Design : Tackling Food Waste On Campus Through A Design-Based Approach

Written by MA in Education and Technology students: Sanya Bajaj, Enying Chen, Xinyue Dong, Thi Huyen Mi Nguyen. This page has been re-posted from UCL IOE’s blog series.

This work took place in the ‘Digital Design Thinking and Making’ (DDTM) module, which is part of IOE’s Education and Technology MA. The aim of DDTM is to support the critical understanding and application of design to educational technologies, with a focus on environmental sustainability. Taking a research-based design approach rooted in creative design practice, during Spring 2024, we, the student team ‘FoodWiser’ worked with UCL’s caterer, Gather and Gather, to develop a new digital tool for tackling food waste in the UCL halls of residence cafeteria.

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Food waste isn’t just an annoying problem of dealing with leftovers: each discarded plate of food means wasted resources and unnecessarily inflated greenhouse gases.

At the start of our journey, it was easy for us to think we had it all figured out with our brilliant ideas – “Make a food scale! Show the calories! Have an app!”. However, the Design Council’s Double Diamond model reminded us to slow down, dig deeper, and truly understand what happens, in this case in the student cafeteria. The first diamond (or phase) focuses on exploring the “problem space”, and the second diamond is all about “developing and refining solutions”. The model is like having a map that helps you see where all the treasure is buried before you start digging for gold.

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Food waste matters and why it happens in UCL’s dining halls

We started the design thinking process by observing mealtimes at the canteen. From interviewing the students and catering staff we discovered:

• Some students wasted food because the flavour was not consistent with what they expected.
• The canteen staff thought the students were wasting food because they wanted to take as much as they could, whereas the students were actually concerned about the large food portions they received.
• The canteen staff strived to reduce food waste through putting up food-saving posters in the dining hall, but the students we spoke to hadn’t noticed these efforts.

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Our research alerted us to the fact that while students and staff appreciated the need to reduce food waste, there was no appreciation of the challenges they each faced in enacting this. Our exploration of the ‘design problem’ led us to consider that improving communication between students and the caterer and its staff could offer an effective way to further bridge the gap between knowing about food waste and taking effective action to limit it.

To give our design project a clear direction, we used the ‘persona’ design method to capture the key characteristics and differences between our stakeholder groups. Our first persona, ‘Linda’ was a cafeteria staff member. Linda perceived posters as ineffective in encouraging students to reduce food waste, while she felt prepaid meals were a trigger for students to take more than they would eat. However, this did not align with the student persona, ‘Leo’, who wasted food as it was incompatible to their palette or because the portion offered was too big. The personas solidified our focus on the communication gap.

New design directions to reduce food waste in UCL’s dining hall

Once we had the persona and the design problem ready, it was time for us to move forward to the solution space in the Double Diamond Model of Design Thinking! For this, we unleashed or creative side through a Stakeholder Drama to generate ideas.

Stakeholder Drama is a creative ideation method that allows one to think from the perspectives of users, objects and different stakeholders. This method enabled us to play out different food waste scenarios in a dining hall context, taking on the roles of human stakeholders (based on our personas) and non-human characters (e.g., anti-waste posters), whilst organising the drama into four stages relevant to eating food at the student halls: check-in and food collection, food consumption, food disposal, and check-out. For instance, during the food consumption stage, we performed a scenario involving two students dining in the hall. The students discussed their concerns about large portion sizes and the meals’ quality, expressing a desire for a medium to communicate their feedback to the caterer – a scenario which informed our app-based solution.

Our final app would allow students to view the menu and send their food orders prior to coming to the hall. Strengthening the connection with the staff, students would be able to give a rating and feedback to express their taste preferences following their meal, allowing the caterer to consider this in future food planning. Envisioning these features to reduce students’ food consumption, we anticipate that caterers would be able to donate leftover food. This would be visualised within the app to reward the students’ effort.

For the teaching team, partnering with Gather & Gather was a unique opportunity for our students to apply design thinking to a real-world problem affecting the student community. For Gather & Gather, the project allowed them to better appreciate their shared goal with students to reduce food waste, and the possibilities for tech to assist with that objective.