card, went back to their team and drew what was on the prompt card. When someone else on their team correctly guessed the prompt, another person on the team went to get the next prompt card from the front. This continued until the prompt cards ran out, at which point a team yelled ‘Pictionary’ and won the race.

The first round featured prompts all related to food items: bread, cheese, fruit, vegetables and so on. When the round was finished, I stuck the flip chart papers on the wall, so we could compare how each team drew the food items. I found it fascinating: everyone had drawn very similar images for each item of food.

Which fruit?

Drawings of fruit
Drawings of fruit

For fruit, every team drew an apple, and then most also drew a banana. Being in the UK, these are very common fruits people eat, and the teams had drawn them in almost identical ways.

Similarly, carrots were drawn for the prompt of ‘vegetables’ on every paper: another common food product in the UK, with a distinctive shape.

Drawings of vegetables
Drawings of vegetables

It was discussed that being in the UK for this exercise meant that certain food items were understood in a certain way: if we were in, say, South Asia or West Africa, would ‘vegetable’ look very different? How would people understand the prompt ‘fruit’ and what items would be the most simplest incarnation to draw?

We discussed how these are the kinds of food items people draw when under pressure, and when they want other people to understand exactly what they mean. Participants noted that they reached for the very simplest and most baseline images of food that they could think of, while also making them recognisable.

For example, it was observed that although there are many types of cheese, it is hard to differentiate between them easily, so the stereotypical ‘Swiss cheese’, triangular in shape and with holes in it, was used to make this drawing as clear as possible.

Cheese please

When asked about why this was *the* cheese stereotype, participants pondered about how cheeses in cartoons are drawn, in children’s books and on TV. That begs the question: how did this type of cheese become so prevalent in cartoons? Where do all these archetypal images come from, and at what point did they become the archetypes?

Drawings of hobs
Drawings of hobs

For the second round of Pictionary participants drew kitchen objects, including the fridge, the toaster, the microwave, and the hob. Again, participants drew very similar drawings for these objects.

One of the conceptual frameworks I am using for my PhD is called Science and Technology Studies (STS). It concerns itself with how science is ‘made’ and how technology comes to be. There are numerous examples of how certain objects and knowledges arose not simply because they were ‘the best’ but because of other compounding factors.

From icebox to fridge

A good example is the refrigerator. In her piece ‘How the refrigerator got its hum’ (1983), Ruth Cowan Schwartz details that the electric compression fridge ‘won’ against the gas absorption fridge not because the technology was necessarily superior, but because of the national rollout of domestic electricity networks by President Roosevelt, the size and influence of electric utility companies, and the aggressive marketing tactics of the electric fridge manufacturers. Without these factors, we may well have gas instead of electric fridges in our kitchens.

Drawings of fridges
Drawings of fridges

The drawings of the fridge made me reflect on this research: in another world, how would our fridges look different? The design of the fridge is indebted to the icebox, which was patented in the USA in 1838 (Gantz 2015). When manufacturers were creating the electric refrigerator, they didn’t want to stray too far from the familiar icebox design – they were already asking their consumers to give up a comfortable piece of technology for a relatively unknown entity.

Keeping the ‘box’ made the move to an electric fridge easier, even though it may not be the ‘best’ design for storing food. Studies (including my own) are showing that having deep shelves and drawers can make food more at risk of going off if it remains hidden from view and more easily forgotten.

Smart fridges

Some designs in the mid-20th century attempted to move away from the traditional ‘box’ design, but they were not successful; and although food waste is now high on the agenda, fridge manufacturers seem to simply be heaping on more digital gadgets (like cameras and smart screens) onto the same boxy hardware. Will we move away from the ‘box’ one day? What would this Pictionary round look like in the future?

The Pictionary icebreaker was a great tool of bringing out the archetypes of food and food-related objects, and made participants consider why these archetypes exist. Other workshops that feature mundane objects and things, or STS-related themes, would benefit from this exercise. It was also rather playful and I hope it made everyone relax and feel more comfortable participating in the subsequent workshops.

References

Cowan, R. S., 1983. How the refrigerator got its hum. In: MacKenzie, D. and Wajcman, J. (eds), 1985. The Social Shaping of Technology. pp. 202-218

Gantz, C., 2015. Refrigeration: A History. Jefferson NC: McFarland & Company.

Imagining Futures with AgeTech: How Older Adults and AgeTech Industries Envision Life with Technology

How do older adults and AgeTech industries imagine future ageing-technology? Miguel Gomez-Hernandez, researcher at the Emerging Technologies Research Lab in Monash University who visited CenSof this summer, examines the debates around smart-home technology futures focused on trust, repair, and fall risks.

Miguel Gomez-Hernandez

There’s a common narrative driving much of the technology designed “for” older people. Industry imagines an ageing population growing rapidly, accompanied by a shortage of caregivers.

In response, the industry predicts a future where older adults will be increasingly surrounded and cared for by smart systems, assistive robots, companion devices, surveillance tools, and AI-powered platforms designed to monitor and manage daily life.

