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A Meat-Summer Night's Dream: A Tangible Design Fiction Exploration of Eating Biohybrid Flying Robots

Ziming Wang, Yiqian Wu, Qingxiao Zheng, Shihan Zhang, Ned Barker, Morten Fjeld

TL;DR

This paper investigates future food futures by staging a tangible design fiction where participants imagine eating biohybrid flying robots. Using a dinner-in-the-drama format set in a 2052 Paris restaurant with six non-expert participants, the study probes how publics negotiate ethics, culture, and sustainability in post natural eating. The authors contribute a speculative artifact that stages robots as food, empirical insights into public deliberation, and a methodological advance in embodied, multisensory design fiction. Findings suggest that sensory immersion, ritualized practices, and cross media artifacts can provoke nuanced debates about sentience, ownership, adaptation, and governance in emergent edible robotics. The work advances HCI research on edible robotics and speculative design by moving from textual speculation to tangible, performative engagement with future food technologies.

Abstract

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 exceed 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 publics negotiate cultural and ethical boundaries in post-natural eating, and (iii) a methodological advance in embodied, multisensory design fiction.

A Meat-Summer Night's Dream: A Tangible Design Fiction Exploration of Eating Biohybrid Flying Robots

TL;DR

This paper investigates future food futures by staging a tangible design fiction where participants imagine eating biohybrid flying robots. Using a dinner-in-the-drama format set in a 2052 Paris restaurant with six non-expert participants, the study probes how publics negotiate ethics, culture, and sustainability in post natural eating. The authors contribute a speculative artifact that stages robots as food, empirical insights into public deliberation, and a methodological advance in embodied, multisensory design fiction. Findings suggest that sensory immersion, ritualized practices, and cross media artifacts can provoke nuanced debates about sentience, ownership, adaptation, and governance in emergent edible robotics. The work advances HCI research on edible robotics and speculative design by moving from textual speculation to tangible, performative engagement with future food technologies.

Abstract

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 exceed 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 publics negotiate cultural and ethical boundaries in post-natural eating, and (iii) a methodological advance in embodied, multisensory design fiction.

Paper Structure

This paper contains 27 sections, 4 figures, 2 tables.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Background and Related Work
  3. New Frontiers for Food and Technology
  4. Human--Food Interaction in HCI
  5. Synthetic Food: Cultivated Meat and Its Limitations
  6. The Idea of Living Machines, Biohybrid Robots, and the Animal-Robot Analogy
  7. Speculative Design and Design Fictions in HCI
  8. Methodology
  9. Ideation and Concept
  10. General Speculative Concept of Eating Animal-Robot Hybrid
  11. Biohybrid Flying Robots as Synthetic Ortolan for Eating
  12. Dinner-in-the-Drama as Tangible Design Fiction
  13. Drama Design and Prototyping
  14. Participants and Their Role Play
  15. Event Procedure
  16. ...and 12 more sections

Figures (4)

  • Figure 1: Theatrical props showcasing the biohybrid flying robot in three different stages: (a) Flying drone (in motion); (b) 3D-printed prototype; (c) Roasted bird (edible).
  • Figure 2: Procedure diagram.
  • Figure 3: Highlights from the dinner-in-the-drama: (a) Opening remarks; (b) Introducing key concepts; (c) Enjoying the show; (d) Biohybrid robot in flight; (e) Observing the biohybrid robot; (f) Serving biohybrid robots; (g) Eating biohybrid robots.
  • Figure 4: The menu.