Seeing Taste:
On the Image of Flavor | 2025
Seeing Taste: On the Image of Flavor is an experimental platform that translates taste profiles into visual form. It explores how ingredients and sensory qualities such as acidity, sweetness, and heat can be rendered aesthetically in color, texture, light, and spatial composition. Bridging food science, sensory mapping, and computational image generation, the project investigates new ways of understanding flavor beyond language and taste alone.
How can flavor be translated into a visual language that others can perceive and interpret?
What new cultural or sensory meanings emerge when taste becomes a communicable image rather than a private experience?
Visualized Flavors
Audience
Designed for chefs, researchers and public audiences interested in experimental, multi-sensory approaches to flavors.
Future Applications
Menu development, gastronomic education and speculative collaborations across food, design and culture.
Research - Crossmodal Correspondence
-
Sweet aligns with warm colors and rounded shapes, salty with white and smooth textures, and umami with blue and moon like forms across all regions.
-
Sour varies significantly by culture, shifting between green, gray, and yellow, while bitter is inconsistently tied to black or irregular forms.
Survey - Flavor to Visual Mapping
-
61 participants mapped flavor to color, shape, texture, and emotional movement.
-
Crossmodal consistency emerged across users, revealing predictable visual patterns linked to taste.
System pipeline
GPT modules
Case Study
UI