Course: User Research / Design Methods 3. Semester
Project: Sustainable Nutrition  
Added value: sustainability and education
Group: with Ligia Dietze, Maximilian Becht, Tara Monheim, Leopold Schmidt
My focus: Concept, research, interviews, sketching, video.
My responsibility: Collaboration, Communication

Reflection

We made extensive research and conducted interviews before coming up with a concept. The value of this project was not the outcome but finding key values and opportunity areas that could solve larger scale problems. We all learned a lot about society and the theme of sustainability as a result of this project, which also affected us emotionally. We not only developed a behavior-change concept, but also adapted it to our own daily lives thanks to extensive interviews with experts. Through countless interviews, everyone had the task of interviewing experts and researching sustainable nutrition, which brought us in contact with psychologists, food scientists, teachers, cooks, a politician, and more.

Sustainable Nutrition

Our basic idea is to help people eat healthier and more sustainably. We realized early on that an app alone will not achieve the desired behavior change within a critical mass of people.

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How do you define healthy and sustainable nutrition?

The basis of this project was the Planetary Health Diet. This diet was designed in 2019 by 37 international scientists. It aims to be a guidance and to raise awareness to prevent food shortages worldwide by 2050 while protecting the planet.

Where can we start?

After many rounds of iterations, it became clear to us that no concept will have an impact without an inherent interest in the subject. This can only be awakened through information and education. That's why we came up with a concept where several strategies go hand in hand. Education is the key to it all.

How can we achieve that larger groups of the population, change their behavior towards a more sustainable and conscious diet?

We need to ask ourselves: what are we eating and why, how does our food influence us, what does it do to our bodies, what is it made of, and where does it come from? We dedicated ourselves to these questions together with an extended team of about 30 users, stakeholders, and experts.