Speculative Design: Future Food and Health Technologies
Through co-designing with teens on futuristic technologies for health and food, we explore the boundaries of technological advancement in food and human care.
Collaborators
Sol Choi, Dr. Norman Su, Dr. Christina Chung
Method
Speculative Design, Design Fiction, Co-design
Overview
Using speculative design and design fiction, we probed for the technological future teens want to support their health, wellbeing, and food practices.
Motivation
Teenagers are growing up in a world where food, health, and technology are increasingly entangled. They see food on TikTok, encounter health advice through apps and algorithms, and are often surrounded by technologies that try to optimize behavior. Yet teens are rarely invited to shape what these future systems should actually look like. In this project, I wanted to create space for teens not just to react to existing technologies, but to imagine and critique future ones on their own terms.
Methods
To explore this, I co-led a series of design fiction workshops with 20 teens ages 14 to 17. We asked them to imagine two speculative artifacts set in the year 2145: a Future Self Mirror that reflects a person’s health and possible future, and a Magic Food Machine that can generate any food. Through storyboarding, prototyping, and group discussion, teens created narratives and objects that revealed how they think about food, care, health, privacy, and identity.
What emerged was not simple excitement about innovation. Teens were imaginative, but also deeply critical. Again and again, they drew boundaries around what technology should and should not do. They expected future systems to optimize eating and automate food preparation, but they pushed back when those systems seemed to threaten emotional wellbeing, family connection, privacy, or fairness. Rather than embracing a purely high-tech future, they negotiated with it.
One of the clearest tensions appeared around health reflection. Many teens imagined mirrors that tracked nutrition, projected future selves, or visualized the consequences of their habits. But they also worried that these tools could become overwhelming, obsessive, or harmful. Some wanted reflective technologies that could be turned off, hidden, softened, or only appear at specific moments. Reflection, for them, was not something that should happen constantly. It had to be bounded, timed, and emotionally safe. This led me to think about “absence” not as a lack, but as an important design affordance: sometimes supportive technology steps back.
What emerged was not simple excitement about innovation. Teens were imaginative, but also deeply critical. Again and again, they drew boundaries around what technology should and should not do. They expected future systems to optimize eating and automate food preparation, but they pushed back when those systems seemed to threaten emotional wellbeing, family connection, privacy, or fairness. Rather than embracing a purely high-tech future, they negotiated with it.
One of the clearest tensions appeared around health reflection. Many teens imagined mirrors that tracked nutrition, projected future selves, or visualized the consequences of their habits. But they also worried that these tools could become overwhelming, obsessive, or harmful. Some wanted reflective technologies that could be turned off, hidden, softened, or only appear at specific moments. Reflection, for them, was not something that should happen constantly. It had to be bounded, timed, and emotionally safe. This led me to think about “absence” not as a lack, but as an important design affordance: sometimes supportive technology steps back.
Teens welcomed convenience. They imagined machines that could generate meals in seconds, respond to cravings, or make food in busy moments. At the same time, they were clear that some parts of food should remain human. Home-cooked meals, family recipes, and foods tied to memory or culture were treated as fundamentally different from utilitarian or mass-produced food. Several teens insisted that machines should never replace “grandma’s food.” In their stories, food was not just fuel; it was love, routine, and identity.
They also showed a sophisticated awareness of the broader systems around technology. Teens assumed that future food devices would be commercialized, tiered by cost, and potentially filled with ads or surveillance. Some imagined basic access being affordable while premium food experiences were locked behind subscriptions. Others worried about privacy when technologies accessed personal data, habits, or even thoughts. Still, they did not stop at critique. They proposed alternatives: schools and clinics should get access first, essential food should remain available to everyone, and systems should include guardrails against waste and overconsumption.
For me, this project opened up a richer design space for youth-centered health technology. It showed that teens do not simply want tools that monitor and correct them, and convenient food access. They want technologies that make room for negotiation, pleasure, emotional complexity, and real-life relationships. Their ideas suggest that future food and wellbeing systems should support not just optimization, but also refusal, deferral, experimentation, and play. The project also reinforced the value of speculative, hands-on methods for working with teens: when invited to imagine futures through stories and artifacts, they revealed nuanced values that more conventional interviews might never have surfaced.
This project expands how we think about youth-centered health design. Instead of treating teens as passive users of behavior-change tools, it positions them as critical co-imaginers of healthier and more humane technological futures.
This work is published at CHI 2026.
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