Tasting Water at Canal Convergence 2021: An Experiment in Embodied Remembering

The idea that tasting experiences can serve as an entrance for changing behavior and enacting a form of selective remembering sits at the heart of taste education efforts. For example, Alice Water’s edible schoolyard project and its more popularized spin-offs (e.g., Jamie Oliver), are rooted in the belief that exposing children to the taste of fresh fruits and vegetables, as well as the labor that goes into making such foods, can shape a child’s likes and dislikes in ways that reverberate out into the economy (Waters 2008). Similarly, taste education efforts in France, such as strawberry tastings for school children, seek to undermine the ongoing industrialization of the French palate (Leysne 2006). Children are not the only ones targeted through taste education. As Brad Weiss points out, learning and teaching others to taste heritage pork has played a critical role in valorizing and protecting efforts to revitalize traditional hog production in North Carolina (Weiss 2018). On a parallel vein, efforts to educate coffee consumers into cultured ways of tasting helped bring the specialized coffee market into being, as well as tea markets (Goldstein 2011; Besky 2014).

Some of these education efforts are influenced by insights drawn from the world of sensory science (Heymann 2019). Examples include the jury terroir used by Comte cheese producers (Shields-Argèles 2019) and the beer or coffee flavor wheels that circulate through media channels or at points of distribution. These “sciences of subjectivity,” as Steven Shapin terms them, offer standardized ways of making aggregate knowledge from individuals’ subjective experiences of tasting or smelling (Shapin 2012). Indeed, insights gained through the practice of sensory science shape how food scientists design products, how marketers communicate about products, and in some cases, how regulators categorize products (Paxson 2019; Baur 2016; El-Sayed and Spackman 2022). In all of these cases, tasting is a form of remembering.

The ability to link past sensory experiences with current sensory experiences marks sensory expertise, even connoisseurship (Ulloa 2019; Muniesa and Trébuchet-Breitwiller 2010). We think of daily repetitive acts such as turning on a tap as producing a special kind of expertise: everyday expertise. Everyday experts are people who through repeated exposure and experience have gained a form of tacit, embodied expertise around the quality of municipal water in their homes or places of employment. While everyday expertise is uneven—varying according to age, health, and personal experience—we see it as both an important counterpart and addition to the officially sanctioned technical expertise held by those working in water production. Everyday expertise is an addition to technical expertise in its ability to capture data spread over vast systems. Indeed, as the recently retired director of Philadelphia Water’s Bureau of Laboratory Services has noted, the expertise held by consumers throughout a municipal water system is a critical, albeit under-utilized and sometimes derided, monitoring system that helps water providers detect and respond to problems that might otherwise go unnoticed (Burlingame 2021; Burlingame and Mackey 2007).

Everyday expertise additionally offers a counterpart to technical expertise. Aesthetic and embodied experiences do not happen in a vacuum. Rather, they mingle with individual and group memory to shape how people evaluate and engage the scientific and technical expertise of authorities (Charles 2018). Across the economic spectrum, people opt out of drinking municipal water due to perceived aesthetic qualities that are believed to indicate potentially pathogenic materials. These behaviors range from purchasing bottled water to installing in-home purification systems. When memory and embodied experience offer a different reading from that provided by authorities, as the experience in Flint, Michigan, potently demonstrates, authorities lose credibility in multiple locales. Everyday expertise can be protective. It can also come at a cost: it may erroneously identify a water as safe when the water is, in fact, dangerous; inversely, innocuous sensory cues may lead to suspicions about water that is, in fact, safe. Everyday expertise invites in experiences of remembering that legal and regulatory structures struggle to accommodate.

Direct potable reuse, however, raises a different challenge on the remembering/forgetting spectrum than that of other supplies. DPR water undergoes a series of “advanced” treatments until the wastewater has been stripped of chemicals, minerals, and pathogens as measured by instrumental and chemical modes of analysis. From a chemical standpoint, DPR water is pure water. Indeed, prior to serving DPR water, municipalities add back in minerals to obtain a desirable taste profile. This means that DPR water should offer essentially the “perfect” tasting water, at least for folks habituated to the relatively neutral taste of many filtered or bottled waters. Yet despite its chemical composition, many people are hesitant to even try DPR water. For water policymakers working to promote the long-term viability of municipal water systems, everyday expertise proves a double bind: many consumers opt out of the current municipal water system as a source for drinking water due to perceptible taste cues. Yet many are reluctant to engage with the possibility of adopting this water supply due to psychological, rather than physical, aspects of taste. Unfortunately, to date, most proponents of DPR have discounted consumers’ everyday expertise as a mode of evaluation (Manheim and Spackman 2022), instead overly relying on technical education to address concerns. This “deficit-model” approach that imagines education will change public opinion has largely failed (Morgan and Grant-Smith 2015). By overly focusing on the actual quality of the water, proponents of DPR miss attending to the role that community experiences and memories with water (culinary or otherwise) play in how open someone is to forgetting that DPR water was recently wastewater.

