Feast Your Eyes (And Hands!) On This

The Team

Alyssa Cote: A senior computer science student at the University of Washington. Interested in AI, UI, and everything in between. I love to longboard, hike, travel, and hang with my dog, Lola.

Roles played in this project: Organize the meetings, design/conduct the survey, brainstorm/visualize design ideas, summarizes the research findings

Wei Sheng: Currently a third year computer science student at University of Washington. Interested in technology and designs. I love to play video games and sports.

Roles played in this project: design/conduct survey, brainstorm/visualize design ideas, sketch the storyboard, check/revise the research findings

Saagar Mehta: Currently a third year student at the University of Washington studying computer science and a member of the Interdisciplinary Honors Program. Interested in the intersection of human rights and technology. I love to read, dance, hike, sip tea, and explore new places.

Roles played in this project: design/conduct the survey, brainstorm/visualize design ideas, brainstorm tasks, summarizes the research findings, come up/present the final design

Mariya Haveliwala: Currently a senior studying neuroscience and interested in the intersection between technology and medical sciences. I love to draw, take photographs, write, code, and play soccer.

Roles played in this project: design/conduct the survey, brainstorm/write out tasks, record/summarizes/check/revise the research process and findings

The Problem

Finding relevant nutritional education, culinary education, and authentic ingredients can often present challenges for people of non-western cultures. While most resources are built with a “western” lens, there are over a hundred cuisines and cultures from all over the world that impart information surrounding nutrition and cooking in different ways. Based on our research, based on cultural backgrounds, there can be differential ways that people learn how to cook which do not always align with the traditionally western ways of teaching to cook. This narrow minded approach to nutrition presents difficulties to those from different cultures who may have differing learning styles. Nutrition and comfortability surrounding food is important for mental and physical health, therefore we decided to tackle the issue of nutrition education specifically for people with niche learning styles and nutritional specifications. By making it easier to learn to cook and have nutritional education resources that are relevant to you at the palm of your hand, we hope to increase access and revolutionize the way that people learn how to cook in our current day and age.

Our Research

Research Process

Our process began with the group coming up with a set of 13 questions for a survey. We felt that a survey was the best way to try to get information from many people in such a short amount of time. Essentially, we needed the most bang for our buck. We asked a range of questions from demographics to specific questions about their eating habits and how they get their information about food and nutrition. We then posted the survey on the UW subreddit to gather information from our peers. We tried posting to other Seattle subreddits as well, but surveys weren’t allowed to be posted there. After that rejection we decided to share the survey with some of our friends. We ended up getting 24 responses from our survey. Our respondents were predominantly 18–22 year olds, so the environment for these respondents is students living in dorms/at home/off campus.

Our survey research group consisted of 7 individuals who identified with Chinese culture, 1 with Muslim American, 1 with Lakota Samoan, 2 Chinese-American, 1 African, 1 Korean-American, 1 Ashkenazi Jewish, and the rest Asian, American, or a mixture of the two cultures.

15 of our participants self-identified their gender as female, 9 as male.

We also conducted one contextual inquiry. We felt that this was incredibly important to be able to get a more personal researching experience, especially because our other method could be considered rather impersonal. The participant, pseudonym Meera, was accompanied while preparing breakfast. Meera is a middle aged woman, originally from Chandigarh, India. She is the primary food preparer in her home. The environment was her home kitchen.

Research Findings

Our research revealed several themes surrounding how people engage with nutrition education. A high level theme that we noticed was that people with specific dietary needs, whether cultural or health-related, aren’t getting what they need from the ways that they currently learn about cooking and food. Many individuals indicated that there was a need for resources that worked better for different learning styles. Individuals showed a broad range of learning styles that were not just visual and auditory, but also kinesthetic. We took this into consideration when designing our final product.

Another major theme that we encountered was that users wanted to be able to find traditional ingredients and an option for budget friendly ingredients. Many ingredients that are marketed towards people with specific dietary restrictions (cultural or health related) can be priced very high. For example, vegan products are often overpriced and also hard to find. Locating non-dairy or gluten-free products in your area could be difficult if you live somewhere where the “normal” cuisine relies heavily on those ingredients. We took this into account as well when considering our solution. How can we make it easier for people to find the ingredients that they need?

