A Pretty Prototype and More Fieldwork

Ryan produced us a prototype, of which we now have somewhat blurry photographs!




We also decided some additional fieldwork is necessary to get a more complete feel for our stakeholders.

We will be attempting to chat with:

• A nutritionist
• Someone from Love Food Hate Waste/WRAP
• Someone in the food industry, such as an area manager at Tesco
• Parents of teenagers who will be leaving home relatively soon
• Young people who have recently left home

We will also being doing several trial runs of each of the use-cases described previously. We're in the home stretch now!

Project Timeline, Prototyping Sketches, and Use Cases

Today we had a long chat about where our current product fits in with our research and the problem of food waste.

To do that, we made a project timeline charting what we had done throughout the course of the project. In particular we looked at the scope. In the bottom left hand corner of the timeline sheet, you can see the tracking of our project scope from the whole of food and sustainability to our smallest point at portion control, then back a little wider for the current design solution, which approaches food waste from the knowledge and education angles.

After we were satisfied with that, Ryan and Liza started making preliminary sketches of the design for our card prototype.

We also developed use cases. They are, from top to bottom:

Go to Tesco without any particular plan in mind, buy what you normally buy and put it all in the fridge. Then, choose a method card and ingredient cards to fill out the recipe.

Or, start with having only a few things in your fridge. Take the ingredient cards for those, and see what method card works for what you have.

Or, use the cards to decide what you want to cook to eat, make a list of ingredients, and then go to Tesco to buy it.

Ingredient Card Clarification

Today we really hammered out what was going to go on the ingredient cards, and how one would use them.

Each ingredient card will have a photograph of the ingredient, information on how to properly select the ingredient, how to store the ingredient properly, how to handle the ingredient safely, and the portion size. (Note how pared down this information is in comparison to what it was!) The cards also indicate what cooking method the ingredient is well suited for.

With the ingredient cards there are method cards. These are slightly different than ingredient cards, because recipe cards imply a specific set of ingredients. Method cards are more like a recipe template. So, for instance, if you have a Stir Fry method card, instead of calling for beef, carrots, and bell peppers, it would call for 1 serving of protein and 2 servings of vegetables. The method card describes how to combine the ingredients in a generic enough way that it works for basically any ingredients you choose. The method cards also have suggestions for good combinations of ingredients and encouragement to get creative.

We decided on a number of categories for method cards, each with at least two specific methods therein:

• Pan dishes (Stir fry, pasta)
• Soups (Stews, Broth-based, Creamy, and Pureed)
• Baked stuff (Quiches, Casseroles)

Recipe Cards

From the research I did online it appears that recipe cards are a way of jotting down your favourite recipes to either keep them or pass them onto a friend. They could be seen as a social tool. Online they seem to be mostly blank cards for you to fill in and pass on.

I did find a pack of cards online for Tagines which was a whle deck of cards dedicated to different Tagine recipes. Here is what one of the customer reviews said:

"The recipes are well-written and easy to follow and the results tasty. I thought cards would be easy to use and they are, but it's hard to find the recipe you want because the cards are not numbered - indexing or colour-coding the sections would make it easier. So I wouldn't particularly recommend recipe cards, I'd go for a conventional book next time."

This falls inline with the other recipe/cooking cards that I found being sold online. Most merely explain the recipes, ingredients and quantities. We need to integrate our cards into a cooking system that can adapt to what you have at your disposal.

I also found this kids recipe card deck selling on amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Kids-Kitchen-Cooking-Card-Deck/dp/1846861764

Although this is based at kids it divides foods into groups using colour coding and food groups. I feel that there are going to be similar things out there at the moment but we need to have a USP (Unique Selling Point) in order to ensure we are doing something brand new.

Ingredient Card Prototype

Here is the first iteration of the ingredient card prototype!



















For this we'll need to develop a consistent symbology. Right now, the little calendar is to show how long you can store it (though maybe a picture of a fridge would be better?), the shopping cart is how to select it in the store, the thermometer is to what temperature it has to be cooked to be safe to eat, and the frying pan denotes good cooking methods. On the back of the card, the magnifying glass gives good search terms to help people utilize the vast resources of the internet in their cooking. The colored symbols on the card would be used to find ingredients that go well with the ingredient on the card. So if I wanted to make something to eat with chicken, I would look for all the other cards with a pink heart on them, and know that those things go well with chicken.