We see in this competing mixture of logics and ideals an opportunity for using tasting practices as a mode to inform decision making at the individual and institutional level. We draw on a recent turn toward multisensory design in art and education that hypothesizes the more sensory channels are activated in a learning environment, the more intensely learners will engage with content, resulting in higher information retention (Novak et al. 2020; Pursey and Lomas 2018). We further draw on a “making and doing” approach from Science and Technology Studies to co-engage municipal water producers and policymakers alongside consumers (Downey and Zuiderent-Jerek 2017). As with other efforts to use art to engage the public around controversial issues, we designed Tasting Water to invite personal reflection, and to spark curiosity about the ways that technologies function (Fraaije et al. 2022). These design approaches aimed to reach a wide audience; approximately 1,250 people of all ages participated over the festival period. We added to these public engagement goals the aim to upend familiar everyday experiences for consumers—as well as implicit producer assumptions about these experiences—by, as Voß and Guggenheim (2019) term it, making taste public.

Memory and social interactions shape how people react to the aesthetic qualities of water. As such, Tasting Water aimed to translate participants’ individual and social tasting experiences into visible traces. We hypothesized that making tasting experiences visible could inspire policymakers and utility leaders to turn attention to how taste is more than just an interaction of a molecular cue with a body. Liking plays a predominant role in consumer interactions with safe (but perhaps distasteful) municipal water. As such, we aimed to invite participants into reconsidering their own reactions to water. We wanted to inspire curiosity about the terroir-like origins of the tastes of local drinking waters, and to highlight for all participants that tasting happens in community.

To develop the Tasting Water exhibit, we used a mixed-methods approach. Our approach combined science and art, drawing on Spackman’s seven-plus years building critical disruptions (performative public engagement pieces that center and render strange sensory science practices), Manheim’s decade-plus working in collaborative design, and Barua’s five years working in media arts. To better understand what hopes and concerns consumers bring to tap water tasting, we conducted three user workshops over Zoom and in person, for a total of five workshops with fifteen people. ASU’s COVID-19 protocols governed how we conducted workshops. A subset of participants (five) were recruited from underserved neighborhoods via collaboration with a local community organization; four additional participants were recruited from advertisements posted at filtered water vending locations. We designed the workshops to build trust between participants, to activate participants’ sense of agency within the water system, and to playfully support curiosity and generate ideas (see  appendix for outline of flow of workshops).

Tasting water is hard. To address this challenge, we primed participants using mental imagination and physical tasting exercises before moving on to water tastings. Throughout the workshops, team members took notes, building out a set of water-tasting wheels (see Taste and Odor Wheel for Raw and Treated Drinking Water discussion below) that included texture, flavor, memory, and participant-generated categories. At the end of the first workshop, we shared the collected notes with participants. The second workshop built on insights from the first, walking participants through a step-by-step tasting process to co-create a collaborative water wheel. To help activate participants’ ability to complete this task, we asked them to “Imagine you’re trying to describe this water to a friend who lives somewhere far away. What do they need to know about this water?” Due to the difficulty many people have in naming sensations, we shared a list of words commonly used by water professionals to describe drinking water, with the inclusion of words we had heard participants use during workshop 1 and the first part of workshop 2. We then asked “What for you is missing from this list of words?” to elicit additional descriptors. Finally, we asked participants to imagine a water wheel of the future.

It can be easy to imagine futures that are overwhelming, or where we feel a lack of agency. To address this challenge, we described a future “where humans have managed to find some kind of balance with our environment” and as such, have adequate water. Drawing on insights from design exercises, we asked participants to situate their bodies in this future by imagining their own future thirst, how they might assuage it, and the aesthetic characteristics of that future water. After completing this exercise, we juxtaposed the water wheel of the future with the current wheel, and discussed how we might make this present wheel look more like the future one. We specifically asked, “What do you want to keep, what do you want to take away from this, and what is missing that you want to add?”

