Our Pitch Video
Click on the above picture to view our pitch video!
Muchos thanks to Bas Goossens for helping animate everything in such a short notice
It’s Been a Long Journey….
It’s been almost five months when we started this project and we’ve been through a lot!
We started with Smart Cities, changed it to Food Waste and ended up with an Interactive Garden for Kids.
In this final post we’ll summarise our research questions and our findings for you to read.
Research Question:
How can a digital application, connected to sensors change consumer attitude towards food waste?
Solution
As an answer to this question we developed the concept of Grut, a sensor kit connected to a digital application that helps children grow their own plants.
By making it easier for children to grow their own plants we hope that more children in the city will come in contact with homegrown food and as adults, make more conscious choices regarding their food consumption and in turn reduce food waste.
The sensors are attached to the soil near the plant and send data to a database. The app determines the condition of the plant based on the data that the sensors gather. Depending on the condition of the plant, the app will give the child advice on how to best take care of his plant.
Context
In Holland, 31% of edible food is wasted (Circle Economy, 2014) by the consumer attitude (FoodDrinkEurope, 2014).
To put this into perspective, in 2013, the Dutch consumer has wasted a total of approximately 2.5 billion euros (Rijksoverheid).
The resources that have been put into growing the food are also wasted, which in turn has an impact on the environment. (Circle Economy, 2014)
Research has shown that by attending school gardens, children gain more respect, knowledge and appreciation for nature and food (Passy, Morris, Reid).
Future Iterations
Currently we have a basic prototype of the application. In the future we want to work further on the topics listed below
• Making the website responsive
• Acquire a database with the conditions for each plant
• Flesh out the checklists and advice
• Experience a full cycle of the plant with the application to iron out bugs
• Develop the personality of the avatar
• Explore the possibilities to involve food waste more
Research Poster
Our research poster, with flowcharts, abstract and conclusions can be found by clicking this link
Exposition
The exposition was a success! There were a lot of people who were interested and enthousiastic in the project and when we explained the concept and showed the prototype, it clicked immediately.
This project is definitely something we want to continue with after we’ve sorted out our affairs.
Sources
Circle Economy (2014)
Circle Scan: Current state and future vision, Agri & Food sector
Consulted on october 30th 2014 via:
https://www.rabobank.com/nl/images/03-07_CE_Rabobank_AgriFood_Circle_Scan.pdf
FoodDrink Europe
Possible causes of food loss and food waste
Consulted on october 30th 2014 via:
http://www.fooddrinkeurope.eu/industry-in-focus/foodwaste-toolkit/possible-causes-of-food-loss-and-food-waste
Passy, R., Morris, M., Reid, F.
Impact of school gardening on children
Rijksoverheid (2013)
Feiten en cijfers verspilling voedsel consumenten in 2013
Consulted on october 24th 2014 via:
http://www.rijksoverheid.nl/onderwerpen/voeding/documenten-en-publicaties/brochures/2014/01/29/feiten-en-cijfers-verspilling-voedsel-consumenten-in-2013.html
1st sprint review and 2nd meeting with Cisco
The last couple of weeks we have done a lot of research, as you might already have concluded from our previous blog posts. Now was the time to see what insights we could get from all this information, and choose our focus for the next sprintThe first step in doing so was the Translate session planned with our team leader Gijs Gootjes and city data expert Wouter Meys.
Looking at the causes of food waste we concluded that there were 4 big ones: uncertainty, attitude, market mechanisms and policy. During the Translate session we decided to focus on uncertainty as it turned out to occur at every part of the food cycle. We also saw it as one of the causes we could best do something about by using sensors and measuring.
Next to that we decided to focus on local production as we believe it provides more transparency by having to food cycle on a smaller scale, and because it gives us more opportunity to have an impact as the whole cycle is within our reach.After a month we finally managed to meet up with the municipality of Amsterdam. We met up with two people, Frank Bakkum, a city planner, and Mara van der Kleij who is working on sustainability.
For this year they had listed priorities they were working on, including food education, encouraging local production initiatives, and developing a Voedsel Informatie Punt (VIP) or food information point. This last concept sounded very interesting to us, as it would not only provide information on food and expiry dates, but also function as a communication point for consumers, producers and retailers.
Next we had another workshop by Charlie Mulholland, were we used various methods to come up with as many solutions to our problem as possible. First we had to present our problem statement in words and in visuals. The next photo shows the drawing we made, representing our challenge of connecting food to the Internet by measuring it with sensors, and in that way combating food waste.
Next we generated solutions to this problem statement. One way in which we did this was thinking of ways how we could make the problem worse, and then taking the opposite as a possible solution. In this way we generated many ideas which we will definitely review in the weeks ahead.
