I love to eat.  Snacking, noshing, munching… eating is a great thing.  I’ve got a few decades of eating experience under my belt, and one thing that struck me was that eating is more than just the food.  It is about how the food is presented, how the food is consumed, the reason for the food, and the environment in which the food is provided.  Besides the taste of the food, all these other factors make a huge difference on whether or not the food will be enjoyed.

Back when I was considering switching careers to design, a designer friend of mine told me “design is in everything.”  Meaning, design is not just a job description.  The principles can be applied to anything in life from creating a website to running a meeting to how you stack your dishes in your cabinets.  That is one of the truest statements I’ve ever been told. 

Since then I’ve been working as a User Interface (UI) designer for various web companies.  Previously I had been a user experience researcher studying how users think and interact with products.  In a nutshell, this field consists of coming up with ways to make the user interface usable, understandable, desirable- all the good things that allow users to achieve what they want with your product.  The key is in understanding the user’s perspective and goals, identifying root issues, and then coming up with competent solutions.

I think I’ve always been an interaction designer at heart.  I have all the right proclivities: perfectionist, obsessed with organizing, love of assembly lines.  I always run into random little things and muse (or rant) about better ways they could work. 

Which brings us to Food UI.  I would randomly be eating or preparing to eat, and then muse (or rant) about better ways the food or eating situation could have been handled.  I joked with my friends about the “food ui.”  But once I had a name for it in my head, more and more examples kept jumping out at me.  So like any self-respecting child of technology, why not get with the 21^st century and write a blog about it!