We used insights from the workshops conducted with consumers to develop a pilot of the core tasting activities we imagined using in the exhibit. Four Phoenix region water utility professionals involved in communications, outreach, and treatment participated in a trial of the tasting activities and provided feedback, which we used to further inform the design of the interactive tasting exhibit. Finally, we built a prototype of the exhibit and invited feedback on the exhibit experience from thirty-nine undergraduate students at Arizona State University.

The exhibit space had two components: an external “orientation” space, and an internal, immersive “tasting” space. The external space used a café-like setting surrounded by a fence to delimit the space and allow for crowd control. Upon entering, participants were given a brief overview of the activity (figure 1) and were directed to a table to sniff two anonymized samples of cinnamon. This activity, team members informed participants, was to help them think about how two things that are the same can also be different. It helped participants begin to attune their senses to small differences (c.f. Kitson and McHugh 2019). As most participants entered the space in groups, this also helped activate within-group conversation about memories associated with sensations. After sniffing the cinnamon samples, participants proceeded to the water bar and directed to take a water sample and a corresponding token. They then moved into the immersive tasting space. We offered three different locally produced waters from different parts of the valley. One of the waters was donated by a brewery and had been additionally treated by reverse osmosis; as such, it mimicked the sensory characteristics of DPR water (figure 2).

We used a charismatic, inflatable white dome to create an immersive sonic and visual space inside which consumers could taste the water, an aesthetic choice that also offered the practical advantage of visually competing with the light installations Canal Convergence is known for. The dome was divided into four pre-defined sections. We placed a fifth user-defined section in the liminal space between the immersive and orientation space. The different sections in the dome combined water associations generated by workshop participants with elements from the Taste and Odor Wheel for Raw and Treated Drinking Water (figure 3). Developed by water professionals in the 1990s, the taste and odor wheel is a communication device that helps water professionals identify and treat unwanted tastes and odors in the municipal water supply (I. M. Suffet, Khiari, and Bruchet 1999). Each section of the “wheel” in the dome reflected one of four major aesthetic descriptor groups regularly found in waters from the Phoenix region, and incorporated tangible material cues gathered from participant design workshops and published literature (Dietrich and Burlingame 2021; Westerhoff 2022) (table 1).

Our team created an environment inside the dome that provoked a rich sensory experience. Participants were invited to enter the dome and immerse themselves, that is, to stand in the center, close their eyes, and focus on the sonic landscape. An immersive composition layered recognizable aquatic sounds such as drops of water, natural streams, swishing jugs, and water in metal containers and pipes. A second, abstracted layer remixed and blended these sounds at random and varied amplitudes to create a haunting, textural wash. These sounds played in an indeterminate pattern through eight speakers, equally spaced and arranged radially inside the dome, to create an indeterminate and slightly disorienting 360-degree composition. This process (1) immersed the participant and calmed the amygdala through sonic/somatic grounding, (2) defamiliarized the experience of water and attenuated listeners to more traditional or preconditioned notions of varieties of water types (natural, treated, etc.), and (3) reinforced the mindset that water can be perceived as a deeply complex and nuanced interaction of physical and temporal processes (soundscape available at www.shomitbarua.com/knowing-water).

Four changing visual tableaus representing the four descriptor categories (table 1) added to the soundscape enveloping participants. Each tableau consisted of a series of slides that were literal expressions of the tableau’s theme (chlorine = swimming pools; earthy/musty/moldy = dirt + vegetation; mineral = rocks; infrastructure = pipes). The images were framed to give a figurative or textural impressions of each tableau’s theme. The length of each slide varied and each tableau was programmed to shift phase and rotate asynchronously to promote an undulating consideration of dominant versus global flavor impressions (figure 4).

Our primary aim in Tasting Water was not one-way taste education. Rather, we sought to highlight the fact that water has tastes, and in the process open a two-way communication channel between consumers and water professionals around the embodied and communal aspects of tasting. To achieve this, we drew on the concept of polarized sensory positioning (PSP) (Teillet et al. 2010) to build in an opportunity for participants to leave behind visible traces of their experiences at the different aesthetic poles in the exhibit. In the sensory science laboratory, PSP is a comparative sensory science approach developed for the water tasting. PSP minimizes the numbers of samples needed in a tasting task. It accomplishes the goal of minimizing numbers of samples and expertise by inviting consumers to decide whether an unknown sample is like a known taste profile. While we did not strictly adhere to the PSP approach, we used PSP’s insights that comparative tasting with taste cues decreases the cognitive load required to taste different waters. Instead of asking participants to mark their experiences on a piece of paper or via a computer program as one might in the laboratory setting, we provided colored tokens corresponding to each water sample.

