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.
- Food waste, recycling, and human waste
- Growing, cooking, eating education
- Food delivery mechanisms/food delivery
- Non-destructive farming
- Urban agriculture
- 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.
- What type of food do you throw away?
- Why do you throw it away?
- Are you aware of food waste being an issue?
- Do you regularly check the expiry dates on food?
- Do you plan meals in advance?
- Do you cook, or do you eat ready meals etc.
- Do you use recipes?
- Do you look for recipes on the internet?
- Do you read food blogs?
- How much time do you spend at a computer?
- 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.
No comments:
Post a Comment