About
Fridgit is a smart refrigerator and companion mobile app designed to assist users reduce
their food waste and encourage them to make responsible decisions about the foods they
have. Fridgit is a project built for a computer science HCI class at UW where my group
and I were tasked with designing a solution to food waste.
Having never formally learned the iterative design process before, I used the class as
an initial foray into the field of human centered design, where I focused on user
research, visual design, and UI engineering. I designed various concepts and visual
content for the project and helped lead the other members of my group through the
design process. I worked alongside three computer science students who were all
interested in learning more about design.
Problem
According to Natural Resources Defence Council, 40 percent of food in the United States
today goes uneaten. Americans throw out the equivalent of $165 billion each year. This
includes leftovers getting spoiled, fresh produce and other processed goods. Many
people usually forget about the foods that they have, don’t know much about proper food
storage, or end up buying too much food to consume themselves.
After some initial research and digging around, we found that American households waste
around 25 percent of the food products they buy. Many people usually forget about the
foods that they have, don’t know much about proper food storage, or end up buying too
much food to consume themselves.
Process
Without much understanding of the knowledge of food storage and food waste in
households, we interviewed students and young working professionals and performed
contextual inquiries in their homes to get a better idea of their needs, concerns, and
problems. This proved extremely informative, as each provided us access to their
refrigerators and food shelves, walking through them with us and describing their
thoughts behind each food item.
We had each user answer a semi-structured interview to see what kind of problems they
were already thinking of and to see if we could dig up any underlying assumptions in
how they viewed the problem of food waste. We asked questions of how often they threw
out food, and for what reason. We asked for walkthroughs of their pantry and the
schedule of an average week of eating, cooking and storing food.
We discovered some key themes behind food storage and food waste: users are forgetful of
their current inventory and often buy food they already had, users are generally
uneducated regarding food storage, and are unsure of how long food can keep without
spoiling. We identified this as a intention-behaviour
gap; people don’t intend to waste food, but a mixture of forgetfulness and
context made them waste food. We used these insights to design our app and fridge
mechanics.
Sketches, storyboards, initial paper prototypes
How it works
Two internal cameras and weight sensors are used inside the Fridgit to dynamically
update its inventory on an embedded computer. Fridgit also tracks how long food items
have been in the fridge, how long they have until they spoil, food usage statistics,
and features a manual add feature when adding leftovers or take-out foods. The
companion app auto-updates a shopping list of food items when Fridgit notices that
you’re running out of a particular food.
Final Product