EIDOS
Our product EIDOS aims to reduce residential food waste by providing gentle ambient reminders about food that will expire or spoil soon. A companion app scans receipts to track and inform smart grocery shopping lists and recipes.
My role
Research, ideation, 3d modelling, User experience in tangible and Digital app, UI in digital app, render, and video edition.
Collaboration with UC Berkeley, Master in Design candidates Akash Mahajan, Debbie Yuen, Eleanor Mayes, Roland Saekow.
Award Winning
Fast Company World Changing ideas 2022
SF Design Week 2022
Problem
In the United States, 33 billions lbs. of food are wasted each year.
That has a cost of $161 billions per year. source
US households are responsible for the biggest portion of food waste in the country. An average person wastes 238 pounds of food per year, which translates into 21% of the food they buy, worth a total of $1,800 per year. source
Research
We spoke to restaurants and grocery stores and learned about the existing programs businesses are implementing for compost and donating unused foods.
Our research found mostly solutions for dealing with waste after it had already been produced.
For example, the dining halls at UC Berkeley donates leftovers to the UC Berkeley food pantry which repackages them into new meals for pickup.
Since we found many existing solutions for reusing food waste in restaurants, we chose to focus on household source reduction.
Furthermore, 60% of all food waste happens in residential settings, so we narrowed the scope further to home kitchens.
How might we track and reward people for reducing food waste?
How might we teach people how to properly store foods to prevent early spoilage?
Enhance grocery shopping lists based on what you already have in your fridge?
Early ideation
We explored several different directions including a board game, interventions inside the fridge such as spot light, and an interactive waste bin.
We created fast prototypes of these three ideas to do new research and get more feedback.
Final direction
Building habits across the food waste journey
After all our research we concluded that our product should focus on building new habits, it should track the food, notify the user, and help them buy groceries more efficient.
Concept
An ambient solution to notify and track food waste.
Form exploration
We explored several modular shapes before finalizing on square tiles. We found that edges of certain shapes either informed or confused users about how to attach modules to each other. The final design has one edge with a portion that sticks out for connecting to other tiles. All other edges have sockets that serve as attachment points.
Prototyping
We prototyped our tangible product using Rhinoceros, 3d printing, and raspberry pi.
Tangible + App flows
The companion app
Overbuying, over-cooking, and forgetting about items are the main reaosons for household food waste.
Therefore we prioritized these features
Onboarding
Home with statistics + food about to waste
Receipt scanning
List of groceries bought + edit items
Suggested grocery list
Suggested recipes
On boarding
Users have different motivations like saving money, protecting the environment or society in general. The onboarding helps us understand what are the main motivation to customize their homepage experience.
Scan receipt
After the user scans their receipt, they must be able to edit, delete, and/or add items. This will reduce possible software errors, and also gives a more customized experience.
Above that, each item can be edited with the slider to tell the system how green/yellow/brown the bananas are. In this way, the system has accurate information and will alert the user more precisely. This information will be saved, so the system will know that you always buy your bananas very green.
In our research we saw that overbuying food is one of the main causes of food waste. The suggested shopping list can be edited too and helps the user to actually reduce their food waste by buying only what they need.
Recipes
One of the main causes of food waste is that users over-cook or forget about certain items in their fridge.
Our app sends suggested recipes to help users use what they have and cook the right amount of food. The system will automatically send to their phone suggested recipes to use up the food item that is about to expire. Furthermore, the user can search for any food recipe, and like the ones they like the most to re-use them in the future.
Technical specifications
EIDOS is composed by a small amount of components. Each tile has a neopixel + button, the middle and bigger tile has all the rest of the components.
