Researchers Stage Dinner Theater With Robot Food to Explore Future Ethics
Academics created an immersive dining experience where participants ate simulated biohybrid flying robots, revealing how people navigate ethical boundaries around emerging food technologies. The experiment offers insights into consumer acceptance of lab-grown and synthetic foods—crucial for companies developing alternative proteins and regulators shaping food policy.
Originaltitel: A Meat-Summer Night's Dream: A Tangible Design Fiction Exploration of Eating Biohybrid Flying Robots
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 extend beyond 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 people negotiate cultural and ethical boundaries in post-natural eating, and (iii) a methodological advance in embodied, multisensory design fiction.