Prototyping Difficulties and Some New Direction

Only one of us managed to get a prototype completed in the week we had to prototype. Ryan finished his delightful and fun moldable measuring device. Unfortunately, I managed to explode that prototype before our morning meeting was over. It was at this point that we decided that physical prototypes of so many different items was a bit of an unrealistic goal given our financial and time constraints. So we set about trying to narrow down our prototypes to the ones we really wanted to pursue by listing the various pros and cons of each idea. Before we did this, Fraser (our module leader) dropped by to have a chat with us. While talking to him, the old idea of the food education ingredient card deck resurfaced. He really liked the idea and encouraged us to pursue that as well. So it ended up on the list as well! So much for narrowing things down.

Fortunately, our Pro/Con exercise took care of that for us.

In the end, we decided that the fruit bowl was likely not going to be appropriate for our target audience of young people (after all, how many 20-somethings do you know who keep a bowl of fake fruit in their kitchen?). The pretty portion plate had a number of strikes against it--it doesn't address the problem of making too much food, just of not eating too much food. Additionally, there are a lot of portion control plates available on the internet; perhaps none as lovely as we intended, but if people aren't buying the ones available, it's unlikely that our product would be any different. The moldable measure is cool, and fun to play with, but we thought the novelty would wear off pretty quickly. A measuring device doesn't do any good if it's never used.



We concluded that we were most interested in pursuing the deck of ingredient cards in tandem with the recipe book--putting together a kitchen knowledge kit for young people. We haven't completely ruled out the other ideas--in fact, we're making little advertisements to show to people to get feedback on them--but we're also prototyping the ingredient card deck. Here's a picture of our brainstorm as to what should go on the cards!

Solution Brainstorm

Today, we met to brainstorm solutions to the problem of making portion control fun. We began by getting everything we could think of up on paper. Our brainstorming session is recorded by the picture at right. No idea was to wacky! We were aiming for quantity, not quality.

Then, we organized those ideas into sets of similar ideas.

We then voted on our favorite ideas, narrowing it down to these five

• an interactive toy measuring system, like something you build to make more measurements (inspired by LEGO and Transformers)
• a measuring system that molds around things, such as your hand. Then when you hear, "A serving of rice is the size of your fist", you can actually make a hole the size of your fist to measure your rice
• a Tupperware system with built in scales that gives audio/visual feedback based on how long the food has been in the fridge. (ie, it makes a happy noise when the food is fresh, and less happy noises as it slowly approaches bad)
• a recipe book with pop-out measuring puzzles. For each recipe, there is a page with the necessary measurements for that recipe, which (like the collapsible measuring cups) can be popped out into a three dimensional form to measure the ingredients for the recipe.
• measuring cups designed to look like fake fruit--useful as well as ornamental!
• a portion control plate where the appropriate portion markings are built into the design of the plate, making it less obvious and more beautiful

We each took one of these items to prototype, so that we could take the prototypes to people and get feedback to iterate our design.

Existing Fun Measuring Products

Ryan, Neha, and Wendy found scads of cool, fun products for measuring food. They range from the practical (such as the collapsible silicon measuring cups at the right) to the whimsical. (Click on the pictures to be transported to places where you can purchase the super-spiffy instruments of measure.)

With this measuring cup, you can use a "tyranosaurus's brain of flour" or other unusual measurements do put together your dinner!

There are colorful measuring cup sets shaped like mice...

...Russian nesting doll measuring cup sets...

...even measuring cups and kitchen utensils shaped like bendable people!

But as cool as these things are, you have to wonder why you never see them in people's kitchens. If someone doesn't already use measuring cups, what's the incentive to use these? They're definitely very cool, but I'm not sure they address the problem.

