An IDEO Social Innovation Design Challenge
THE BRIEF
How Might We Provide Healthier Food Options for People in Need?
The Problem - In many neighborhoods, there is little infrastructure for the distribution and preservation of food. Food is often spoiled or lost during distribution. In other places, healthy food options are simply unavailable or community members lack the knowledge to make healthy food choices. Another constraint is access to capital, both for small businesses providing healthy food as well as potential customers. My team was tasked to design solutions for providing healthier food options, which might include providing people with better food choices, the skills to cook healthier food, or the knowledge to make healthier food choices.
Re-Framing the Problem - To achieve the intended impact, we re-framed the design challenge by narrowing down on Social Kitchens. These locations are frequented by people in need - the jobless and homeless for their daily needs. Dedicated to offering nutritious and healthy meals, the menu served most times is limited due to the inadequate storage capacity for perishable food items. On the other hand, the people who rely on these kitchens for their daily succor doubt the quality of food served. Not only do they believe they are not healthy, they also believe that the meals are prepared with expired items. Hence the re-framed problem:
How Might We Improve Healthy Eating for People at Social Kitchens?
The Solution - Understanding that the problem is perception related, it was agreed that a visual-led enlightenment campaign could help change peoples perception about these kitchens and that the food served are nutritious and beneficial to their health.
My Role - Working in a design team of 5 of both full-time and remote professionals, I worked as the Researcher, gathering and analyzing information while coordinating the activities of the team towards completing the project at set deadlines.
THE PROCESS
IDEO's Human-Centered Design (HCD) Process
INSPIRATION
With a clear problem to solve, the research activities was planned to fuel ideas by learning from the people we were designing for and exploring unfamiliar contexts.
Learn From People - Identifying our audience, we recruited for interviews both the mainstream and extremes users
Learn from Experts - This secondary research involved experts to provide a systems level view of your project area and specific technical advice.
Immerse Yourself in Context - The best route to gaining an understanding of the people we were designing for is to immerse ourselves into their routine and observe firsthand in the context of situation to be tackled.
Immersion Location - COMEDOR AVE MARIA, MADRID
Further Observations...
• Especially lunch, many avoid eating there and prefer to keep the food and takeaway to wherever they are going to.
• The Kitchen receives food supplies monthly
• There are more non-perishables food items and canned foods due to its long shelf life
and storage.
• It was noticed that the outlet is not fully equipped to store fresh food. Hence vitamins enriched foods such as fresh vegetables and fruits cannot be stored.
Analogous Inspiration - To gain inspiration from a different context to give a fresh perspective on the project and gain learning from unexpected places and experiences. The selection of the context went thus:
Decision - Getting a Haircut! What could we learn from observing a hair cut session that could be applied to our challenge?
Inspiration at Marco Aldany, an affordable and highly efficient unisex saloon distributed across Madrid
Key Observations
1. Waiting Time - The salon offers a unique experience for waiting customers that engages the senses. The objective is to increase their anticipation while they look forward to their reward, their grooming session. The experience involves music (audio), magazines (tactile/touch) and full view of hair styling (visual). All together, this offers an experience package that informs the final output.
2. Styling Period - Very efficient and mechanical process. Once the customer sits on the chair, prepping starts immediately and less than 35 mins later, the session is over with payment done and ground swept.
3. Taking Turns - As clients walk through the doors, they interact with a female stylist. Once the customer takes the waiting seat, there is an unspoken agreement among the stylists who is next in line. You can't ignore the obvious efficiency when the customer is invited to take his seat!
IDEATION - SYNTHESIS
Took all the research gathered in the Inspiration phase through Synthesis with the objective of turning information into opportunities. The Synthesis process produces four linear outcomes; they include:
a. Learnings - recounts or recollections of all what stood out during the conversations or observation sessions
b. Themes - headlines and categories for clusters identified in the learnings that contains similar statements or observations from multiple interview subjects
c. Insights - These are succinct expressions of what was learned during the research activities that offer a new perspective, even if they are not new discoveries. They point to suggestions of probable challenges in need of solving (HMW - How Might We)
d. HMW - Consolidating all the Synthesis outputs and in direct response to the Insights, we generated three “How Might We” questions to brainstorm new ideas
e. Ideas - Deferring all judgement, the team brainstormed several ideas with the goal to come up with as many ideas as possible
IDEATION - PROTOTYPING
Completing the first part of the Ideation process, we proceeded to select promising ideas and turn them into concepts for testing to gather feedback. To tackle this, we generated an Experience Map, a storyboard that visualizes the flow of operations
Theme Focus: Create value for meals served at Social Kitchens with appealing infographics
Experience Map: Interaction points of the user's journey with the solution
1. Arrival at Venue 2. Entry into Kitchen 3. Service Time 4. Departure 5. Adoption
What to Prototype? - We narrowed down on five moments to focus, prototype and test
Low-Fidelity Prototypes and Mock-ups
Test Session at Comedor Ave Maria Kitchen, Madrid
IMPLEMENTATION
The field test points to that all social kitchens need to have a set standard for the meals served adopted across all locations.
To execute further would involve working directly and collaboratively with the systems and stakeholder involved in managing and coordination of the supplies to and operations at the different kitchens to improve the image and perception of food quality.
Project Key Takeouts:
1. Design extends beyond digital solutions and human-centered design is iterative; starts with the users and never ends!
2. There's the need to continue engaging the users due evolution of their needs
3. There's a clear difference between creating solutions from assumptions and from users’ insights, the latter more substantial
4. It was interesting to actually observe people’s reactions during the testing to some of the prototypes we believed could be easily adopted and their explanation why not.
