Tidbits
A service for individuals with food sensitivities
Final project at the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design
Context
Tidbits is the name I gave to my final project when I was a student at the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design, the master level programme I attended in 2014. In the final project students worked individually on a task, for the first time in the programme. They were asked to work on something meaningful to them and to shape an idea by using the practices they learnt and used earlier in the programme.
Starting point
I wanted to work on food because I’ve always had a keen interest in it. I’ve always been curious about food traceability, chain stores, entrepreneurship in agriculture and anything that has to do with food. I needed to understand what to focus on. My starting point was desk research and conversations with my peers, inside and outside the CIID.
Actions
I read various magazines and articles on the internet and I realised that quite often they talked about food allergies and food intolerances. By talking to friends and classmates I learnt that some of them suffered from food sensitivities and that these problems affected more people than I expected. At this point I knew what I wanted to work on.
I decided that I wanted to talk to people with different food sensitivities and I conducted in depth interviews with them. Soon after that I thought that I should interview professionals and staff working with food and selling it. I interviewed a total of 14 people.
I learnt a lot about the topic thanks to the interviews but two were the main and most valuable insights I gained. The first one is that people go through a learning phase after they discover to be intolerant or allergic. The second is that their relatives find it very difficult to buy groceries for their loved ones. These insights led me to an idea: a service able to inform people about the content of food at supermarkets.
In order to test my idea I prototyped the experience. I made a price tag with an Arduino board and a screen. The device I created worked from remote. By tapping on a letter in the keyboard of my phone I could choose the message to display. I invited people with food sensitivities to a supermarket and gave them a shopping list. I positioned the fake price tag below the food that was harmful for the participant.
Results
The testing showed that participants didn’t read the information on the price tag and it’s probably due to the fact that it didn’t look like a real price tag and it didn’t look like it belonged to the shelves. I was going to iterate on it and test it again with participants but there wasn’t enough time. I decided instead to storyboard and film a video scenario in which I described how the service would work.