POINT Brainstorm

Today we met to start narrowing down our focus a little more. The issue of food waste, after all, is a big issue, and there are many ways to approach it. We were beginning to feel a little overwhelmed by all the research--it seemed like as soon as we closed off one avenue of approach, half a dozen new paths to follow would pop up. We wanted to develop a little more direction. To do that, we decided to use a POINT brainstorm.

The POINT brainstorm is a technique that Colin Burns (former head of IDEO) taught us at the beginning of the semester. Basically, you sort all of your observations into several categories:

• Problems
• Opportunities
• Insights
• Needs
• Themes

We did that today, with the result of our brainstorming session being pictured above.

From that, we decided that portion control was the issue that we wanted to tackle. The scope was small enough for us to have real impact, we felt, and it's an issue that addresses several problems at once: food waste and healthy living! We wanted to make sure that we were addressing the issue from the perspective of fun. Whatever portion control solution we came up with, we wanted it to be whimsical and delightful, like the VW Fun Theory stuff.

After our brainstorm, we divided up a couple of tasks--Neha, Ryan, and Wendy were going to research pre-existing portion control products, while Liza and I were going to look into UK government nutrition guidelines.

Paul McKenna Portion Control

As Ryan was doing research into existing systems and products for portion control, he turned up this video:

The approach is pretty sensationalist; however, it's has a few interesting ideas. If we use visual

cues to know when to stop eating, then it might be a good idea to use smaller plates. I'm not sold

on the rest of his approach, necessarily--he doesn't so much teach healthy eating and moderation

so much as make people hate the foods they love. I'm not sure that's helpful in the long run, and

it's certainly not fun.

The VW Fun Theory

My roommate introduced me to the VW Fun Theory the other day, and I fell in love with it. It's based on such a simple idea--people will change their behavior to benefit themselves and their environment if you make it fun for them to do. Here are videos of three of their experiments so far.

Carbon Footprint Labeling

I found a fantastic article in the New York Times about a Swedish experiment in food sustainability.

Basically, they have started labeling all of their food with the food's carbon footprint. The new labeling system is supposed to encourage Swedes to not only eat healthfully for their bodies, but also healthfully for their planet. Each food item is labeled with the number of kg of CO2 produced for each kg of product, including transport. Ideally, the new labeling will help Swedes choose carrots, which grow well in the Swedish climate, over cucumbers and tomatoes, which must be grown in energy-burning heated greenhouses.

I am not sure how I feel about the labeling. On one hand, it would really simplify my jam-aisle decision making. I often stand in the jam aisle, holding a jar of imported Swedish lingonberry jam (made with no high fructose corn syrup or other suspect ingredients) in one hand, and a jar of local strawberry jam (chock full of high fructose corn syrup AND sugar) in the other, trying to weigh the various factors of nutrition and environmental responsibility. Almost every time I decide that I really don't need jam badly enough to stand there longer than the 45 minutes I have already deliberated, and leave the store jam-less and distraught over the intractable nature of the jam dilemma. So I could see how it would be helpful in that regard. However, I suspect that it oversimplifies things. After all, is the carbon footprint of HFCS that great? I don't know; however, the problems with HFCS have a lot more to do with the nature of corn. Corn requires exceptional quantities of fertilizer and water. The fertilizer runs off into the Mississippi River, which flows out into the Gulf of Mexico. The fertilizer feeds the algae there, causing massive algae blooms that suck all of the oxygen and nutrients out of the water, causing red tides where everything dies out. Unless that part of the corn equation is factored into the carbon footprint, I worry that this labeling isn't telling the whole story. I think I would be more in favor a more general "environmental labeling" that lists carbon footprint in addition to other pollutant indexes. That way, a shopper can make decisions based on which factors are most important to him or her.

(This photo was graciously provided by gwire at flickr. It is published under a Creative Commons license. The photo is actually of CO2 labeling at Tesco in the UK.)

Why This Is Important

So far we've talked a bit about why there is food waste, and what we can do about it, but we haven't yet established why this is an important topic to address. Neha located this article from CNN, which is a good primer on why food waste is an important issue.

You would think that food waste isn't a big deal from an environmental perspective. Food biodegrades, so it just returns to the soil, right?

Yes, but as it rots it releases methane, a gas that is "20 times more damaging to the environment than carbon dioxide."

