Summary
Research Synthesis Design Solution

Research

Fresh Food

 

While brainstorming what to do, we noticed that there was a lot of fresh food around because of spring time. We decided as a team we were interested to work with food as the central idea for our project.

To conduct further research we visited the strip district. There were many outdoor food stands set up and a variety of food was being sold.

Another trip to Wholefoods gave us more insight into people's shopping behaviour and in particular their preferances for fresh and seasonal food.

At whole foods and the strip district we observed people. We saw that people liked sampling different types of food. At whole foods we observed that when confronted with a choice people took a long time staring at the labels trying to find the differentiating characteristics to help them make a decision of what to buy.

We also found that some people didn't really rely on the labels completely as they all said the same thing. People would prefer to go up to an employee at the store and ask them about the product. When we spoke to a whole foods employee he told us that most people asked what the product was and what his recommendation would be. People would also inquire about the popularity of the product in order to determine the shopping preferences of other people.

From these trips we concluded that variety and the freshness/seasonal nature of food were themes we could explore.

 

BID 2009 . Human-Computer Interaction Institute . Carnegie Mellon University