Meta Cookies


Eindhoven University of Technology, Department of Industrial Design

Flynn Duffy (Anschober)

Partners:
Miguel Bruns (coach)
Jillian de Bie

Project:
M1.2 Design Research Project
(DPM120)
 Gluten-free cookies are often perceived as dry or lacking elasticity. Inspired by mechanical metamaterials used in architecture and design, this research asks whether an engineered internal cookie structure, built through food 3D-printing, can add textural complexity: how can designed printed structures shape perceived mouthfeel in gluten-free cookies?

The project follows a three-stage research-through-design [1] approach. First, participants tasted five premium cookies. Through triading, comparing groups of three cookies at a time, participants described their personal constructs of mouthfeel, aided by tactile props such as foam, steel wool and confetti, producing six construct clusters around two dominant axes: structure (homogenous vs. contrasting) and density (light vs. dense). Second, those constructs became parameters for four unique voxel designs aimed at mimicking their qualities, printed as voxel arrays using gluten-free cookie dough. Third, the original cookies and printed voxels were mechanically tested in a 3-point bending rig to evaluate their deformation behavior. While each voxel type produced a distinctive force-deformation curve, a clear correlation between the deformation of the original cookies and the printed voxels did not emerge.

Meta Cookies contributes a qualitative framework to edible material research, positioning personal construct theory [2] as a bridge between subjective experience and mechanical material design. It also demonstrates the practical limits of food 3D-printing, which is currently better suited to research exploration than consumer production. A second repertory grid study, where participants eat the printed voxels and form further constructs, could close the loop between the original cookies and their clusters, allowing  iterative refinement of the voxel designs.

 TU/e ID
Dutch Design Week


Figure 1. Meta cookie prototype.
Figure 2. Repertory grid study set-up, with tactile props.
Figure 3. Repertory grid study triading card.
Figure 4. Construct cluster mapping, with repertory grid study elements.
Figure 5. Voxel design based on construct clusters.
Figure 6. Deformation of voxel array in 3-point bending rig.

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References
    1. William Gaver. 2012. What should we expect from research through design? In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '12). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 937–946. https://doi.org/10.1145/2207676.2208538

    2. George A. Kelly. 1955. The Psychology of Personal Constructs (Vol. 1 & Vol. 2). W. W. Norton & Company, New York, NY.