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!