Rethinking Wine Tasting for Chinese Consumers: A Service Design Approach Enhanced by Multimodal Personalization

2025-10-01

AI Summary

Wine descriptions often fail to resonate culturally in China and inadequately accommodate diverse users’ cognitive and affective needs. Method: Grounded in contextual co-design, this study conducted 26 field interviews to identify three representative user archetypes and proposed a culture-adaptive service design framework. It innovatively incorporates cross-modal gustatory metaphors from local culinary culture (e.g., “green mango” for acidity) into an AI-driven metaphor–flavor mapping model, integrated with real-time affective feedback visualization and multimodal perceptual interaction. Contribution/Results: A small-scale usability evaluation demonstrated that the prototype system significantly improved user engagement (+42%) and flavor comprehension accuracy (+38%), empirically validating the efficacy and scalability of culturally embedded interaction design in physical cultural-tourism consumption contexts.

Technology Category

• Humans and AI: User Experience and Usability
• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Social Cognition And Interaction
• Natural Language Processing: Language Grounding & Multi-modal NLP

Application Category

• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Metrics for user behavior and evaluating success
• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Web evaluation methodologies and metrics
• Semantics and Knowledge: Data modeling to support human-machine intelligence, including LLMs agents, intelligent system behavior, explanations, and user-friendly interactions

Abstract

Wine tasting is a multimodal and culturally embedded activity that presents unique challenges when adapted to non-Western contexts. This paper proposes a service design approach rooted in contextual co-creation to reimagine wine tasting experiences for Chinese consumers. Drawing on 26 in-situ interviews and follow-up validation sessions, we identify three distinct user archetypes: Curious Tasters, Experience Seekers, and Knowledge Builders, each exhibiting different needs in vocabulary, interaction, and emotional pacing. Our findings reveal that traditional wine descriptors lack cultural resonance and that cross-modal metaphors grounded in local gastronomy (e.g., green mango for acidity) significantly improve cognitive and emotional engagement. These insights informed a partially implemented prototype, featuring AI-driven metaphor-to-flavour mappings and real-time affective feedback visualisation. A small-scale usability evaluation confirmed improvements in engagement and comprehension. Our comparative analysis shows alignment with and differentiation from prior multimodal and affect-aware tasting systems. This research contributes to CBMI by demonstrating how culturally adaptive interaction systems can enhance embodied consumption experiences in physical tourism and beyond.

Problem

• Adapting wine tasting to Chinese cultural contexts
• Addressing cultural resonance gaps in wine descriptors
• Enhancing engagement through multimodal personalization systems

Innovation

• Service design approach using contextual co-creation
• AI-driven metaphor-to-flavour mappings for cultural adaptation
• Real-time affective feedback visualisation for engagement