Smart Fridge

Reduce food wastage in household

Project Overview

Project Type:         Group
My Role:                 User Researcher
Project Duration:   3 Months
Team:           4
Tools:            Sketch, Illustrator
Project for:   User-Centered Design                       class

Problem

Food wastage is a major problem that envelopes the USA. 40% of the produce in the USA ends up in landfills, while 12.7% of the population struggles to find food according to the United States Department of Agriculture in 2015. The issues revolving around food and food wastage is a major problem seen today in the USA. In the meantime, there has been a rise of “smart devices” with the rapid growth of technology. Refrigerators have also been made “smart”, by attaching a screen and internet, allowing more electronic features to be added to the conventional style.

Goal

Our team believes that technology can play a pivotal role in fighting food wastage from our homes. Our study focuses on food wastage and the role of refrigerators to determine whether modern-day refrigerators are smart enough to help us out with the problems of food wastage. In order to investigate this, the team conducted four interviews. The interviewees reflected the wide range of potential smart fridge users in various perspectives. This gave us a deep understanding of the interaction between users and their fridges at home, and their personal fridge usage. In this report, we bring the four interviews together in order to gain extensive knowledge on what users value when using a refrigerator.

Motivation

Contextual Inquiry

Flow Model

Sequence Model

Artifacts

Physical Model

Cultural Model

Affinity Diagram

Consolidated Sequence Model

Empathy Map

Customer Journey Map

Visioning

Smart Fridge Concept

  • NOT just an APP.

  • Maintains an inventory of food items the user puts in.

  • Detects if some food item is spoiling by analyzing its visual spectrum using SCiO Chip.

  • A display on the face of a shelf to indicate items to put on for easy fetch.

  • Provides recipe suggestions based on items available and the ones that could potentially spoil soon.

  • Green points for the family if more healthy food is stored.

  • IoT based - connected to the phone to provide alerts and notifications.

Storyboarding

Problem Scenario

Solution Scenario using Smart Fridge

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