The AI-powered Dinner in 2050 was a first-of-its-kind interactive storytelling experience that makes climate change tangible and actionable for guests visiting the UAE House of Sustainability at COP28, Dubai. It was designed to be a reflective and transformative way to shift deeply ingrained daily habits by focusing on strengthening food security in a region that is already at the frontlines of climate change. Using a combination of future foresight, design craft and emerging technology, Tellart's custom AI model tailored the experience to the food substitutions needed in that region in order to achieve net zero in 2050.

Lamb is swapped for grasshoppers and millet (a drought resistant grain), broccoli for algae, and beef for lab-grown meat. Standing around a table, made of sustainable palm wood, guests speak their favourite meal into a microphone. Our AI model identifies the top ingredients in their meal and selects, using U.N. data, which ingredients have the highest carbon footprint. It then chooses sustainable alternatives specific to the UAE, and generates a speculative future version of this dish with an informative description. Guests learn how their meal can impact water and energy use, carbon emissions and biodiversity, and improve their nutrition.

Today, food systems face unprecedented and accelerating challenges, but they also have enormous potential to be part of the solution, creating more inclusive, equitable and prosperous economies and societies.

While conversations about the future often feel far-removed from the present day, this interactive, joyful dining experience uses machine learning to showcase how seemingly small, individual choices can have a ripple effect on our collective future, while raising questions around what ingredients will be available in thirty years time if we don't change the way we consume and waste food.

What sets this interactive dining experience apart is Tellart's innovative approach in combining open source tools to create a bespoke AI model that takes voice input and generates unique images of speculative dishes, with explanatory text in English or Arabic. The system can recognise any well-known dish from any culture. In order to tailor the experience for COP28 in the UAE, the Tellart team trained the image generation model on popular dishes from Emirati cuisine. Through this AI-assisted visualisation game, their imagination is tested with new possibilities and constraints, sparking a lively "dinner conversation" about what food traditions we can keep, what we may need to leave behind, and some new possibilities we may need to embrace.

The Dinner in 2050 experience consists of a typical dinner table on top of which future foods are projected. Each plate on the table provides a user interface for guests to interact with the system. Through an AI-assisted visualisation game, their imagination is tested – making an otherwise abstract experience personal, and the future imaginable.

Description of User Experience

Welcome: As they walk into the vessel, guests are invited to gather around the table. They are invited to imagine dinner in 2050.

Experience: A welcome message begins to appear on their plate. Guests are asked to answer into the microphone next to their plate 'What is your favourite dish?'. As the guest answers the question, the system generates a future version of their dish. As the future version of their dish appears, text appears next to the dish, explaining why the meal they are imagining will likely take a different shape in the future.

Reflect: Guests are invited to compare plates with their neighbours, to discuss and explore how a simple thing like dinner with family can express the systemic changes to come.

Research and Development

Intent and Point of View

Our thinking was shaped by the hard truth that water is scarce in the UAE and they have to import most of their food. Climate change will put even greater pressure on the ability to provide these essentials.

The shift that is needed is to rethink our relationship with the food we eat by setting new norms, and encouraging behaviour change by minimising food waste, and growing new forms of food by embracing both nature and emerging technologies, and expanding the UAE palate.

The climate crisis is overwhelming and the future is abstract and hard to imagine. We wanted the purpose of this experience to make the climate crisis personal, and the future imaginable, through food.

Ethnographic research

We worked with research partners in the UAE to conduct 24 interviews with senior citizens and researchers across the UAE's distinctive geological areas (mountains, sea, oasis, desert) to understand:

Bedouin / Emirati traditions, values, beliefs, and practices we might draw on to inspire action on climate and sustainability.

The Bedouin / Emirati words, phrases, symbols, and imagery we might draw on to inform climate and sustainability efforts.

The elements of Bedouin / Emirati culture and tradition that most resonate with modern day residents of the UAE, the region, and the world.

Dish ingredient selection - Creating climate resilient dishes for 2050

To imagine climate resilient dishes for 2050, we needed to identify which ingredients in the dish would have the biggest impact to be replaced. Based on the UN report Food and Climate Change we gave the ingredients an 'impact score'. The impact score is assigned to the ingredient based on its kilograms of greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) per kilo of food, protein, or kilocalories. The higher the impact score, the greater its GHG emissions. The ingredient with the highest impact score was selected to be replaced.

