Design Thesis Project

Designing for the Grocery Store: A Service that Facilitates Community Building as a Means to Ecologic Improvement

Due to the rise in food industrialization and western disease, eating healthily has become a priority to Americans and many have embarked on a healthy eating journey. As a result, many products and services have materialized in an attempt to lessen the barriers that people encounter along the way.

Designers have done extensive work to bridge the gaps between the psychological, motivational, learning, and informational aspects of healthy eating. Largely, they have taken on the responsibility of designing information to provoke individual behavior change, however, they haven’t focused on changing the systemic level; and there’s much work to be done. While individual behavior change is important, people will not succeed at sustaining a healthy diet if they do not have sufficient access to healthy food. The lack of focus on designing to change food providers leads to a false implication that they have no role in influencing healthy food consumption. To fully implement behavior change within individuals, it is pertinent to influence change at both the individual level and the systemic–or food provider–level.

This thesis project highlights the importance of the relationship between food providers and food consumers in creating sustainable healthy food communities. The designer’s attention is focused on facilitating a conversation and commitment between the grocer and healthy eater; they each have a responsibility in achieving the common end. The solution augments existing services within the conventional grocery store so it can provide better access to healthy food, and therefore, make healthy eating easier for people.

Thesis Documentation | May 2011

The first half of the year-long thesis is focused on ethnographic research, forming questions and hypotheses, and framing opportunities for design. The second-half of the year is focused on taking these design opportunities, giving them form, and putting them out into the world to see how well they work. Throughout the process, a rich set of design implications were disclosed and led to the design solution; Foodconscious.

The thesis documentation is a detailed explanation of my thesis design process. It describes the research methods I used, the questions I asked, and the findings I discovered along the way. It also includes images of the process, the prototypes I created, and my reflection on the project as a whole.

enter full screen mode or download to view in detail

Thesis Poster, Research & Questions | December 2010

To summarize the research and questions explored in the beginning phase of the project, I designed a thesis poster and presented it to the CMU Design community. I was able to gain feedback and recommendations for potential opportunities and directions that I could take the project.

download to view in detail

Thesis Poster, Design Solution: Foodconscious | April 2011

A final thesis poster session concluded the thesis exploration. It was an opportunity to present key research findings and the design solution to design professors in the CMU community. *download to view in detail

download to view in detail

Foodconscious: Grocery Store Buy-in Booklet | April 2011

The Foodconscious Grocery Store Buy-in Booklet is a prototype to communicate to grocery store owners why it is important to implement a service, like Foodconscious, into their service model. It not only illustrates the benefits for the company and its customers, but it also explains how the service works in the life of the grocery store.