Project Direction Changes

The direction and scope of the proposed mealsharing system remain largely unchanged. At the project’s core, it still aims to facilitate buying/selling/trading of food between users in the same building complex/small community. Considerations made that were not originally in the proposal include:  

• Reflecting more diversity in use cases and target users:
  • Not only an emphasis on building community through food, but also on discovering new types of food (e.g. belonging to different cultures)
  • On building meals with multiple dishes through buy/sell/trade
  • People who like to cook in bulk, but end up with too many leftovers (e.g. those who might like to swap tupperware meals after stretching the same dish out for days)
• A design-appropriate way to build trust in other users
  • Possible solutions might look like some sort of rating systems and/or user profiles, though this is to be explored in the design process

Task Examples

1. Michelle is a single parent of 2 children and lives in an apartment complex. To make enough money to support the family, she is working part-time at 2 jobs and she does not own a car. Her schedule allows her to pick up and drop her children from school and spend a few hours with them. This leaves her with minimal time to buy groceries and prepare home cooked food for her children. Michelle doesn’t want to keep ordering food delivery from restaurants as the bills are stacking up and she fears that the restaurant foods may be too salty and oily for her children to eat constantly.
2. Adam recently moved from Port Moody to Vancouver to be closer to his new workplace. One of Adam’s hobbies is cooking as it allows him to try food from various cuisines. Living with his family allowed him to cook multiple dishes at a time since he would always have people to share his food with him. This is now an issue for Adam since he lives alone, he finds it hard to adjust his cooking style to cook just one portion. He is constantly finding himself with too many leftovers and feels that the leftovers are preventing him from cooking and trying new dishes. Unfortunately, since Adam is new to his neighborhood, he hasn’t found anyone to share his food with yet.
3. John and Mary just moved into their new apartment a couple of days ago and have been meaning to introduce themselves to their new neighbors. They recently immigrated from Italy to Vancouver and they do not know anyone in the city. The couple knows how to cook outstanding Italian dishes, however, they have not had the opportunity to try authentic home-cooked dishes from other cultures. During their meal prep, they plan to make some excess Italian food with the intention of handing it out to some of their neighbors to start the conversation. Hopefully, in the future, they can trade Italian food for other cultural foods with the new friends that they make. However, they don’t know who else would be interested in becoming friends or trying foods from different cultures in their apartment, so they do not know how much food to make or for who.