Breaking Down Dishes
Made by Brian Li
Made by Brian Li
As a novice cook who just moved off campus, one of the most intimidating aspects of making lunch and dinner everyday is having to work with the ingredients. It can be scary trying out new combinations and having a dish completely fail. Personally, I have fallen back on 2 or 3 dishes that I am comfortable with instead of trying out new recipes. What I have created here is a visualization that shows every existing connection between different ingredients, the cuisine they are used in, the technique used to cook them etc. In this way, I hope to not only provide a way of comfortably testing new materials, but also a way to visualize how food differs between cultures and time periods.
Created: September 15th, 2014
As a novice cook who just moved off campus, one of the most intimidating aspects of making lunch and dinner everyday is having to work with the ingredients. It can be scary trying out new combinations and having a dish completely fail. Personally, I have fallen back on 2 or 3 dishes that I am comfortable with instead of trying out new recipes. What I have created here is a visualization that shows every existing connection between different ingredients, the cuisine they are used in, the technique used to cook them etc. In this way, I hope to not only provide a way of comfortably testing new materials, but also a way to visualize how food differs between cultures and time periods.
I really like this idea, trying to make food based on ingredients instead of deciding on a dish and then reading what the ingredients are. However, I was wondering if maybe you would add another ring for the names of dishes? This right now seems kind of discontinuous in the way that you can see ingredients that go well together based on recipes that only the software can see. If there were recipe names or even that ring would have links to the recipes you could click on and view, maybe it would make the entire thing more cohesive by having both ingredients and final products? I know personally, when I think about ingredients I am also thinking about the final product that I am going to eat.
I'm having a bit of a hard time understanding your description of how this works and where the data is coming from. Are you compiling data from cooking websites and suggesting combinations of ingredients based on the frequency with which they appear together in recipes online? I understand and like the rationale behind your choice for this project, I'm just unclear about how the system collects and interprets data.
Why did you choose gradient rings in particular? I feel like I would have a hard time locating a particular element on a ring unless they were arranged in a way that followed some very obvious ordering, such as alphabetically, but in your system it seems to make more sense to group similar ingredients together so that spinach could be easily switched to arugula, for example. Would something more like a web better serve your purpose?
@kevinramser Yes, that is how I intended to collect and interpret the data.
@Kim Lister
I only used a gradient here to try and show a sense of depth. In the real product, the rings should look more solid and 3-dimensional (I kinda rushed these). I admit I didn't think about looking for a particular element when creating this visualization, so some sort intuitive ordering or search option would definitely be a nice addition. However, I don't think a web would serve my purpose. My goal was to compare and contrast the different patterns created by matching ingredients. I think a web would look a bit too chaotic.
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