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This chapter examines the relationships between three complimentary paradigms: food experiences, food well-being, and design thinking. All three are holistic approaches to improving individual and community well-being – herein, food well-being is the goal, food experiences are the mechanism, and design thinking is the tool. This chapter first defines each concept, which are all relatively new to academic inquiry. Next, it traces the history of design thinking from its roots in 20th century mechanical and industrial engineering, to its modern incarnation of rethinking our approach to effective problem-solving. The chapter simultaneously examines the evolution of food design during the same timeframe, noting when and how food experiences have received greater and less attention from designers and consumers. Next, the chapter examines how a design thinking approach can be used to examine and improve food experiences, and to increase food well-being. Finally, because food experiences and food well-being are, to date, underrepresented in the portfolio of design thinking contexts, we conclude by emphasizing how food-related research can and should be put into practice by applying design thinking, thus increasing our understanding of the utility of all three concepts.

Social risk is an area that has been extensively explored with regards to gift giving in general, but only in a limited fashion with regards to gift cards (e.g., Tuten and Kiecker 2009). In this paper, we examine the situations in which a gift card is the giver’s first choice of a gift, and when it is a last resort. Specifically, we aim to answer questions how gift givers perceive themselves, and how they want others to perceive them (i.e., self- and meta-perception), are innately tied to when and why consumers choose to give gift cards. In this paper, we explore the risk-reduction strategies that consumers use when choosing gift cards in lieu of specific gift items - strategies related to consumers’ self-perceptions, meta-perceptions, social ties, and gender. We use a field study to explore both intrinsic and extrinsic reasons why people choose to give gift cards in lieu of actual gifts. The focus is about people’s experiences of giving gift cards, such as why they choose to give them, whom they purchase them for, and how they feel about the exchanges. We received 217 valid survey questionnaires with a response rate of 80.6%.

Most current research that exists on gift card use addresses their risks for consumers and retailers (e.g., Horne 2007a, Horne 2007b), although recent work by Tuten and Kiecker (2009) greatly expands our understanding of how teenage consumers value gift cards on both practical and emotional levels. In light of the absence of research on this topic overall, we expanded the preliminary scope of our inquiry to include three fundamental questions related to gift card giving: 1) Who buys gift cards? 2) For whom are gift cards purchased? 3) When giving a gift card as a gift, what are the reasons that people choose to give a gift card as opposed to a specific item? We specifically focus on the ambivalence that consumers feel when they both give and receive gift cards, given that the monetary value of a gift card is an explicitly indicated amount, and that they are less personal than other types of gifts. We used a multi-method research approach, combing survey and focus group data to examine our conceptual model of the gift-card decision-making process.