Finally we wanted to find out if our problem was even relevant to any particular audience. Do people care about their nutritional information? If so, do they want to learn to cook? We noticed in our responses that participants were eager to learn about cooking and nutrition in general. They were looking for better resources unlike Instagram and Facebook blogs to learn to cook authentically and in a way that they can understand. Individuals also overwhelmingly indicated that they preferred to learn from family members, friends or community members. Finding this out meant that our solution could help a broad number of people interact with their food experiences in a more engaging way. We thus took into consideration that we didn’t want to implement another Facebook or Instagram model of dispersing nutritional and cooking information. We wanted to take a different approach, one that helped teach people to cook the way their parents, grandparents, or other relatives in their community did, but using an innovative approach.

Our Design

To help our audience better understand our design, we come up with three personas for illustration:

Personal Information:

Name: Yìchen Huang

Age: 21

Location: Moved from Shenzhen, China to Seattle, WA

Occupation/ Education: Psychology Student

Home Life: Single, no children, lives in a house with his friends near campus

Hobbies: Reading, watching tv shows, hanging out with his friends

Personality: Easy going, life of the party, loves learning

Tech savviness: Above average. Grew up with tech so has no issues with new tech

Pain Points / Frustration: When he feels like he’s wasting his time, when he cannot find

food that aligns with his dietary restriction. He cannot eat gluten and cannot always find recipes that align with this.

Goals and Desire: Wants a straightforward way to learn challenging recipes from his childhood. Wants recipes that align with his dietary needs that are relevant to his culture. Wants to impress people with his cooking abilities.

Personal Information:

Name: So-min Song

Age: 20

Location: Moved from Seoul, Korea to New York

Occupation / Education: Art student

Home Life: Single, no children, lives in a studio

Hobbies: Watch/Draw comics

Personality: Shy, rarely communicate with strangers

Tech savviness: Below average. Only use tech for necessary contact

Pain Points / Frustration: Has a basic knowledge about cooking but knows little about specific recipes. Only know one asian market but some ingredients are always out of stock.

Goals and Desire: Get to know people / friends who can help her cook a specific recipe. Find more local ingredients to replace ingredients that are hard to find.

Personal Information:

Name: Meera Rikhi

Age: 50

Location: Moved from Chandigarh, India to Seattle, WA

Occupation/ Education: Licensed Mental Health Therapist

Home Life: Wife and mother of 2, lives with family in a suburban home.

Hobbies: Read romance novels and psychology books, watch period pieces and old Bollywood films, walking outdoors and enjoying nature.

Personality: Responsible, independent, intellectual, maternal.

Tech savviness: Average. Generation didn’t grow up with tech, so adapting to “intuitive” tech is actually quite difficult.

Pain Points / Frustration: Engaging with overly complicated interfaces

Goals and Desire: Wants a straightforward way to learn challenging recipes. Wants to be able to cook new things for herself and her family in an enjoyable way.

After multiple design iterations, our group is moving forward with an AR-experience facilitated via eyeglasses and hand gloves (initial mock-ups included above). In choosing our design, we wanted it to be something truly novel and reflect the user guided value in human interaction. In relation to the other designs we sketched, this design fit those aims exceptionally well. Accessibility across age groups and varying levels of comfort with technology was also a consideration, as we want it to serve as a point of connection across these demographic factors. This is reflected in our personas, as two individuals are young adults in college, and the other is middle aged and settled into their professional and personal life. The result of this specific nuance in consideration is the idea of having customizable user interaction options. This would allow users like Meera to simplify what is overlaid in their field of vision, and what they can interact with, as well as support users like So-Min who might want more information to be simultaneously, visually accessible.

The two tasks we will focus on for our design are acquiring culturally relevant recipes with dietary restrictions, which encapsulates locating related ingredients, as well as supporting kinesthetic learning in community.

Here are two storyboards to provide our audience a visual scenario of how our designs deal with these two tasks:

The initial idea that inspired our selection of our user group was culturally sensitive access to nutrition and nutrition education, and this speculated need was reinforced in our user research when we had participants from various non-Western ethnic backgrounds express difficulty in navigating the plethora of nutrition information to find information that was culturally relevant and in alignment with their dietary restrictions. Along the tangent of reflecting cultural sensitivity in our design, we learned via contextual inquiry as well as our survey that individuals from our user group most often learn to cook in community, with and from their friends and family. With increased globalization, people tend to be farther apart from their ethnic communities, and so connecting them with someone who knows how to cook a recipe they might be interested in is a very important task. In examining our personas, this applies both to Meera, whose parents and elders have now passed, as well as Yichen and So-min, who are thousands of miles away from their families. Thus, we determined that these tasks served substantial ends and were deserving of their centralization in our design process.

Overall, we believe that our design will help people learn about and connect with their culture through cooking, while taking into account their dietary restrictions and access to local ingredients. Cooking can be daunting, but this design will make it fun!