Blood chocolate Tasting experience
controlled by perceptions
Experience design project
One growing area of interest in the study of multi-sensory flavor perception comes from work on cross-modal correspondences. The latest research shows that people tend to associate tastes, food aromas, and flavors with other unrelated sensory cues in ways that are surprisingly consistent. For example, people tend to match sweet tastes with high-pitched sounds, while matching bitter tastes with low-pitched brassy sounds. People also reliably match sweetness with roundness and redness.
experience MAPPING
The experience map is meant to frame the journey I designed and highlight the key steps towards reaching the goal. This is a very useful tool that is useful for visualizing each step and interaction with the participant, reflect on how to engage with people to take the work further.
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In this experience, the effects of mood state on taste sensitivity and perception towards a product are stimulated in humans by exposing them to an ambiance that is meant to play around with their senses, aiming to analyze how people perceive it after going through some extreme stages from the pleasure to disgust and back.
Moreover, the awaking some various emotions will be surrounded by the mystery created around the identity and origin of the product. Another goal is to make people discover new flavors or feel more intensified the taste of some ingredients at the end of their journey.
The star of this experience is a chocolate, called Hematogen and originates from post-soviet countries, Russia and Moldova.
The nutritious bar, often considered to be a medical product is comprised of fudge and cow’s blood (~50%). Talk about bloody goodness. This chocolate treat is definitely not for the faint of heart, or vegetarians for that matter.
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It is a children targeted product and it is sold in pharmacies without a prescription, and solves many health problems, like iron deficiency, anemia, vitamin A, B12 deficiency, digestion, immunity.
Participants
Since the outcome of this journey is not intended to be necessarily positive, but rather assorted and distinctive for each person, with overall expected similarities, to observe various reactions and behaviors, it is interesting to apply it on people with different personalities and traits.
Although a persona well defined profile hasn’t been framed, there are some features that are preferred in participants, like being open-minded, curious, not vegetarian, food lover (in a way that likes to explore new products), healthy heart (no cardiac problems) and honest.
Applications
This kind of experience might be applied to play around with people’s minds, transforming it more into a game. It will nicely work on food festivals where you can find strange or new foods, similar to what we present. Furthermore, by changing the touchtpoints it can be applied in restaurants and bistros that want to make a difference and can also be used in advertising campaigns.
Outcome
In the experience took part people that had all the few required features. Leading them through all the touchpoints, I have managed to deliver the experience as it was planned. The emotions generated in all stages were similar to the ones we presented in the e map.
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Mystery was induced to people in the beginning, followed by the pleasure of tasting the chocolate which has a flavor similar to Sneakers (the blood taste is not obvious, being hard to distinguish without knowing about it).
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Paranoia and disgust installed after the creepy video, people trying to recall meaty flavors from what they ate. The calm was established after sharing fun and positive facts about the product, inducing more curiosity.
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Revealing the product's identity was slightly shocking, but people got captivated by it, leaving an overall feeling of enthusiast.