This project was carried out in a course at Chalmers University of Technology. The project resulted in a concept for an app, that targets consumers’ planning and shopping behavior as a means of decreasing food waste.
The project was conducted with a distributed project group where all of the group members were situated in different countries. Because of this, the selection of tools for communicating, planning and designing was based on the ability to support online collaboration. It all started on a café napkin when we had the first meeting to ideating ideas for the project. We got the idea to create a concept for decreasing food waste. This was also the only time we met in person during the project.
The project resulted in a conceptual design of a smartphone application that strives to decrease the user’s amount of food waste by targeting the behavior around food management including meal planning, shopping for groceries, getting an overview of groceries, finding recipes and using leftovers. Although the main purpose of the design is to reduce consumer food waste, the application is designed in a way that does not require the user to use the application solely with the goal of reducing their food waste. Instead, the core design philosophy was to create a solution that provides benefits for the user and that makes reduced food waste one of the positive consequences of using the application.
The matrix was created to summarize the insights from user research and ideation sessions. Moments of engagement that had been left out of the ideation could also be spotted.
Activities in the physical space
The design of the interaction can not only consider the scope of the application but should extend beyond this to work in concert with the activities in physical space. Activities could for example include cooking while using the recipe feature and updating storage, adding leftovers to the fridge and adding to the shopping list.
Behavioral change over time
Evaluating behavioral change by design is in general hard. Doing it within a short time frame is impossible. To truly evaluate this concept larger studies should have to be made.
Working in a geographically distributed team
It has both perks and drawbacks to work in a distributed team. I believe that there needs to be more structure, planning and clear guidelines of how to work together, but it also keeps the communication more to point and goal-focused. There are many great tools for both designing and communicating online, and it worked very well in this project.