Considering all the food we waste, the amount of methane going into the air is significant.

Additionally, the food we in the developed world waste could feed millions of people. The food wasted by the US could feed all of Africa.

This surprised me, though--

Proportionately, the UK and Japan have traditionally been among the worst offenders worldwide in recent years when it comes to food waste, discarding between 30 and 40 percent of their food produce annually.

It's not just that us buying the food prevents other people from eating it, though there is that issue. Our overconsumption drives up food prices on the global market, so that many people can't afford what food is available.

The article goes on to discuss one of the solutions that is currently being pushed forward--biogas, a renewable fuel made from rotting food in a controlled environment. Biogas can then be used to power cars, trains, and lots of other things!

Unsurprisingly, Sweden is at the forefront of biogas use. They even have a biogas train already!

The article does discuss the limits of biogas production. Even if the majority of the food waste in the UK is turned in to biogas, it would only produce enough fuel to power 164,000 houses.

What the article doesn't discuss that I feel is really important is the climate impact of burning methane. It's not the process of producing the methane that allows you to power things--it's the burning of the methane afterward. What kind of by products does that have?

Also, the idea of converting food waste into biogas deals with the problem after it happened. It treats a symptom, but doesn't solve many of the other problems (such as driving up food prices on the world market). To my mind, it would be better to reduce the amount of food wasted, and then use biogas production as a tool to deal with necessary food waste.

Hellman's Eat Local Video

Neha turned this up in her desk research. While it's not strictly related to the Food Waste topic at hand, she points out that it's a really cool and engaging way to present the statistics. Imagine how much more impact that 237 page document that WRAP released on food waste in the UK would be if it were presented in video form! Or better yet, in an interactive way!

Waste = Food

Ryan found this interesting documentary on the Cradle to Cradle design concept. It focuses on the idea of using the waste we produce as fuel for our consumption, lest we use up all our resources and die on our own stinking midden heaps.

The Food We Waste

Today I came across the mother of all food waste statistics documents. It's a study put out by WRAP, which is a charitable organization in the UK that encourages the efficient uses of resources in the UK. According to their website,

WRAP works with local authorities, business and households to prevent waste, increase recycling and develop markets for recycled and sustainable products.

It is our aim to create the case for change, support change and deliver change.

WRAP has three targets that they want to meet. They aim to:

• Divert 8 million tonnes of waste materials from landfill.
• Save 5 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent emissions.
• Generate £1.1 billion of economic benefits to business, local authorities and consumers.

WRAP plans to reach these targets by focusing on four priorities:

1. Packaging
2. Food waste
3. Collection systems
4. Quality of materials

WRAP released a 237 page study on the UK's food waste habits. Their research supports what we found in our earlier surveys, that food waste is caused by a variety of factors including

• A lack of planning when food shopping - buying more than is needed;
• Poor food storage knowledge;
• A lack of confidence around cooking (especially making meals from the food available in the house, and portion control), and
• Confusion over food date labels (such as the difference between 'use by' and 'best before')

Other notable bits from the document include:

• 6,700,000 tonnes of food are wasted every year in the UK.
• 4,100,000 tonnes of that food waste is avoidable, meaning that it would have been unnecessary had the food been handled properly.
• Food waste costs the average UK household £420 pounds per year.
• That's £10.2 BILLION in avoidable food waste.

The whole document can be downloaded from WRAP's website.

Deck of Food Cards

I've been talking to a couple of student-aged people about why they don't cook or why they throw away food, and there is a general consensus of not knowing what goes well together, or buying things but only having one use for them so that the excess goes bad before it can be used. A possible nifty solution for that would be a deck of kitchen cards with various ingredients on them. Each card is given a particular suit or color. Foods of matching suits or colors go well together. On the back of each card there are web addresses to find recipes, in addition to suggested search queries. For instance, let's say you have lamb in your fridge. So you pull out the lamb card. On the front of the card it has a drawing of a lamb showing where the different cuts of meat are from and describing what they're good for (ie, leg of lamb is good for braising and grilling, etc.). It also has the suggested cooking temperature to make sure it's safely cooked, and a couple of cooking suggestions, as well as nutritional information and easy leftover suggestions, such as "lamb sandwich with branston pickle". On the back, it has web addresses of good sites to look for recipes, and good search query strings like, "easy lamb stew recipe" or "minted lamb couscous". Other cards in the same suit as the lamb card might be mint, or tomatoes.

