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Call for Papers:

Special Issue of International Journal of Food Design – Healthy Eating

Full paper due: 1 April 2019

Call for papers

Healthy nutrition is key to people’s health and vitality. A growing body of knowledge about nutrients and their effect on our health is available and besides, who doesn’t want to lead a healthy life? And yet, making the food choices that we often know we should make in order to live a healthy life is not something that always comes naturally. Food is connected to social contexts, cultural values, emotions and identities, all factors that make changing our food consumption habits difficult.

However, the ongoing rise in lifestyle-related diseases directly associated with food intake calls for action. As a result, the last decades have seen many initiatives aimed at persuading, inviting, nudging or coaxing people into healthy eating. Such initiatives range from promotional campaigns to apps, online environments and (serious) games to inform people about healthy eating or to monitor food intake, to the design of retail and food environments. These many examples testify to the importance of healthy eating as well as to the importance of design. Tools and methodology in design for behavior change have been developed that can support the development of interventions aimed at healthy eating. These may, for instance, take into account how and when we make food choices and how we choose to eat (for instance alone or with others). Likewise, designers of environments, communication and food packaging can stimulate healthy food choices or enhance the experience of healthy eating. But also consider the role of assistive technology which can play a role by providing suggestions about food, monitoring food intake, shopping for food, etc. It is therefore also important to consider how the design of technology might influence what we eat and how we eat. Taken together, these topics point out the widespread responsibility of designers of all kinds in designing for healthy eating.

This special issue would like to emphasise the importance of the ethical, cultural, social and emotional perspectives on healthy eating and how these might be influenced by design. To give just a few examples of questions that we would like to answer with this special issue: Could interventions to stimulate healthy eating be more social? What does this mean for design? Can (or should?) design / designers change our current obesogenic food environment? What design principles should designers of food, communication about food or of food environments adopt? What is the role of current and future technological developments for this area? Could personalized food printing offer a solution? What new sensor technology will assist people in tracking their food behaviour? How should designers deal with the complexity of healthy eating?

 We welcome both empirical work and theoretically-informed design case studies since both are needed to creatively tackle the above and the many other questions in this field.

Suggested Research Themes:

• Theories and principles of design for healthy eating
• Design influencing habitual food choices (e.g., through nudging)
• Theoretically informed and/or empirically evaluated design case studies
• Company strategies that support healthy eating
• Social implications of design interventions
• Ethical considerations
• New sensors and feedback mechanisms
• Application of new technologies, such as 3D printing
• Multi-sensory packaging design 

Journal background

The International Journal of Food Design (IJFD) is the first academic journal entirely dedicated to Food Design research and practice. We aim at creating a platform for researchers operating in the various disciplines that contribute to the understanding of Food Design: Design applied to food and eating, or food and eating investigated from a Design perspective. See

https://www.intellectbooks.co.uk/journals/view-Journal,id=246/view,page=2/

Schedule:

• Call for papers: October 2018
• Submission of full papers: 1 April 2019
• Notification of acceptance: 1 June 2019
• Final version of paper due: 1 July 2019
• Special issue publication date: September 2019

Submission of papers:

A double-blind review process will be used for this special issue.

Please check the Notes for Contributors on https://www.intellectbooks.co.uk/MediaManager/File/IJFD/2018%20NfC%20IJFD_3_1.pdf

You can send your contribution for this Special Issue directly to one of the guest editors:

Dr. ir. Geke Ludden