Smart Food Locker

A research and design project aiming to help alleviate food insecurity in Seattle.

Overview

Problem

One in five South King County families in Washington state do not always have enough food to eat. The food shortage is leading parents and children to consume cheap, energy-dense foods to stave off hunger, according to King County Public Health.

Team

Connor O'Toole, Carrie Ding, Dave Kennedy, Jennifer Chan, Lauren Ambielli, Stefania Gueorguieva, Veronika Hanson

Solution

The solution proposed is to create the Smart Food Locker to solve local food insecurity issues. The Smart Food Locker allows people to pick up customized nutritious food at their convenience from food banks.

My Role

Researcher

Set micro deadlines, check status of team members, lead team meetings

Physical Designer

Create study materials, conduct research methods

Design Process

Research

Literature Review

After completing our initial review, we decided to focus on food banks and the various challenges they face as they try to distribute food to those in need. Considering our time constraints, we chose to focus on a food bank system that was local to our area in King County. We eventually chose Northwest Harvest (NWH) as our focal point as they have the largest system of food banks within the state of Washington.

Expert Interview

With our group now focused on Northwest Harvest, our next goal was to learn the specific problems that that organization was facing. I reached out to one of the head coordinators for NWH and conducted a brief remote interview with her. During this interview, I was attempting to answer the key questions listed below:

1. Are food insecure individuals receiving nutritious food from Northwest Harvest or other food banks?

2. What are the biggest challenges that food insecure individuals encounter when receiving food from food banks?

3. What challenges do food banks encounter when trying to collect nutritious food?

4. What challenges do food banks encounter when trying to give out nutritious food?

On-site Volunteering

In addition to the interview, my group realized that we would have a fantastic opportunity to learn more about the operations of NWH by volunteering at one of their local shelters. Several of my group members and I chose a Saturday morning to help pass food out at their King County location.

Because we were not there as official researchers, but rather as volunteers, we decided it would not be appropriate to take in-situ notes. Rather we treated the experience as a casual observation session, chatting with whichever volunteers or customers we could.

After our shift was over, my teammates and I held a quick meeting where we discussed our experiences and recorded some brief insights that we thought were significant.

Findings

Food Insecure Individuals:

Work multiple jobs and are unable to pick up food from food banks during business hours
Wait in 1-2 hour lines for their turn to pick up food
Feel uncomfortable waiting in line with their kids
Some have trouble meeting the eligibility requirements and feel overwhelmed by the sign up process
Some are not comfortable divulging personal information due to their immigration status

Food Banks:

Do not know what food they will have to offer in advance
Cannot send or trade excess food to other food banks or pantries due to legal regulations
Some food banks can only offer food to people living in certain locations and/or can only give food to the same families once a week
Most ask for some form of documentation or eligibility before offering aid

Our project began by being told to research and attempt to solve a problem related to food insecurity. As it turns out, food insecurity is a huge problem space with world-wide implications. Thus our first step became to read as many articles related to this problem space as possible to better understand the totality of the problem and help identify a specific piece we could focus on.

Define

Framing the Problem

With our newly generated findings from our research, we decided to scope down our focus to a more manageable size. Here are the aspects that we honed in on:

NWH > other food banks/pantries because:

It is a large non profit food distributor operating statewide with strong ties to farmers and state legislature
Is inclusive in their mission (does not collect personal data of recipients and never turns away the hungry)

Food insecure individuals > food banks because:

We can directly improve the day to day lives of individuals
We can see immediate results from efforts and pivot if needed

Solidifying the Design Problem

Now that we had a more concrete focus, we turned back to our collected data to pinpoint a specific design problem to solve. Here's what we found up with:

Food insecure individuals who work throughout the day struggle to get to food banks during business hours, making it even more difficult for them to obtain nutritious foods.

Design a solution that would allow these individuals a way to access food from the food bank during non-business hours.

Ideate

What's the Big Idea?

We took our new design question and used the crazy eights and brainswarming exercises to start generating ideas for potential solutions.

With a myriad of ideas at our disposal, we organized them into a shared spreadsheet to list out the various pros, cons, and assumptions associated with each solution.

After some careful consideration, we decided to move forward with an idea to create a food locker that could store food and would be accessible even when the food back was closed.

Storyboard

With the activities we had completed, we had a fairly good idea of some features that our food locker would include. But listing things out can only take you so far, so we created a storyboard to help us visualize what it might look like out in the wild.

Refine

Consider the Values

With the solution better visualized, my team next moved on to ensuring that it would have all the affordences needed to satisfy the intended user group, while being practical and sustainable for implementers. We used the Business Model Canvas and Value Proposition Canvas to help organize our thoughts.

Business Model Canvas

Value Proposition Canvas

Prototype

Smart Locker

My teammates and I created a smart locker mockup to demonstrate it's most important functions to our stakeholders. I constructed the box out and pressure place as well as programmed the opening mechanism. We used two Arduino Uno's and an Adafruit HUZZAH to program the necessary interactions

Prototype Features:

Weight sensor that can tell if the locker is full or empty
- If empty an automatic notification will be sent via text & the front panel LED light will turn on
Magnetic lock system that unlocks when users enter in the correct pin number
When the door of the locker is opened an automatic light will illuminate the locker
Temperature sensor monitoring the temperature inside of the locker