EIDOS: Reducing Food Waste by Building New Habits
Update 6/22/22: EIDOS selected as the winner of the San Francisco Design Week Awards Student Category!
Update 5/3/22": EIDOS selected as the winner in the Students category of Fast Company’s 2022 World Changing Ideas Awards.
An ambient reminder linked to your kitchen to help you use what you have, buy what you need, and minimize what you throw away.
EIDOS: a wall or fridge mounted device to help reduce food waste in the home.
EIDOS was the result of two month long collaboration with my classmates Akash Mahajan, Debbie Yuen, Lula Duloup, and Roland Saekow for our Technology Design Foundations course.
Our assignment was to select a potential area for social impact; we chose food insecurity. Due to the constraints of the project (time, funding, etc.) we elected to focus on food waste. We conducted preliminary research by talking to local businesses and food pantries and found that these larger entities already had a few systems in place to reduce food waste at the commercial level. So we decided to pursue reducing food waste by individuals in the home. We focused this by asking How might we track food waste in the home and how might we enhance shopping lists based on personal habits?
We investigated several routes of inquiry with different prototypes focusing on education and habit forming. These included ideas such as in-fridge notification system, smart trash/compost bin, and a game to teach proper food storage. We interviewed several individuals and received their feedback on our preliminary prototypes. The fridge notification system was both the most popular and viable of our ideas.
We had several iterations on the fridge food expiry notification system. These included ideas such as illuminating food in the fridge with different colors based on expiration date, having a rotating platform within the fridge that oriented expiring food towards the front, and a fridge mounted display that tracked food usage and expiration.
Introductory video to EIDOS
We conducted more interviews about these specific designs, and found fridge mounted notifications to be most popular. We considered having a screen mounted to the outside of the refrigerator that would notify you when food was expiring soon, based off of scanning your receipt from the grocery store. We eventually decided to not go the screen route, but instead using light-up tiles for an ambient notification system that was less disruptive to the eye.
As foods near expiration dates, the tiles light up with the dominant color of the food. When pressed the tile announces what the particular food is that is expiring. We also partnered this ambient tile system with an app that scans your receipt and revises your next shopping list based on how much you actually consumed in the previous week.
