Miles, Oliver
(2025)
Interactions with Valuescapes: applications of extra-sensory values in everyday coffee personalization.
PhD thesis, University of Nottingham.
Abstract
Personalization of consumables is increasingly grounded on extra-sensory as well as sensory qualities. Using the everyday example of coffee, this thesis addresses the challenge of creating a values-orientated personalization paradigm that maintains the descriptive and predictive capabilities of sensory product-preference alignment seen in mass market approaches, while also eliciting the extra-sensory qualities more likely evaluated by the consumer end-user as ‘personal’. This paradigm is referred to as the ‘Valuescape’; a theoretical, structural conception of the socio-technical world in which values themselves become objects for interaction.
This work begins by presenting a shared problem of values-orientated personalization in industry, human-computer interaction (HCI), and digital society (Chapter 1:); a literature review framing approaches to coffee personalization in terms of industry norms, theories of social value, and interaction value (Chapter 2:); and a methodology establishing a three-part approach to asserting, probing, and provoking values-orientated interactions, enabling a thematic analysis of participant retrospection on interactions with Valuescape(s). Designs for Valuescape(s) are presented here, along with ‘CoffeeWizard’ – a framework for producing ‘personal valuescapes’ used in two of three empirical studies (Chapter 3:). In ‘Contingencies for Valued Interaction’, a timeline is used provoke the elaborations of hospitality workers on how they maintained preferred practices during the Covid-19 pandemic (Chapter 4:). In ‘Interactions with CoffeeWizard’, the framework for generating personal valuescapes takes the form of a coffee selection box, surveying user preferences, provoking product choice, and eliciting retrospection on ‘personal value-footprints’ (Chapter 5:). In ‘Building Valuescape’, novel graphs serve as the primary provocation to personal preference selection in speculative enactments with a prototype recommender interface (Chapter 6:).
Four top level modes of interaction are found and set out as ‘substantiation’, ‘practical application’, ‘evocative remembrance’, and ‘speculative co-design’. Personal valuescapes as constructions that provoke are delineated from Valuescape as a social structure that can be probed, with instances of interaction across studies contributing to four distinct ‘archetypes’ of Valuescape and associated implications for their use between consumers and corporate value experts as mechanisms, agents, and of democratising value agendas (Chapter 7:). Finally, limitations are discussed, informing recommendations for revised study protocols and future works (Chapter 8:).
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