A flavour wheel you can reach into. An experiment in turning taste vocabulary into a playful, spatial experience.
Explore the experience
We can recognise a taste before we have the words for it. A flavour wheel connects that sensation to a vocabulary, from broad families such as fruity or floral to specific notes.
Flavoriq takes the coffee taster’s wheel and gives it depth. Coloured pieces form three rings, from families to subfamilies to single flavours, and the whole thing can be turned, opened and read piece by piece.
The wheel is a map before it is an interface. Every interaction is a way of getting nearer to one part of it.
The wheel opens flat and complete. Colour keeps related notes together; the rings show a family becoming more specific as it moves outward.
Dragging rotates and tilts the wheel, so its thickness shows and the pieces read as objects.
Scrolling spreads the pieces apart. Each small segment gets room, and pointing at one flavour becomes easy.
Fully open, the three rings separate into single blocks. The structure of the vocabulary is the structure you see.
Selecting a piece opens a card: the flavour, the family it belongs to, a line of description and a photograph.
A card ties an abstract word to something familiar. Phenolic is the band-aid note. Jasmine is heady white-flower perfume. The path above the name shows where the flavour sits in the wheel.
Photographs are credited on each card in the interface. Closing a card returns to the same wheel, ready for the next connection.
The same wheel can also be driven by hand gestures through the camera: a fist grabs it, a pinch selects, two open hands spread it apart.
On a phone the wheel fills the width and a tap opens the card. Nothing is hidden behind a menu; the map is the navigation.
Mouse, touch and camera gestures all drive the same three actions: turn, spread, select.
The experiment gives a diagram a more physical quality. The relationship between its parts remains visible, while movement offers a reason to pause, explore and compare.
The next design question is how this interaction supports learning over time: helping people remember the vocabulary and connect it to what they taste. This case study describes the prototype’s interaction, without assuming a measured learning outcome.