To accompany the deck of ingredient cards, you have a deck of meal planning cards. Meal planning cards are of a particular color, and are numbered. Higher numbers mean that you use ingredients from a previous meal in them. So, let's say that you pull the meal card for minted lamb couscous, and it's an orange card numbered 1. You could them pull the orange card number 5, and it's lamb stew with apricots, which uses the lamb couscous as an ingredient. If you choose seven of them, you have meals for a week, and can use it to produce your grocery list.

Since meal planning is one of the primary suggestions I've found in my web research for food waste, it seems like a potential solution. (I also realize I'm jumping the gun a bit here, getting straight to the solution part, but it was an idea that I thought I'd share.)

Desk Research

During my desk research this week, I found a website very similar to what we had talked about designing as a solution to the food knowledge/meal planning/food waste problem. It's minus a few features, but it covers enough of them that we are going to look in other directions for a food sustainability problem to solve. The website is called Love Food, Hate Waste, and it's pretty cool.

In addition to being a slick, beautiful interface, Love Food Hate Waste has a bevy of neat tools.

They have a portion calculator that allows you to select what foods you are making

then how many people you are cooking for

And then tells you how much of each item you need!

They also offer a recipe search based on what ingredients you need to use up in your fridge,

tips on how to store, freeze, and revive foods,

as well as meal planners and advice for saving both time and money by appropriately stocking and using the food in your kitchen.

Results to Surprise Everyone

Young people who don't know how to cook, or are learning how to cook, don't use the internet to find information on cooking.

Older people (50s and 60s) who cook, however, DO use the internet to look up recipes and other information related to cooking.

This is perhaps the most surprising result of our inquiries into the cooking and waste habits of various folk in and around Dundee. So much for the idea that older people wouldn't use the internet and younger people would.

A somewhat less surprising result from our interviews was that older people do more meal planning, while younger people rarely plan at all. As a result, older people waste less food.

Additionally, older people seemed to have more knowledge about food. Younger people would throw out food based strictly on its expiry date--if, for instance, milk passed its "Use By" date, they would assume that it had magically gone bad (even if it was fine just hours before) and would have to be thrown out. Older people took a more laissez-faire approach to food spoilage; they often based their judgments on look and smell. They described it as just "knowing" when meat was going off. This increased knowledge of food spoilage was also a factor in older people wasting less food.

It was this anecdotal evidence that led us to decide to narrow our focus to young people: students, and other people leaving home for the first time. Often, our interviews suggested, they do not know how to cook or meal plan, and as a result, end up wasting a lot of food. A general lack of knowledge seemed to be the root problem, and that was something we felt we could address well within the scope of this project.

But first, we felt that we should gather more evidence. We surmised that students don't meal plan because of the generally chaotic nature of the average student's schedule. In our own experiences, we planned meals best when we were working full time: under those circumstances, we got home at the same time every day, and were able to plan our food consumption accordingly. To test this supposition, we designed a more in depth probe. We would ask students to record what they ate for two days, as well as how long it took to make it. We also asked them to photograph the food and any waste produced in the cooking. We were each to administer this probe to two students to see if there were any marked patterns in their food planning, preparation, consumption, and waste.

First Group Meeting and Topics of Interest

Today was our first group meeting! We were given the entire period today to brainstorm, lay out a research plan, do a bit of research, and in general get the ball rolling on our project.

First, we started by brainstorming up problems we knew existed in the food system. We came up with a list of 30 or so ideas, which we then lumped into more general categories. These were the areas of interest and opportunity that we came up with (in no particular order):

• Obesity
• Binge-drinking
• Seasonal food education
• Food expiry dates/wasting food
• Food waste in restaurants
• Migrant workers
• Delivery mechanisms
• Non-destructive farming
• Rapeseed replacements
• Food systems
• Cooking education
• Sustainable livestock
• Replacing council flowers with food crops
• Antibiotic use in livestock
• Human waste reprocessing
• Recycling realism/City compost plan
• Food swap like Charity shops
• Meal planning education (including how to tell when things go bad)

We were able to further condense those into broader categories for research purposes.

