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Proposal
Our project (Food for Thought) is an application that will be aimed at providing a platform upon which users can provide recipes from their cultural background (along with their experience with said food), while also allowing others to provide their variations of the recipe and their experiences. While the recipes in Food for Thought will play an important role in the application, the main focus of the application will be upon the experiences provided through the food - especially the idea of how one food can be represented in two different cultures while also providing two differing perspectives. Additionally, the main target audience for Food for Thought will be users who are young adults and over who are interested in learning about how food can create different experiences for different people and families who wish to share their traditional family recipe. By the end of the semester we hoped to have gone through several iterations of prototypes to create a well-designed application which will be able to run on smartphones on a native level.
The domain space that is being identified for the project is the preservation of culture and history. This domain presents the ideas of preserving specific cultures around the world in the future, in order for it to be maintained and sustained. The specific problem space that is being explored is the idea of preserving specific cultures from countries all over the world, looking at how skills and culture get brought up from generation to generation, and being able to share this within the country or other countries around the globe. This is shown through the older generation, where their sense of belonging to the world is by nurturing and guiding the next generation by leaving stories and skills behind (Liddle, 2013). This skill sharing is important between the older and younger generations in order to further preserve family culture (Liddle, 2013).
The design opportunity that was chosen was a platform that cataloged a wide range of traditional recipes but instead of having the recipe be the main focus, the platform looks into the stories behind those recipes. Terrenghi’s Kitchen Stories employs a similar concept that aims to share the cooking of people in a virtual cookbook that is comprised of uploaded videos. The project aims to deliver a platform on which the stories linked to traditional foods from all cultures can be documented and will allow people to share their own stories. The platform is primarily targeted at young adults who are looking to learn more about their cultural heritage with other aspects being aimed at older generations who are looking to impart their own stories. The concept is of a social design as the technology is more aimed toward the sharing of knowledge rather than being mobile - although there will be a small mobile aspect to the concept as the users’ location will be used to determine what ‘area’ they will be posting to. The concept will also feature a translation feature to allow people who speak different languages to access the same data as everyone else. Breaking down the language barriers is a large part of the project; Xiaojuan Ma looks into ways of breaking these barriers down in his research paper ‘Augmenting text with multiple pictures can facilitate online information processing across language barriers’ in which he agrees with the idea that language is one of the biggest obstacles when it comes to communication.
Our project aims to develop a system to preserve the cultural and historical value behind food around the world, which would allow users to learn more about food from the perspective of history and culture. By encouraging users to share their personal experience related to food, the system is dedicated to reinforce users’ understanding of culture through sharing, and promote their awareness of preserving cultural heritage. In order to do this, the progress of project is broken down into weekly phases to specify the work that needs to be done to produce a prototype that helps to realize our idea.
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Decide the design space to explore -
Narrow down the scope of project and generate a conceptual idea of the system
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Previous research on the chosen space -
Semi-structured interview to understand:-
people’s attitude towards the preservation of their culture -
the role of food in different culture -
How people might react to the idea of the system
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Concept proposal -
Sketches for proposed concept
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Gather more information to identify system requirements -
Refine the idea of concept and create initial functionality and interaction flow
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Questionnaire to get quantitative data about people’s needs for features and preference for the medium of the system -
Semi-structured interview to extract user requirements -
Testing with user using paper prototype to drive iteration
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System requirements and conceptual model of the system -
Paper prototype -
Testing plan -
Testing data
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Iterate the concept and develop an interactive digital prototype which incorporates design of interface
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Analysis of testing data to refine system requirements and review conceptual model -
Prototyping using suitable program
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Testing data analysis -
Refined system requirements and conceptual model -
Interactive digital prototype
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Evaluate the proposed system with the interactive prototype -
Analyse data gathered from evaluation session
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Evaluation with the interactive prototype in which users are asked to perform task related to the activities the system is intended to support, in order to identify problems in terms of interface and usability
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Testing plan -
Testing data -
Analysis of testing data to point out problems
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Fix problem identified from evaluation -
Pick the representative function according to system requirements and conceptual model, and start on building the proof-of-concept prototype by coding
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Prototyping in the similar or same form of the final product
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Finalised system requirements and conceptual model
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Complete the proof-of-concept prototype -
Prepare material for exhibit
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Final testing for the prototype within the team
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Proof-of-concept prototype -
Promotional material including a conference poster
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Deliver Project
This plan above shows only an overview of what should be done for the following weeks and further details of execution needs to be confirmed during the design process according to our actual progress and problems arise. Currently, there is a need to understand the factors that could impact people’s perception of culture, what they would like to share about food and how to help them benefit from sharing with each other.
Michael is a UX designer in the team who is also familiar with programming. He has considerably more experience in UX design, although is willing to learn more about programming throughout the course of the project. Additionally Michael would like to continue practicing and learning more about the design process, and the gathering and analysis of data. By the end of the project, Michael hopes to implement a system that the targeted audience would like and enjoy, that is also targeting the domain space.
Ali is one of the teams UX Designers and will also be assisting with programming. While confident in UX Design, Ali has not had as much experience with programming as he would have liked, which is why he volunteered to assist with that part of the assignment. Furthermore, Ali wants to engage in the prototyping of Food for Thought as much as possible to increase his level of experience when it comes to actually making prototypes.
Zhijun Tang is one of the UX Designers and the Visual Designer of the team. Zhijun Tang is familiar with the design process due to previous experience of working with a team on projects, and is relatively confident in visual design. She has learned about some programming but not as good as at designing, which is what she wants to improve by contributing to this project. She hopes to help with as many aspects of the project as possible to broaden her understanding of the process of developing an application.
Ethan is the teams lead programmer and will also assist in the prototyping and interviews. Having an extensive background in coding and software development Ethan is confident in his skills, though he does lack skills in regards to conducting interviews and gathering requirements from them hence is why he volunteered to help with this area as well. By the end of the project, Ethan wants to have gained some skills in UX design to make himself more beneficial in other areas of the software development life cycle instead of being only useful in coding.
The strengths within our team include that all members of the team have a unique cultural background which gives us a broader understanding of other cultures. This coincides perfectly with our domain and problem space. Additionally, this helps with the team having access to people from these differing backgrounds, which allows for different perspectives. The concept is ascertainable due to its simple nature and due to the relatively unique nature of our concept, we are not bound by similar previously existing applications and are therefore forced to be imaginative when it comes to this concept. In addition to this, in some way everyone loves food - which is something that we considered by allowing users to try out new recipes and seeing other cultures in greater detail.
A challenge that the project concept does suffer from is the lack of previous domain research done by others looking into similar fields. The concept being unique the team does not have a rough estimation of how the concept will develop going forward.
The main risk of the project concept is that the variations may overrun the traditional aspect, which breaks our problem space. The main opportunity is that this project concept is unique, in that we have many options going forward in design.
The initial concept idea received positive feedback from the target audience, and so the team has reason to believe that the project concept will also have a positive response. This has already been shown through the additional feedback received on the team’s received concept model.
Liddle, J. L. M., Parkinson, L., & Sibbritt, D. W. (2013). Purpose and pleasure in late life: Conceptualising older women’s participation in art and craft activities. Journal of Aging Studies, 27(4), 330– 338. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaging.2013.08.002
Ma, X. 2014. Augmenting text with multiple pictures can facilitate online information processing across language barriers. Proceedings of the Second International Symposium of Chinese CHI, pages 80- 86.https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2592247
Terrenghi, L., Hilliges, O., & Butz, A. (2007). Kitchen stories: sharing recipes with the Living Cookbook. Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, 11(5), 409–414. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00779-006-0079-2