Beet: A food waste management app for your smart kitchen

Beet is the new way to manage food waste in your household. By communicating with your smart-kitchen appliances, Beet helps you keep track of your food’s expiration dates and provides useful methods for cooking, storing, and disposing of the food to prevent it from ending up in a landfill. This app can be used by all the members in your household and will educate everyone on their collective food waste habits, plus it will allow your household to interact with your neighbors in completing community goals and challenges.

Beet acts as a coach for reducing food waste, without sharing the complicated jargon associated with climate change. Whether users are motivated by preventing global warming, reducing food insecurity, or even saving money, all of these outcomes will be realized after using Beet. Together, we can Beet food waste.

The Process

The Experience (my contribution)

The Final product

The Process

Project point of view

Human centered design is an amazing practice that serves humans by centering their needs and experiences at the core of a service or product. However, maximizing the comfort and convenience of humans has often come at the expense of the wellbeing of other living organisms on Earth, and even other human lives, through propagating climate change.

Our goal was to incorporate smart kitchen devices and an intuitive interface into an experience that enabled humans to fulfill their role in helping protect ourselves and the life around us from the adverse affects of climate change. We wanted to help people move our society in the direction of becoming a "regenerative system", where we consider ourselves one with our planet's ecosystem and work to promote its health through all we do.

Research

To start moving in the right direction, my team researched current advancements that were happening now in the world of using digital devices to promote sustainability in the kitchen, and affective techniques of promoting behavior changes in the service of sustainability.

We determined that the goal we wanted to pursue was helping people and organizations decrease their levels of food waste to reduce the large amount of greenhouse gasses being produced by landfills. Our project would not only help people learn about their food waste habits, but also develop new habits that prevent food waste and creatively use food that has expired.

We examined the "jobs to be done", or underlying goals, that a potential user wants to accomplish when they say they want to decrease their food waste. Many people do have an inherent goal to live a more sustainable lifestyle, and most have the goal of saving money.

However, the act of reducing food waste is not the center of everyone's lives, so I could not expect people to reorganize their lives around our app either. In order to successfully enable a person to reduce their food waste levels, our product had to fit seamlessly into their routine and ease in the completion of other jobs that they have involving food and the kitchen.

Wireflow

For this project, my team decided to design an interface that communicated with a smart fridge, smart range oven, and a smart trash can. I chose to tackle the interaction with the smart fridge.

After some brainstorming, I drafted a wireflow for the smart fridge that included tasks that users needed to accomplish and functionalities for the fridge and app to assist with those tasks, both physical and digital.

Snapshot of Wireflow

Wireframes

Once the flow of the experience was mapped out, I started drafting what potential screens of the interface would look like and what they would allow the user to do. It took multiple iterations to get to the final product, and the biggest challenge was organizing which functionalities belonged on which screen, and how the functionalities would connect to each other.

To the right is the progression of the Food Inventory page in the app

Snapshot of early wireframes

The Experience (my contribution)

This section breaks down the parts of the experience that I was the main driver in designing

The embedded Figma frames are interactive! Follow the directions on each slide to know where to click and experience the app for yourself

Inventory and expiration management

Walk through the process of adding food to your inventory through either the fridge or app interface, and see how
the app helps users manage inventory and expiration dates

Grocery list generation and fridge visibility

Walk through the process of adding food to a grocery list, as well as using voice commands and a live camera
feed to see what is in your fridge without opening it.

Visualizing your food waste and learning new habits

Walk through the process of seeing which foods go to waste most often in your household and learning creative
ways to use expired food rather than throwing it away.

Gamification of sustainable community living

Walk through an opportunity for using fun and friendly competition to strengthen your community and decrease
food waste together.

The Final product

Here is my team's final experience walkthrough with all of the appliances and functionalities included. My partners in this project were Yong Shan Lee and Pragna Kurra from the Institute of Design.

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