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Paper short abstract

This project examines how the idea of ‘healthy eating’ has been platformised through the infrastructure design. It aims to demonstrate how scientific knowledge of nutrition can be a complex sociotechnical production afforded by digital platforms in everyday life.

Paper long abstract

This research investigates the platformisation of nutritional knowledge, examining how the infrastructural design of digital health tools reconfigures the science of ‘healthy eating.’ As digital platforms increasingly mediate everyday life, the production of scientific knowledge is no longer the sole domain of traditional institutions. Instead, it is increasingly shaped by the business incentives and technical mechanisms of the platform industry. Centred on the mechanism of datafication, this research explores how platform companies aim to maintain the active user base for data extraction through prioritising infrastructure designs that are accessible, intuitive, and affective. In this sense, there is a systemic incentive for companies to re-engineer complex scientific information into intriguing digital content in favour of user-friendly interface design.

Drawing on the concept of affordance (Davis, 2020) at the intersection of Sociology and Science and Technology Studies (STS), this research argues that the sociotechnical arrangements of nutrition apps provide the very infrastructure (Bowker and Star, 1999) through which platformised knowledge of ‘healthy eating’ emerges as a co-production of platform mechanisms, corporate incentives, and scientific research.

The project employs the walkthrough method (Light et al., 2018) and technography (van der Vlist et al., 2024) to conduct an inspection of three nutrition apps: Zoe, Yuka, and Nutracheck. The research illuminates how specific interface choices, e.g., classification systems, performatively generate knowledge. Ultimately, this project demonstrates how knowledge in the platform society (van Dijck et al., 2018) is a complex sociotechnical production afforded by platform designs.