INTERACTIVITY

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EAT ST. CASE STUDY

DESIGNING INTERACTIVE COOKBOOKS

by CELESTE MARTIN

The introduction of tablets and e-readers marked not only the dis-
placement of some cooking texts from printed books to screens but
also opened up new possibilities for their use. Bringing tablets into the
kitchen to follow recipes directly from their screen became the norm
as they afford a large screen that allows people to read from a distance
as well as a compact design and touch-based technology which makes
interactions more fluid than with a laptop. Cookbooks designed for
tablets pose a unique set of challenges and opportunities that address
not only traditional notions of what cookbooks are and how they are
used, but also the expectations of this group of users in terms of sharing,
social media, and the permeability of the book to the web.

The Eat St. ebook project was developed in partnership with Invoke
Media, a Vancouver-based digital agency, and Emily Carr’s Social and
Interactive Media Centre under a Natural Sciences and Engineering
Research Council of Canada Applied Research and Development grant.
The goal of the project was to develop an e-cookbook for Food Network
Canada’s television show, Eat St., a show about food truck culture. The

project entailed creating and designing an interactive cookbook featur-
ing a series of recipes from season three of the show.

Over the course of 12 weeks, | worked with two research assistants, who
are both design students at Emily Carr, Amanda Wangen and Kieran
Wallace, to research, explore and deepen our knowledge about the
possibilities of digital publishing for the e-cookbook niche. Through
several phases of research, online surveys, prototype building and user
testing, we created a richly interactive digital publication, designed spe-
cifically for the Eat St. ecology and their audience while also addressing
larger research questions about e-book design for cookbooks, such as
modes of interaction in the kitchen space and the extension of the book
through social media and the web.

FRAMING THE PROJECT

The word ebook is loosely used to describe a wide range of digital
text formats, from traditional static PDFs to standalone applications.
Understanding the role of the proposed interactive cookbook within