Co-creative Eating
Three-week project completed for Graduate Design Research Techniques: Needfinding. Designed in collaboration with Carla Gonzales and Ben Cline. Winter 2013 at Stanford University.
Intrigued by these questions I explored ways to invent a new language and craft a different experience of reading a story.
Initial Insights & Displacement Plan
Our interviewees are smart, successful young professionals, yet they haven't fully figured out how to eat well consistently. We heard stories about forgetting to eat a whole day until getting a headache, often replacing meals with cereal, and eating once a day for efficiency. We spoke to their friends and they confirmed these habits and voiced their concerns to us.
As for the causes for this behaviors, we were intrigued by this notion of cooking for oneself as boring and meaningless, especially since they are all single and by default spend a portion of their day alone. All our interviewees expressed their disinterest for preparing a meal that they would have to eat alone. In addition, extreme users described to us their challenges when it comes to tasks that we take for granted such as knowing how to buy ingredients and cooking a basic meal. With these initial insights in mind, we set out to run displacements on our users. Below is a summary of the most relevant extreme user displacement.
Insights to Framework
There is a gap in the lives of our users when it comes to food culture. These young professionals have excelled academically and professionally, they have put emphasis on what society expects from them. When growing up, their families were able to provide both social and food culture needs. However, once they leave their parent's home or school dorm and find themselves single and alone, food and eating healthy meals becomes a major unexpected challenge. Their friends end up becoming their family, and they successfully fulfill the social needs once provided by family, however friends don't quite fulfill the void when it comes to food culture. That is how individuals such as our extreme user end up lacking basic skills for tasks such as buying ingredients and using basic kitchen equipment.
In addition, it is important to note that friends who are better versed in the kitchen are aware of the problem and try to help, however they also have very busy lives and often lack a context in which to teach a friend how to buy produce or make a basic healthy snack.
We want our users to be able to take a more active role in adopting a food culture, even if this means starting with small steps, while embracing their desire to make learning how to cook more of a social activity rather than a teaching session.
Service Concept
A different kind of restaurant, place for gathering, where food is a co-creative activity. Customers get to hang out and cook without the hassle of buying ingredients or cleaning up afterwards.