1. Food waste, recycling, and human waste
2. Growing, cooking, eating education
3. Food delivery mechanisms/food delivery
4. Non-destructive farming
5. Urban agriculture
6. Binge drinking

After condensing our original Problems/Opportunities brainstorm into those categories, we each took a category that most interested us and set out to find some information on it. We broke for an hour and a half to do desk research so that we could further focus our project.

We returned from our research break with a clearer picture of what would be good areas to pursue for sustainability purposes. Very little information was available about the impact of binge drinking on the environment, and since we don't have the time to run full-scale environmental impact studies, we decided that addressing binge drinking from a sustainability perspective would have to wait. Urban agriculture, our research determined, had been done in hundreds of different successful and innovative ways, leaving not so much a design problem but a fundraising and implementation problem. Non-destructive farming and food delivery mechanisms were discarded as being huge industrial issues, which interested us significantly less than the small, individualistic issues of food waste and cooking.

In further discussion we dreamed up the idea of an all-in-one food education website as a solution to both the food education and the food waste problems (working from the idea that people waste food because they don't know how best to use it). The website would have not only nutrition information and meal planners, but also information on seasonal foods and the local food community, an expiry date tracker to help remind you to use the food in your fridge before it went bad, and numerous other cooking, nutrition, and food waste related tools. While many of these tools are available on separate websites, there is no integration to make it easy for users to play with.

Fraser, our module leader, liked the idea but encouraged us to go out and explore the user space before committing to a solution. He felt that we were jumping the gun somewhat; did we know that people would even use a website of that nature?

We agreed that perhaps our flash of divine design inspiration was premature, and set off to explore the user space. We came up with the following set of questions to ask to a variety of people from various social strata and age groups.

1. What type of food do you throw away?
2. Why do you throw it away?
3. Are you aware of food waste being an issue?
4. Do you regularly check the expiry dates on food?
5. Do you plan meals in advance?
6. Do you cook, or do you eat ready meals etc.
7. Do you use recipes?
8. Do you look for recipes on the internet?
9. Do you read food blogs?
10. How much time do you spend at a computer?
11. Where do you buy food?

We agreed to ask these questions to two people each, and meet back on Friday, Oct. 16, at 10:30 am.

Welcome, Introductions, and Project Brief

Welcome to Waste Not, Want Not, the Dundee edition! This blog will track the progress of our team as we work towards a design solution in the realm of food sustainability. Our team consists of five members of the People and Design module at the University of Dundee in Dundee, Scotland. They are (appearing alphabetically by first name):

Liza M., a Masters of Design student from Scotland

Neha T., an MSc Design Ethnography student from India

Ryan M., a Masters of Design student from Scotland

Rachel S, an MSc Design Ethnography student from the US

Wendy W., a Masters of Design student from China

Our project will be entered into the Usability Porfessionals' Association 2010 International Student Design Competition. This year's brief is Designing for a sustainable world. The UPA writes

Sustainable design is an attempt to remedy the current problems of excessive energy consumption and pollution in two basic ways:

• Designing the product allowing for a eco-friendly process, materials etc: Have the materials and processes that have been used been recycled and are they re-usable? Are they user and environmentally friendly? How can existing products be optimized to contribute to a sustainable world?
• Designing concepts and products that influence the behaviour of users, for example the labeling of products to raise awareness of consumers on the real energy use in order to influence their decisions of buying or using a product (such as labeling schemes for domestic appliances or indicators / systems that visulize users’ consumption)

Our mission is to "invent a system or create a concept that addresses this design problem," while "[following] a user centered design process supported by background research and, if possible, ethnographic research of the solution space"

Because that sustainability is such a large issue, our module leader has requested that we "consider sustainability through the 'lens' of food."

This blog will follow our progress through the user research and design process: we hope you enjoy the ride!