Taste Portal
A speculative food experience for an over-industrialised future
Personal Portfolio Project
Future Scenario · Sensory Design
Taste Portal is a speculative food experience set in an over-industrialised future, where dense population, repetitive work and social alienation reshape how people eat, desire and consume.
The project imagines a sensory dining system built around an olfactory mask, immersive digital food interfaces and a 3D food-printing machine. Together, they turn smell, image and taste into a designed form of artificial comfort.
Future Scenario
The scenario begins with three pressures: population growth, alienation from nature and the rise of artificial luxury food. In this world, food becomes more than nutrition. It becomes a tool for escape, pleasure and identity.
Taste Portal responds to this condition by creating controlled dining experiences, where users enter a designed sensory environment before they eat.
Research Analysis & Logic
The early research looked at how future food consumption could be shaped by work pressure, emotional alienation and artificial forms of pleasure. This helped define the social condition behind Taste Portal.
The second layer focused on how smell and taste could be simulated through speculative technologies, including olfactory programming, nanomaterial-based scent release and molecular gastronomy.
Olfactory Mask
The olfactory mask is the main touchpoint of Taste Portal. It sits between the user’s body and the virtual dining environment, releasing programmed scents that match the selected food scenario.
Through the mask, smell becomes an interface. It helps the user feel closer to an imagined place, memory or desire, even when the food itself is artificially generated.
Dining Experience
The dining experience is designed as a step-by-step sensory journey. Users first choose a flavour, then adjust the scent, and finally select the state of molecular gastronomy before receiving a printed dish.
The visual environment, scent and food texture are synchronised to create a temporary escape from repetitive daily life.
