Institute For The Future

What Does Your Spoon Stand For?

Optimizing values with design choices

The idea of technology as morally neutral is pervasive. We are told that it is only the use of a technology that makes it good or bad. But, technology is persuasive. It is designed with optimal users and purposes in mind. It exerts influence over our lives and helps create the kind of world we inhabit.

The spoon is one of humankind’s earliest technological inventions, and seems about as neutral as it gets. Is it really?

From Power to Convenience

Spoons have actually been used to signify wealth, power, and religious significance for thousands of years. Although many early spoons were made from wood, which was cheaper and easier to carve, spoons were also made of silver and gold to distinguish the wealthy and elite. Spoons engraved with hieroglyphics were used for religious purposes in Egypt some three thousand years ago. British kings were given spoons ceremonially, and spoons of varying degrees of preciousness were often given as christening gifts, probably resulting in the phrase, “born with a silver spoon in his/her mouth.” In other words, the material, design, and ceremony surrounding the spoon have made it not just a tool, but also a signifier of class, religion, ability, and social status. But these values are not necessarily constant.

Fast forward centuries and the plastic spoon gained prominence in the 1950’s in an ode to a value of a different kind: convenience. However, as concerns about climate change and sustainability have grown in recent years, compostable cutlery has also grown in popularity. Other shifts are more imaginative or subversive. For example, it is not uncommon to see people playing spoons as a musical instrument in folk bands.

But what a spoon has been capable of to date has been fairly limited. The technologies of the Internet of Actions is transforming even the humble spoon into an object that can be re-imagined and designed to optimize for a wide set of values.

The convergence of additional technologies possible today however is changing what is possible in every space, and cutlery is no different. So-called smart spoons, embedded with computing power, are now available and add additional layers of ability to these items we use daily. The range of design possibilities is expanding, and the choices we make are a reflection of the values we hold today.

Bringing different values to a technology, even when that technology is as simple as a spoon, has a meaningful impact in the world. The idea of design ethics is to think critically about what a design is optimized for, who it is intended to benefit, and in what way. Many digital technologies are optimized to encourage time spent on a company’s service. But this is rarely in the interest of the user. What other kinds of values are being explored within the space of our eating tools? The following signals highlight how prioritizing different values can alter the impact of a technology. They also encourage us to test our assumptions about the objects we use everyday.

Dignity and Independence

The company Liftware (now called Verily) has designed “smart spoons” that are self-stabilizing, which helps people who struggle to hold food steady for a variety of reasons to eat with greater ease. Liftware became part of Google Life Sciences (now called Verily) in 2014. The company’s first product, Liftware Steady, allows someone with a hand tremor, for example from Parkinson’s disease, to eat more easily. Liftware Level helps people with limited hand or arm mobility, for example from cerebral palsy, spinal cord injury, or Huntington’s disease, to eat more easily. The spoon is electronic and uses a microchip and sensors to respond to the hand’s movements.

While online reviews reveal that the product does not work for everyone, it does seem to improve the experience at least to some degree for many others. Although using a special set of utensils can be stigmatizing in its own way, Liftware empowers people to feed themselves without spilling food. It also enables its users to do things many of us take for granted, like go out for dinner with friends without feeling stigmatized. It is designed to be discreet and to minimize the stress and embarrassment of spilling one’s food. This design helps people with reduced motor function to regain some of the dignity and independence that comes from being able to eat on one’s own.

Mindful Health

Unlike Liftware, which aims to increase the ease of eating, the HAPIfork aims to make it a little more challenging. The purpose of this, is to cause you to eat slower, which is beneficial according to the company because it can improve digestion and support weight control. Using HAPIfork is supposed to help you “lose weight, feel great!” The HAPIfork uses lights and vibrations to alert you when you are eating too quickly. It also tracks your eating habits: the amount of time you spent eating and how much you ate, which you can then monitor on its website.

Another company called Spun Utensils, claims to calculate the nutritional information in the food you eat, and offer you “as much (or as little) data on your eating habits as you’d like.” It also provides nutritional recommendations. It works through the use of motion sensors and by weighing each bite of food. Similar to the HAPIfork, it also uses vibrations to alert you if you are eating too quickly, as well as if you have reached your calorie goal.

A slight twist on these ideas, an “electric flavoring fork” announced last year by Hiromi Nakamura at the Rekimoto Lab in Japan, tricks your taste buds. The fork uses a small amount of electricity to stimulate the tongue and generate the sensation of eating something salty. The product is currently targeted at those who need a low or zero salt diet, such as hypertensive patients.

Safety and Security

In 2014, the Chinese search giant Baidu unveiled a set of “smart chopsticks” that can check for contaminated cooking oil. There is an illegal practice in China of reselling so-called “gutter oil” that is toxic and harmful, but can end up in your food. These chopsticks, called Kuaisou, apparently started off as “something of an April Fool’s prank” according to a Baidu representative, but were met with real interest.

It is unclear if this product ever made it to market, and it is hardly the most straightforward strategy for shutting down dangerous and illegal activity. Nonetheless, it’s a nice idea that your eating utensils can keep an eye out for you, so to speak, and warn you if the food you are about to eat is unsafe. Baidu representatives also talked about future versions being able to tell the origin of different ingredients and the nutrition they contain.

Novelty and Fun

Not all ideas for eating utensils have such lofty goals in mind. The so-called “selfie spoon” unveiled by cereal brand Cinnamon Toast Crunch is pretty much what it sounds like. It is a free spoon people can order with an attached selfie stick that allows people to photograph themselves during breakfast. Their website states, “Selfies and cereal together at last!” and assures this is, “Really a Thing!” It’s a brilliant marketing ploy to get kids to advertise cereal. It’s fun to use the device, which is now sold out.

So What?

Each of these individual products is far from perfect. A recent study published in the journal Appetite actually found that the HAPIfork made people eat slightly slower, but made no difference on the total amount they ate. Moreover, when people experience a device like this as “food shaming,” they may avoid using it, or it could even backfire. Any particular technology may be the wrong place for a value to be expressed, and good intentions can certainly go awry.

Nonetheless, all technologies are value-laden. Uncovering those values, and thinking critically about what you actually want from them opens up new opportunities. As the simple technologies around us—from spoons to everything else—become increasingly infused with algorithms and intentions, the question of what values to encode and how to overcome biases will become more difficult to ignore. Over the next decade, we’ll program machines with a much wider set of goals, priorities, and values, and they will be much more effective at achieving their ends.