Dish replacing logic: Creating climate resilient dishes for 2050

After selecting the ingredient to be replaced, we needed to find a suitable alternative to replace it. We created a list of alternative ingredients based on extensive research, guidelines from the Lancet diet, and considered the key needs of the UAE.

As well as international cuisine, a local perspective to the UAE was required:

We focused on locally produced ingredients, now or in the future (2050). We found the alternatives that use limited amounts of fresh water and embraced foods that can grow in the UAE's salty environment.

Example of a dish for Dinner in 2050:

The traditional Emirati dish Khameer:

The system Imagined a dish with flour, yeast, and sugar.

Flour - impact rating: 0.9

Yeast - impact rating: 0.9

Sugar - impact rating: 0.5

In the future, as we strive to create more climate-resilient dishes, we replaced wheat flour with buckwheat flour. Buckwheat flour is the perfect replacement crop for the UAE, requiring minimal water and able to grow in rocky, low fertility soils. Its shorter growing season means it uses less energy, and therefore emits less carbon compared to other common crops. Buckwheat nutritional density leads some to call it a superfood.

Physical and Experiential Design

The Table Dinner in 2050 was experienced at a welcoming dining table that was fully set with plates and cutlery, and integrated microphones. The materials were sourced locally, including sustainable palm wood for the table, locally produced artisan ceramics, and flowers and foliage from the gum arabic tree, a tree native to the UAE that has a wide variety of uses across medical and industrial applications, dressed the table. These layered and natural materials added a contemporary Emirati look and feel.

The Vessel Dinner in 2050 was housed within a space we call a 'vessel', an intimate space for physical & emotional grounding within a stimulating environment that prepares guests to calmly and imaginatively engage with the experience.

AV Hardware

1. The installation runs on 2 PCs, two high end machines with NVIDIA GPUs; one for the machine learning system, one for graphics, show control, audio processing.

2. Inside the table we mounted 8 microphones, one for each plate.

3. Also inside the table we have mounted buttons and switches, the buttons facilitate the recording interaction, the switches allow the visitor to change the language of the experience.

4. The projector setup is suspended above the table; four projectors WUXGA high lumen, blended to cover the table surface.

5. The installation has a multi-channel in-ceiling mounted speaker setup. Each interaction on the table has their own unique sound effects.

6. A tracking camera (Kinect Azure) suspended above the table tracks the presence of visitors; welcoming them to the experience and starting off the interaction.

Machine Learning

The software for the Dinner in 2050 installation uses machine learning. First we used a speech to text model to extract what people are saying into the microphone. We then used a LLM (Large Language Model) with a designed prompt to give us the main ingredients of the dish that was spoken into the microphone. The LLM returns a list of ingredients after which we analysed which ingredient has the highest environmental impact (see research).

For the visual output we trained a custom Stable Diffusion model for each future ingredient (LoRa models). Additionally we added a dataset of dishes that are unique to the region so that the output is more representative.

Value and significance of the project

COP28 Dubai welcomed guests from around the world including world leaders, delegates and the public. During the conference, 18,000 meals were generated by guests.

In designing Dinner in 2050, we knew that for those embarking on their climate action journey there is an opportunity for a new narrative, and for us, this was an invitation to rethink our relationship with food. For the House of Sustainability at COP28, where Dinner in 2050 was set, there was a precious opportunity to employ this experience as a tool to inspire transformation. We wanted to create a guest experience that balances a mix of audience needs, from low to high knowledge of climate and sustainability issues, and also as an experience with a high degree of creative learning and collaboration. We wanted guests to leave feeling empowered, revitalised and with a sense of optimism to keep what works, to leave behind what no longer serves us, and to embrace new possibilities.

Dinner in 2050 makes the future tangible and personal so that it can be faced and creatively imagined. Calling upon years of story-first, interactive multisensory storytelling, Tellart sensitively applied design craft and emerging technologies, including AI, to confront guests with the realities of climate transformation - and give them ways in which they can positively respond.