Because taste plays a role in how open people are to new approaches for making drinking water, we additionally ran smaller group workshops during the exhibit. These workshops focused on a collaborative futuring activity. In the futuring activity, we asked participants to consider the dome as a physical manifestation of how people responsible for the sensory qualities of municipal water understood and talked with each other about the tastes and smells in raw and treated drinking water. We asked which of the sensations represented by the objects in the dome they would like to still see present in their water system of the future. Once participants had decided, we placed the objects in the center of the dome. We then discussed reasons as a group. One especially notable interaction occurred when a subgroup of participants initially excluded chlorine from the water of the future, and then changed their mind in the group discussion, deciding that they valued the safety chlorine represented, but also wanted minimal detectability. As such, the bleach was moved farther away from the center of the circle (figure 5).

In recognition that one of the core weaknesses of current sensory approaches is the failure to account for and record sensory experiences that fall outside of the bounds of scientific knowledge production, we additionally incorporated a fifth aesthetic pole in the exhibit. This user-generated section offered additional material cues drawn from participant insights during workshops, such as a clock (to represent the changing sensations over time), a plastic bottle, Jell-O, and more. We also included sticky notes, inviting participants to write down their own personal cues if our pre-provided cues did not work (figure 6). This table was unevenly engaged with over the course of Canal Convergence, but did yield some especially interesting interactions and observations. For example, one group of participants in their late teens or early twenties spent a significant amount of time at the user-generated table. When asked why, one member responded: “I liked the creativity of it, the rest of the stuff is pretty basic. I want to see what it’s like to taste time.”

Practices of making taste public exist in a variety of nonscientific spaces, from online restaurant evaluations to Instagram accounts (Yu and Margolin 2021; Contois and Kish 2022). Experimental eating, however, is less common (Voß and Guggenheim 2019), despite the opportunities experimental eating can offer with regards to new or emerging (and potentially controversial) technologies. However, capturing the potential of experimental eating to open up new modes of communication between policymakers and consumers requires moving beyond the hedonic “I like” or “I dislike” mode of evaluation. The colored tokens we asked participants to place at tables with cues that corresponded to their tasting experiences sought to move participants beyond hedonic evaluation, while also highlighting the communal aspects of how people taste.

From a scientific perspective, our experimental eating approach offered an array of biasing factors; several participants commented that the exhibit “was not going to offer reliable results.” While the critiques of biasing factors is ostensibly correct within the framing of laboratory practice, they entirely overlook the aims of art-science practice in, as Andrew Yang suggests, “creating a space of meaningful uncertainty” (Yang 2015). Meaningful uncertainty, Yang argues, offers an opportunity for resetting the epistemic principles guiding how researchers and others evaluate the usefulness of experiments done outside of disciplinary boundaries; it offers a space for “configuring new and largely uncharted kinds of meaning” (2015). We see meaningful uncertainty as a necessary to reframing the conversation around technologies like DPR that depend on forgetting, specifically because forgetting at the regulatory and institutional level seems to play a key role in activating tensions between embodied knowledge and professional expertise. Rather than telling people what to think, or trying to educate away embodied concerns, Tasting Water engaged the public and water professionals in an open-ended invitation to rethink the way they use taste within a larger series of remembering practices in evaluating their water.

Tasting Water highlighted for participants the ways that tasting is not actually entirely individual, but rather situated. Family groups made this most explicit, with caregivers and children engaging in some of the most extended conversations we observed. For example, we observed two adult men with a little girl discussing their experiences back and forth as they tasted in the exhibit space. “It’s OK. I’m not scared. It’s water,” the girl said to the man. One man observed about one of the waters, “It tastes like my RO water.” The girl observed back, “It tastes like dirt,” for one sample, then exclaimed “Pipes!” and later to one of the men, “I did [place my token for] pipes two times.” Similarly, the tokens left behind on tables offered subsequent participants the opportunity to agree, disagree, or simply be curious about other people’s tasting experiences. We observed a father–son team tasting. The father asked his son, “What is the most important thing you learned while tasting water…did anything surprise you?” The son responded, “the water tasted different” and mentioned that he was able to make a decision about where to put the tokens based on the number of tokens that were on the table. In contrast, one participant commented, “I saw what other people were putting their chips down with and I just didn’t agree with what other people were doing,” highlighting that while this participant saw themselves as within a community of tasters, they also disagreed with the experiences of others. Another group of friends found it difficult to reconcile the very different tasting experiences they were having, with one person commenting to his friend: “Did I get a different water to you? I don’t taste that at all. Maybe it’s because I grew up drinking tap [water].” The lack of alignment seen with regards to dominant taste sensations across the exhibit demonstrated the challenges intrinsic in tasting water. More critically, the lack of alignment highlighted the meaningful differences between people’s disparate remembered experiences with water, and the uncertainty about what “good” or “bad” tasting water actually is.