The week after that was mostly spent making presentations, and reviewing and revising them according to feedback. Luckily the work showed itself in the results we got, and Cisco was also pleased with the research and findings we presented, and our future focus. Here you can see the short video we showed which explains our findings of the 1st sprint, and the focus we decided to take for the 2nd sprint Summary 1st sprint and what’s next.
However, they stressed the importance of doing really thorough research and finding where the problem exactly is, to make sure our project will have an impact. They also advised us to not only map out where food is wasted in the food cycle, but also how money flows in the cycle and where both money and food could be saved. Attitude remains an important cause of food waste, and if we can find a solution that will also save money it would make it easier for us to get people and companies to cooperate and make a real impact.
The day after our meeting with Cisco we were invited to attend a conference on food waste for restaurant owners, organised by the municipality. Right after that we also had to present at a lunch on sustainability at the MediaLab. The conference was very interesting and showed that there are many interesting initiatives in Amsterdam. The conference was held in InStock, a restaurant which collects food from Albert Heijn supermarkets which are about to expire, and uses them to make the menu for the day.
There was also a presentation by Restaurant Vermeer, which tries to get their products from as close as possible, and also grows some of their own crops and herbs on the roof. Next to that there were many small initiatives being presented such as improved doggy bags and a “grow your own crops” kit called very witty the “VegeTable”. Next we had to hurry back for our presentation at the sustainable lunch, where we explained our project and showed the video we had made.
The last important meeting we had was yesterday, when we had our first retrospective, reviewing what went well in our first sprint and where we could improve. Here we concluded that our team spirit is great making us very productive, but instead of just doing desk research we really need to start making things such as prototypes and get out of the building to do some field research.
And those are our plans for the next sprint: getting out, talking to expert and people who are working in the field, and in that way trying to find a solution with which we might make a difference. Unfortunately our next sprint will only be 2 weeks, but we have many interesting events planned. You’ll hear more about those soon!
Research, reframing, interviewing, and more research…
It has already been a while since our last update. In the meanwhile we have done loads of research, contacted people, and had interesting interviews and workshops.
Just to remind you: we chose as our topic food waste, and are now trying to find a solution that makes use of the Internet of Everything. This includes bringing physical things into the digital realm by measuring them, making use of fancy sensors and filters on social media and stuff. Oh, and we are also focussing on the city context by trying to look at the city of Amsterdam and how we can work on this issue here. This is all very interesting, but because of the broad scope of the project we have not been able yet to focus down on a specific area where we can make a difference. That’s why we’re investing much time in getting to know the field and the people involved in it.
Two weeks ago we had a problem definition workshop by Charlie Mulholland. Here we were asked to identify the main stakeholders, their needs, the different aspects to the project, etc. This is one of the schemas we made during the workshop:
As you can see we still need to narrow down our focus more to make more effective use of this method, so we’ll definitely come back to the so called WWWWWH-method in the course of our project.
Our next workshop, last week, was on tinkering and making prototypes. We got some paper, fancy electronics, and were asked to try some things and come up with several prototypes for our project. This is a paper prototype we made for a package were a acidity sensor is implemented in the package, measuring the freshness and updating the expiry date accordingly:
Later on in the week we had a reframing session by using a tool developed by the School of Creative Leadership (THNK). By using this tool we could gain new perspectives on our problem, and ended up with the idea of a circular city, where whatever is produced is consumed and recycled and re-used in the food chain to create one continuous circle without any waste. We decided to include this idea in our problem definition and keep it at the back of our minds while doing further research.
The last interview we had was with Thomas Luttikhold, or in other words the Waste Watcher. He explained to us he focusses on restaurants and cafes, and was inspired by his own dream to start a restaurant and finding out how much food is being wasted, just because of mistakes and inefficiency. He pointed at projects re-using waste to for example grow mushrooms (coffee grounds), or make sweets (orange peels). Why are these things not done more often, was his question.
This week we summarised our findings in a beautiful infograph (all visuals are by Ilaria and her great drawing/visualising skills):
The coming week we’ll spend more time doing research and narrowing down our topic. We also have a second meeting with Cisco coming up, and a food waste hackathon. Enough interesting stuff about which will inform you soon!
Week 1 | Meeting the India Team and Cisco!
This week we (the team) decided to narrow our subject to Food Waste. It’s an area where we think we can make an impact.
We also created a user scene, where we depicted the problem we think our users might experience.
On Thursday we met with the Smart Cities team from India and Jan and Hendrik, our contacts at Cisco. We exchanged ideas and opinions on our topics and they gave us a lot of freedom in picking a subject. The following half of the day and on Friday the team did research on the overall lifecycle of food in Amsterdam. This way we can get a better overview of the whole process and where potential problems might lie.