Yours Flavorfully is a taste/gustatory installation which explores a merging of written emotion, Indian aesthetics, and taste to provide the user a unique experience that allows them to see their emotions in action and ultimately, taste their emotions. This is an incredible opportunity to engage Indian users in their cultural heritage while western audiences have the opportunity to interact with Indian aesthetics and flavors.

The theory of Rasa, in Indian aesthetics, is a highly evolved, ancient conception of base human expressions. They have been used primarily in dance for at least a thousand years. Pani puri is an extremely popular Indian street food which consists of Pani (Juice), filling, and a crunchy puri as the base. 

Combining these two disparate forms hinged on the re-mediation of the letter-form into a taste-form. For this, we needed to achieve two transformations, One, we needed to transform the letter-form into an emotion-form. We solved this using a custom built recurrent neural network NLP model which detects emotions within a series of sentences and transforms them into a rasa classification.

Two, we then needed to transform the emotion-form (Rasa) into a flavor-form. We utilized the duality of meanings of the word “Rasa” in Sanskrit and other Indian languages - the word “Rasa” is used to denote expressions, taste, and in a more literal form, juice at the same time. Thus, we have readymade access to a tried and tested, culturally relevant classification of emotions which easily bridges the emotion-to-taste gap. 

We were able to perform this classification and re-mediation through detailed user interviews and flavor tests which allowed us to map user emotions to particular flavors. Through a trial-and-error (and arguably, highly enjoyable and delicious) process, we made Pani puris using a variety of flavors and tested them out first among ourselves and with users to identify the most appropriate flavor mapping. These flavors are utilized to build different types of Pani puri. 

We then automated the making of pani puris by building a pani puri installation which automatically combines these flavors based on user letters. Users can simply scan their unique QR code at the installation to get their personalized pani puri. They also have the ability to share their letters, Rasa artwork, and the final flavor interpretation with their friends - who can simply use the shared QR code at the installation and get their uniquely flavored pani puri.