A Meat-Summer Night's Dream: A Tangible Design Fiction Exploration of Eating Biohybrid Flying Robots

2025-10-07

AI Summary

This study addresses the sustainability, ethical implications, and cultural acceptability challenges associated with edible biohybrid flying robots as future food. Employing a speculative design practice set in a 2052 Paris dinner-theatre, it prototypes the Autun quail substitute—a tangible biohybrid artifact—integrated with multisensory immersion, ritualized performance, and situated narrative to construct an embodied design fiction. Six creative practitioners engaged in role-play exhibited curiosity, discomfort, and philosophical reflection, exposing cultural tensions in negotiating technological boundaries within post-natural dietary contexts. The research innovatively extends food design methodology beyond the synthetic meat paradigm, catalyzing deeper ethical discourse on living food systems. It further empirically validates dramatized experiential formats as effective catalysts for critical public deliberation and socio-technical acceptance.

Technology Category

• Humans and AI: Game Design — Virtual Humans, NPCs and Autonomous Characters
• Intelligent Robots: Embodied AI
• Philosophy and Ethics of AI: Artificial General Intelligence

Application Category

• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Fairness and ethical considerations in crowd work and in human-in-the-loop AI systems
• Responsible Web: Machine-in-the-loop, human agency and autonomy
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Accountability, Transparency, and Ethics for personalization

Abstract

What if future dining involved eating robots? We explore this question through a playful and poetic experiential dinner theater: a tangible design fiction staged as a 2052 Paris restaurant where diners consume a biohybrid flying robot in place of the banned delicacy of ortolan bunting. Moving beyond textual or visual speculation, our ``dinner-in-the-drama'' combined performance, ritual, and multisensory immersion to provoke reflection on sustainability, ethics, and cultural identity. Six participants from creative industries engaged as diners and role-players, responding with curiosity, discomfort, and philosophical debate. They imagined biohybrids as both plausible and unsettling -- raising questions of sentience, symbolism, and technology adoption that exceed conventional sustainability framings of synthetic meat. Our contributions to HCI are threefold: (i) a speculative artifact that stages robots as food, (ii) empirical insights into how publics negotiate cultural and ethical boundaries in post-natural eating, and (iii) a methodological advance in embodied, multisensory design fiction.

Problem

• Exploring ethical implications of consuming biohybrid robots as food
• Investigating cultural boundaries through multisensory design fiction experiences
• Challenging conventional sustainability frameworks with speculative dining scenarios

Innovation

• Tangible design fiction explores biohybrid flying robots as food
• Dinner theater combines performance and multisensory immersion for reflection
• Methodological advance in embodied design fiction for HCI