Waste Not Want Not is a sprint project aimed at re-imagining young people's relationship with food through systemic change, supported with digital products.

This project prompt was to identify a problem, and persuade people to change some sort of behavior to ammend the problem. Billy and I identified food waste as something to address, given our personal experiences. We quickly realized how big of an issue it was after some initial research.

Americans waste something like 80 billion pounds of food every year, and young people ages 18-35 are the main contributing age group to consumer-end food waste.

Inspired by self-help and education apps, we developed features that create structure and clarity for food tracking, in order to gameify being responsible about grocery usage and encourage better habits.

When deciding on the visual direction for this product, we decided to go with colors inspired by both the natural and artificial. Colors pulled from the environment that also symbolize states like 'stop', 'slow', and 'go'. These states are then used as the base for the function of our app, easily representing the state of various grocery items visually.

The visual assets for this project took inspiration from a lot of existing trendy self-help apps, with exagerated rounded corners. We decided to reinforce the boldness of the colors with dark shadows on all assets, creating nice opportunities for motino as well.

The motion associated with this app was made to appear as tactile and realistic as possible, placing extended responsibility on the user to visualize their actions. Each button press is animated to remind the user of the importance of healthy food habits.

The resulting deliverables from this project were supposed to inspire our peers to make actionable change in their lives towards our end goal. This prototype was one artifact in an ecosystem of others all intended to come together and guide young people towards responsibility.

The core features of this app are demo-ed below, each focusing on a different experience we believed would draw users in and keep them engaged.

This project was an exercise in identifying a problem and crafting an adequete solution, and the biggest success metric that we found was our peers, the original interviewed audience, genuinely wanted our tool so that they could improve their own habits.