No Room for Ego in Agile
Or… How a Large Group Tackled Food Waste And Working Together
For our third project in the UX Design Professionals course at RED Academy, we were asked to find a solution to the problem of food waste. No small task. As always, we began with hypotheses about how food waste happens, by whom and under what circumstances, followed by a deep dive into domain research on all things related to food waste.
This project introduced us to working in an Agile environment, which quickly revealed itself as the need for rapid adaptability as the landscape of the project changed according to insights from ongoing research.
As it happens, I developed programs for war-affected populations in emergencies for years, and the Agile environment mirrored those experiences perfectly. Emergency programs rarely travel in a straight line from inception to conclusion; rather they shift and adapt to the changing needs of a population and our understanding of the contextually appropriate ways we can address them. As in emergencies, so in Agile… Continued research, quick-thinking and a lack of ego ensured that I could easily move between Research, Planning, Design & Prototyping sub-groups and adapt my contribution without needing to control the outcome.
Research
Who? What?
We began as an 11 person team looking into this problem, sub-divided into 3 research groups; Consumers, Producers and Organizations. Initially I was in the Consumer Research group, which yielded some staggering statistics.
According to the Cut Waste, Grow Profit 2014 report, Canadians waste $31 billion worth of food every year and 47% of that is wasted in the home.
Equally disturbing was the Global News report that claimed high expectations were the primary contributor to consumer food waste. In North America, over 30% of fruits and vegetables are rejected by supermarkets because they aren’t attractive enough for consumers.
Those statistics, along with shocking images, inspired me to want to know more, starting with, how did we define food waste?
“Food waste or food loss is food that is discarded or lost uneaten. The causes of food waste or loss are numerous, and occur at the stages of production, processing, retailing and consumption. … Loss and wastage occurs at all stages of the food supply chain or value chain (Wikipedia).”
While our group was focused on discovering more about Consumer food waste habits, the Producers Research group discovered that the percentage of food that was lost between farmer to supermarket was relatively little compared to the 47%. This led us to focus our efforts on creating a solution that would address food waste at the Consumer level.
Why?
Why did people waste food? I imagined there were many reasons despite the innumerable messages advising how not to. We found the same strategies to reduce food waste described by everyone from David Suzuki to social justice activists like Tammara Soma of Food Systems Lab.
“Do frequent, smaller shopping trips with a grocery list in hand, stop ‘stocking up’, take up gardening, cook in large batches and don’t shop when you’re hungry”
Those are all very sensible and widely distributed pieces of advice but Canadians aren’t following them. Trained to understand human behaviour and the underlying reasons for it, I brought my natural proclivity to ask ‘Why’ to this problem. In my experience every behaviour meets a need and information alone rarely changes behaviour.
Despite ample information about the reality of food waste, the costs of food waste and the ways to avoid food waste, Canadians still weren’t changing their behaviour. We needed to understand why.
My years living and working on the front lines of humanitarian emergencies led me a long time ago to define certain problems as stemming from deficiency or abundance. Many Malawians, for example suffer from insufficient food during the growing season and are forced to eat mango skins while they wait for their maize crops to be ready. Conversely, I quietly hypothesized that most Canadians had well-stocked refrigerators and could afford to care less, making food waste a problem of abundance.
I was pleasantly surprised to learn from our survey respondents that not only did they care about food waste, they felt really guilty about it.
But we still needed to answer they Why. One of our hypotheses (backed up by the domain research) was that poor planning contributed to food waste. We conducted two surveys. The first survey had 11 respondents between the ages of 19 and 52 and revealed that these consumers were indeed planning their food consumption by taking lists to the grocery store. That said, the primary cause of food waste for this group was social; when an event arose and they chose to go out instead of staying in to eat the food they had purchased, that food went to waste.
The second survey we did had over 40 respondents and… The highlight from these consumers was that they felt really terrible about wasting food. They went into their purchasing with conscience and pre-prepared lists and a determination not to waste food, yet despite their best efforts they felt terrible. This again had me looking for the underlying reasons. From an affinity diagram done with survey respondents, we gleaned that this group would be interested in an alternative to throwing food out, if it were available.
This was the point where we connected the dots between people with excess food and people in need of food.
The Solution
Human behaviour being what it is, there will always be contradiction between beliefs and actions, and in terms of food waste, even the best of intentions can result in wasted food. That said, the group researching Organizations had identified a local food rescue agency called Second Harvest, which had been redistributing surplus food for several decades. This organization was not only well-connected in the food industry in Toronto, we discovered that they prioritized food donations above 100kg.
To us, this highlighted a gap between average consumers who inadvertently created food waste and felt badly about it, and and organization that already had connections to people in need but not the infrastructure to distribute small donations. We needed to find a way to connect people with small donations of surplus food with families who needed food.
Planning
From our research we identified key personas in both the Food Diner and Food Donor groups.
Our research insights suggested that Diners wanted to access healthy food that from their local non-profit agencies and to know what kind of food was available and where to pick it up.
Conversely, our Donors wanted to be able to donate small amounts of food to people in need and to be able to do so timely, easily and to know when their donations would be picked up.
The Specifics
By this point, our eleven-member group had compiled a lot of information and it was all on one wall…
One of our genius teammates, Miss Juni Bimm, synthesized this information with the word ‘Feedback’. She reasoned that what we were trying to create was a kind of loop, wherein surplus food was repurposed to address hunger; one of Second Harvest’s business goals. As a group, we adopted her logic quite quickly and began brainstorming branding ideas.
While the Design Team moved ahead with mid-fidelity sketches and prototypes of our solution, three of us began to research and play with logo ideas. I am thrilled to be able to say that I developed the initial version of our logo using Sketch.
My colleague Cara Scime developed the final version of our logo in Illustrator.
Design & Prototyping
Back at the Design ranch, the team were busy creating beautiful UI screens that reflected the research and core components of our solution. The aim was to develop a multi-functional platform that would allow Diners to view available food and where to find it, Donors to know when their donations were going to be picked up and Agencies to monitor drivers and inventory.
Lastly and crucially, to provide support to Second Harvest, we created a Dashboard to monitor the Drivers connecting people with surplus food with people in need of food.
In Conclusion
As we moved towards the end of the project we discovered that Second Harvest were already in discussion with Metalab, an interface design firm from Victoria, BC to develop an app similar to the one we had created in our three-week design sprint. It was beautifully serendipitous.
Further to that, Second Harvest had received funding from the Walmart Foundation to begin working on it. As a result, we got to present our project to Second Harvest as a prototype of a potentially live project. While we aren’t certain at this point whether our ideas will be specifically taken forward, we do know that Second Harvest was impressed by our work (there were even Second Harvest tears!) and that felt like a brilliant end to a thoroughly engrossing project.