This vision is often driven by urgency: ageing is framed as a demographic crisis that must be solved through technological innovation.

These assertions are based on my interviews with industry experts, drawing on comic scenarios, after a review of industry reports, and published here. But older adults don’t necessarily see their futures this way as my research with older adults in Melbourne demonstrate.

Both methods form the basis of my PhD based at the Emerging Technologies Research Lab in Monash University (Australia) with Prof. Sarah Pink as lead supervisor.

In my household visits with older adults – drawing on video-tours and GenAI scenarios – I found rich, nuanced reflections that resist this binary framing of technology as either salvation or intrusion. Most older people I met do not simply accept or reject technology. Instead, their relationship to it is shaped by trust, repair, and anxieties. These are not binary positions – they exist on a spectrum, shaped by personal histories, imaginations, and priorities, and broader social concerns.

Trust in technologies

Computer generated image of an older person living with AgeTech

One recurring theme is trust. Older adults are not passive users waiting for technology to “assist” them. The idea of being constantly monitored or managed by machines, without choice or flexibility, raises serious questions about trust.

Many express concern over loss of agency, privacy, or being forced to adapt to systems they didn’t ask for. This relation to mistrust and trust is about feeling confidence, control, and security in their future.

Who will repair breakages?

Interestingly, participants also expressed fears about the possible breakage of technology,  that don’t usually appear in tech-centred companies, while enacting and showing me ways they would repair them.

Many questioned what happens when these technologies break down, asking who will maintain the technologies when they inevitably break? How will power outages or natural disasters impact the future smart home – without reliable backup systems – where older adults are envisaged to live independently?

These questions reveal a broader awareness of and concern around the fragility of technology – a recognition that the future is not just a place of progress, but also of vulnerability that we need to embrace.

Risk of falls

And then there is the question of the anxieties over the risk of future falls —an ever-present fear in later life. More than just a physical and metrified event followed by growing frailty as typically depicted through biomedical perspectives, it represents a turning point: the moment that can lead to institutionalisation, a move to a new home, or the loss of independence.

While technology companies monitor and quantify older people’s lives offering solutions such as sensors, alarms, or the removal of carpets and stairs to prevent risks, older adults are reluctant to instrumentalise fall risks since falls are an inevitable and pervasive hazard. They imagine fall risks as entangled with economic constraints, housing insecurity, cultural differences, and home objects and pets, often anticipating transitions with ambivalence or anxiety.

Design with care

My research investigates dominant industry and older adults’ visions, and urges us to take older adults’ imaginations seriously. They are not merely end-users or “beneficiaries” of innovation. They are experts in their own lives, actively imagining and shaping their own futures.

If we truly want to design inclusive futures for older adults, we must listen more closely and participate in the lives of older adults – not just to design a set of design requirements, but to how they resist and envision with hope the years to come.

As my PhD dissertation is expected to be submitted in January 2026, I hope to report back to my participants, strengthen collaborations with the AgeTech industry and researchers, and develop joint research around AgeTech futures with the ETLab, CenSoF, and more.

Algorithmic reparation – from fairness to redress

By Jenny L. Davis, Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Chair and Professor of Sociology at Vanderbilt University

Algorithmic bias is a perpetual problem. It is a problem rooted in history, manifesting in the present, and shaping the future into troubling form. This is not a problem with a technical fix, a box to be ticked, nor obvious actors to blame. It’s diffuse, entrenched, and the subject of significant attention.

That attention, framed through the prism of ‘fairness’, has not been especially effective, if effectiveness is measured in a greater justice and less harm. With each new advance—automated decision systems, facial recognition, generative AI—social stratifications replicate, amplify, and scale.

The fairness paradigm isn’t working. It’s time for something else. Here, I pose algorithmic reparation as an orienting framework and worldbuilding project, displacing fairness in favour of redress. This draws from a burgeoning movement across fields and domains.

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Neptune Frost – futures speculations for community technology

By Matt Dowse

Here at the Centre for Sociodigital Futures we’ve convened a speculative fiction reading group about Community Technology with friends outside the university that we know are practicing Community Technology and co-creators from the Centre for Creative Technology. We’ve worked in various ways to come together to experiment with ideas about community/technology/and community technology. All of these ideas are feeding into the research that we are doing and are planning to do in the future. Through the reading group we have engaged with Octavia Butler Octavia E Butler: Visionary black sci-fi writer – BBC World Service, Witness History (youtube.com), Adrienne Maree Brown adrienne maree brown – awe. liberation. pleasure. , and Mother Cyborg About — MOTHER CYBORG so far. Watching Neptune Frost was the group’s first exploration in to film.

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Why do a research visit?

By Judith Nyfeler

Between February and April 2024 I spent time as a visitor to the Centre for Sociodigital Futures at the University of Bristol. I had visited Bristol before and also one of my co-authors was based within the Centre. I was glad to have this opportunity to live and work in this colourful city in southwest England. And also, to have the privilege to take my family with me for a certain time. During my stay, I learned a lot about the benefits of such a trip. I will now share eight reasons why working abroad can be fruitful and beneficial.

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