What do you have for breakfast?

Design a Research Method for Thesis Study | Doing with Theory | Seminar III

Intro

For my master study, I am investigating how could knowledge building and skill practicing could empower behavior change. Many Design for Sustainable Behavior (DfSB) projects doe not take learning and motivation into consideration for behavior change. For example, many studies in eco-visualization try to explore how energy could be displayed in a tangible form so that people will be conscious about the energy consumption and take actions accordingly. The problem of these approaches is that with minimum motivation, knowledge, and skill, people often take simple actions such as turning off the light or unplug the home appliance.

In fact, how to live a sustainable lifestyle requires many knowledge and skill. For example, it would be very difficult for a normal person to imagine the life of being a vegan. They will ask themselves how does that even possible? So as participating in the zero waste movement. A radical lifestyle shift requires strong motivation to build the necessary knowledge and skill in order to do so. As a result, I try to ask the question?

How might design equip people with effective knowledge and skills to empower them to explore more sustainable everyday practices?

Online Survey

Besides doing literature and artifact review, I also conducted an online survey asking people about their thoughts and practices of sustainability. To narrow down the scope of sustainability, I focus on 4 fields including 1) Food choice and Cooking, 2) Waste creation and recycling, 3) Plastic using and 4) Energy consumption. With more than 30 participants, I was able to identify that my project could be most impactful in the field of food Choice and cooking. Because this is the area where people have the most agency to make their own decisions. Furthermore, food education often targets children while for adults, most projects focus on food waste. So how could I design a research method to help people articulate their thought process about making food choices?

What do you have for breakfast?

Introduction

“What do you have for breakfast?” is card game that requires people to mix&match food ingredients to create their own combination of breakfast. Through the game process, the player is required to explain the combination in detail to promote his ideas for other players to buy-in in order to win the game. The reason I choose breakfast is that this meal requires minimal cooking skill to start with.

Rules

1. There are four types of ingredient cards, 1) Carb, 2) Protein, 3) Fruit and Vegetables and 4) Drink.
2. There is one context card and one conditions card.
3. There should be 2–4 players and 1 host.
4. In the beginning of the game, players should draw 3 cards from each categories.
5. The host flips a context card and player should start to make their breakfast combination based on the prompt.
6. The prompt is intentionally ambiguous so the player could fill in the details. For example, makes the healthiest meal you could imagine.
7. Once they finish the set, they started to talk about it and explain why the set meets the prompt.
8. The host flip the condition card which indicate some conditions that player could get extra credits for this round. For example, the condition might reward people who choose organic food or food with less carbon footprint.

Playtest

I have playtested the first prototype in the studio. The first prototype use words rather than image to illustrate the food. ( I believe the image could be more ideal) and I choose to put 7 attribute on the cards including

• Time required to prepare the food
• Money spent to buy the food
• Organic or not
• Processed food or raw food
• From local farm or not.
• Seasonal or whole year
• Carbon footprint in numbers

While playtesting the game, I found out that people did enjoy playing the game and selling their ideas about the combination. With limited choices, they come out with very innovative and detailed description of their set.

Although some players argue that the rule is not clear and the host get to make the final decision. This part is intentional design in that way.

What I have learned?

In terms of research purpose, the research question I have is “How could I learn people’s thought about making food choices?” and it actually works really well. What I have learned includes:

1. People’s personal flavor (demographic), cooking skill and food knowledge affect what they build through the card deck.
2. The cooking skill also connect to kitchen appliances. If you have used certain appliance, the object become an entity in your mind that you could use to support your narrative.
3. There are so many consideration while making food choices. Experienced cook will take sustainability into consideration with an indirect way. For example, organic or farmer market will be considered as eco-friendly. However, I think the healthiness and better flavors play more important role in the decision making.
4. Followed up by point 3, I think there are too many things to consideration in terms of sustainable food choice so an overall concept (things like farmer’s market) will take the lead.

Moving forward

This card game is still under developed. While more iteration is definitely required, I will focus on below direction.

• Refine the rule: Embrace the ambiguity and make it into a social game that requires and emphasize on the interaction.
• Focusing on sustainability in a more limited way: While the attributes I have listed on the card all imply sustainability, it is too overwhelmed for people to consider.
• Focusing on both individual rational and environment: It would be interesting to bring up the tension between individual decision making and collective impact and see people’s reaction about it.
• Design a debreif activity: After the game, there should be a group debrief session to understand people experience while playing it.

Since the game is still under developed, the game is not really for other designers to adapt. I will come out with full rule sets and prototype once the game design is finished.

Furthermore, while the topic only focuses on food, I believe similar approach could be used in other decision making process for people to articulate their thoughts clearly so design could learn from it.

Feedback from Dan Lockton

Research plan and quality

• Good reasoning to focus on food choice as an area where people have agency. You could talk more about who the “people” are — how does agency differ between context, demographics, age, financial situation, etc
• The ‘tensions’ are a really interesting dimension to your card deck. For example, tensions between context and conditions. This could be an excellent addition to the practical investigation of behavior and practices — getting people to model the conflicts and dilemmas and ‘double binds’ they experience, which are undoubtedly a big part of sustainability issues. You could really make a substantial contribution to knowledge by developing this aspect further!
• It’s good how you state clearly what you learned from the project.

Use of theory

• As an addition to / development of theory around design for sustainable behavior and / or practice theory, this work has a lot of potentials. But you don’t really discuss the actual theory much in your article.
• I would also like to see much more discussion of the actual sustainability impacts of different food choices. For example, you mention the carbon footprint as being one of the attributes on the cards, but don’t talk further about any of these in the article. (If you need a good source of statistics for everyday things, How Bad Are Bananas? is a good simple introduction)

The writing style and clarity

• I wasn’t clear what all the cards were. You say “there are…one context card and one conditions card.” But presumably, there is a variety of each of these to be chosen from, rather than just one? Could you include images of all of the cards in the article?
• How many people took part in your playtest? Could you give us details of (some of) the actual combinations and discussion people had?

Overall this is a very interesting article, and I’m glad you were able to pursue a project that is useful in your thesis. I’m especially intrigued to see how the cards and the activity around them could be developed further.