Waste Not, Want Not, Service Design
NCAD collaborated project with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) on service design project. The Interaction Design class worked together during an intense research phase and then broke out into smaller group to create solutions to the problem of food waste. The overall aim of the project was to raise awareness and change behaviours surrounding food waste in the home. Throughout the project an emphasis was placed on user engagement, from research, through concepts, prototyping and delivery of the final outcomes.
Initially research was conducted as a group.
Research
- As a class we acted as a studio and broke the research phase into small groups. Our research included:
- Interviews
- Cultural Probes
- Co -Creation
- Expert Interviews
- Synthesising Data
- Building Perosnas and Journey Maps
- Defining Key Insights and possible points of design intervention
We each conducted several interviews with friends, family and anybody willing to participate. In addition I conducted an expert interview with owner of OBEO, an Irish company that tried in earnest to tackle food waste.
Cultual Probes
In addition to this I belonged to the cultural Probe team. We designed a fun handout that asked users to look insider their presses and compare what they have to their shopping receipts. The probe was deployed across homes and aimed to be a reflective means of capturiing user behaviour. We wanted how users stored food, managed thier homes and question what they told us and what we saw.
Synthesising
We then as a group pooled our research and began unpacking all we had. We did this through grouping themes and commonalities.
From our research we divided out into small teams to tackle key insights.
Food Drop - A Food Sharing Service for Apartment Living.
I was in a group with Conor Bergin and Sue Kenny, together we developed concepts and prototypes. Our end product was Food Drop.
My Role on the team was:
- Ideation
- Experience Prototyping
- User Interface
- Final Video
Persona
Service Blueprint
Experience Map
Concept
Food drop is a community driven food sharing service for apartments, facilitating the sharing of fruit and veg among neighbours and the development of increased community interaction.
Experience Prototyping
As we developed the service, we tried to examine what an app would do for the service? Do we need it and how can we make this service as seamless and easy to use?
One of the biggest challenges was normalising food sharing. Would an app help this by closing the network to set group? Through user testing we found that an app was additional and unnecessary. We used the below wireframes in XD to to user test.
Iteration
In our third iterative loop we needed to remind ourselves that the goal was to connect people with food and share. We stripped back the tech and aimed to make the user experience as easy to access as possible.
