Author:

How can we design a safe dining experience for students with allergies?

Project Focus

User Research • Service/Experience Design • Prod­uct Design

Project Overview

[2133], the EDI ‘17 cohort, part­nered with Dr. Ruchi Gup­ta and her lab to research food aller­gy aware­ness on campuses.

With­in that scope, our team of 3 devel­oped a phys­i­cal pro­to­type to reduce cross-con­t­a­m­i­na­tion in sal­ad bars. This process entailed ini­tial for­ma­tive user inter­views to define a design direc­tion, ideat­ing upon that design direc­tion and final­ly con­vert­ing that direc­tion to a phys­i­cal design.

A full detail of the work we did as a part of Spot­light can be found here. 

Personal Responsibilities

Ini­tial­ly I was respon­si­ble for lead­ing user inter­views. Once our team devel­oped insights from those user inter­views, I devel­oped the below frame­works to bet­ter visu­al­ize and under­stand those insights. Final­ly, I pro­to­typed the final design that was pre­sent­ed to Dr. Gup­ta and her team.

After ini­tial user inter­views, we found an oppor­tu­ni­ty with­in din­ing halls. Specif­i­cal­ly that stu­dents with aller­gies often have to com­pro­mise between safe­ty and food vari­ety at din­ing halls.

With­in that scope, we iden­ti­fied sal­ad bars as an oppor­tu­ni­ty space, since major­i­ty of issues can be solved by elim­i­nat­ing cross-contamination

In order to under­stand where our team could make an impact we mapped out the dif­fer­ent points cross-con­t­a­m­i­na­tion could occur. We iden­ti­fied a pain point at the end of the con­sump­tion chain when stu­dents use sal­ad bars.

Based on our insights we devel­oped design direc­tion of elim­i­na­tion, not mit­i­ga­tion. This drew from the Japan­ese man­u­fac­tur­ing phi­los­o­phy of PokaYoke — where the process elim­i­nates makes mis­takes, such as cross-con­t­a­m­i­na­tion impossible.

To fur­ther flesh out our design direc­tion, we cre­at­ed a low fideli­ty pro­to­type to visu­al­ize the design con­straints an aller­gy safe sal­ad dis­penser would need to meet — name­ly zero-con­tact dis­pens­ing, a mod­u­lar replace­ment mech­a­nism and an air-tight lid.

Finally, we presented our work to Dr. Ruchi Gupta and her lab in which we outlined a list of design constraints salad bars should employ in order to instill confidence in students with food allergies