Interactive Grocery

The Interactive Grocery is a teaching tool that I made to use as a study for my
master’s thesis project. This prototype strives to teach people why they should change their behavior when buying food at the grocery store. It first illustrates the high level problems with the processed food industry and then allows the user to “grocery shop” and see how her purchases may be affecting the larger problem. So, a user can see personalized information about how the food she buy affects her while simultaneously seeing how her food purchases are affecting the larger problem. With this tool, a grocery shopper will learn about food industrialization, will learn how she can affect supply and demand, and will hopefully be empowered to change the way she shops in the real grocery store.

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Design Process

This project was completed in an information design class that was separate from my thesis, however, I was able to use my thesis research to guide the making of this prototype. I spent a lot of time surveying, interviewing, and shadowing grocery shoppers to determine how they shop and why they make the decisions they make at the store. I then applied some of the learning theories presented in class (i.e. McCarthy’s 4 Quadrants of Learning and Wiggin’s 6 Facets of Understanding) to the information and learning problems that occur in the grocery store. I came up with a story and a “grocery game” that engages people as they see how their real world actions may be influencing a larger problem with obesity and non-communicable diseases.

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If you’d like to dig deeper into my process, check out my process book below (or download it).

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Information Perception and Interaction, Fall 2010
Stacie Rohrbach
Carnegie Mellon University

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