One form of meaningful uncertainty that surprised us was the apparent risk participants and potential participants saw in the invitation to make their tastes public. We noticed a self-consciousness in participants’ body language in that moment when they put their token down on a table: participants often walked away quickly from the table. Once the token is placed, one’s interior experience is expressed publicly. But, by stepping away, the experience becomes private again through the anonymity of the token. When we presented the exhibit on the Arizona Water ’22 exhibitor floor, we noticed a surprising number of attendees who were unwilling to participate despite their expertise in water writ large. While it is impossible to know why so many chose not to participate, we had multiple people tell us, “I know what water tastes like,” foreclosing the opportunity for that expertise to be proved “incorrect” by the uncertainty in the anonymized samples and the public visibility of what they perceived. Opting out of tasting, too, is a form of meaningful uncertainty in its refusal to let someone else, expert or not, direct action.

The sociality of tasting, we think, is one of the most critical, yet missing, parts of conversations around what sort of water futures Phoenix-area inhabitants would like to see realized. One of our initial workshop participants was especially clear that the reason she avoided using tap water was because others in her social network distrusted the water and its sensory characteristics. Current educational and communication approaches used by water utilities, however, lack the ability to engage the sociality of tasting. By translating the sociality of taste through meaningful uncertainty, Tasting Water opens the door for further exploration of how to valorize the sociality and subjectivity of taste rather than to discount it in discussions around DPR.

Tasting Water acted as a multidirectional communication vehicle. It allowed us to engage water hesitant consumers from the Phoenix region, local residents and visitors from various areas around the valley (although primarily the east side of the valley), and decision makers from utilities and regional water think tanks. We evaluated the success of Tasting Water via its ability to activate the consuming public as well as producers and policymakers in remembering the multiple aspects of water. Perhaps the most telling measure of success is in the invitation extended to us to bring the exhibit to Arizona Water ’22, and in the enthusiasm exhibited after by water directors from more than one Phoenix-area utility. In recognition of this political potential, as well as of the challenges associated with putting on a full-scale exhibit, we are currently working in collaboration with community members and local Phoenix-area utilities on building a small, portable exhibit that utility communications or outreach teams could use. The aim of this in-process exhibit, like that of Tasting Water, is not only to educate but also to provide opportunities for policymakers and utility leaders to learn more about the hopes and desires for water futures held by members of the public under their jurisdiction. We anticipate these interventions into conventional drinking water and DPR carrying significant potential for publics and decision makers exploring new or emerging foodstuff-related technologies.

Spackman authored the majority of the paper. Spackman and Manheim co-conceived the project, with Manheim taking lead on project design and implementation. Spackman, Manheim, and Barua co-conducted workshops, exhibit design, and analysis. Barua led on sound and projected visual art design.

We are grateful to the two anonymous reviewers who provided valuable feedback on this manuscript; to the students of FIS 201 (Fall ’21) for providing feedback; to Oluwabukola Makinde, Lauryn Mannigel, and Brandon Lofgreen for research assistance during Canal Convergence; to Ben Spackman, Charles Wheeler, and Susie Wheeler for assistance in exhibit setup and breakdown; to two Phoenix-area municipal water providers and OHSO Brewery for providing water; to Scottsdale Arts for providing exhibit space, technical support, and marketing for Canal Convergence; and to the Arizona Water Conference organizing committee for providing exhibit space on the conference floor. Spackman’s start-up fund, and grants from the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory, The Center for Experimental Humanities, the Earth System Science for the Anthropocene, and the Morrison Neely Foundation Food and Agriculture supported the development and building of the Tasting Water exhibit. This research was declared IRB exempt.