School Project - WWF “The Foo(d)tprint Project”
concept & ideation; framing & strategizing; creating & crafting; reflection & awareness;
Introduction
We were challenged by WWF to create a ‘toolbox’ that will help companies reduce their environmental footprint. We re-framed the problem and focused on finding a solution to reduce CO2 footprint from corporations by making changes in their food-related habits of their employees.
According to the Paul Zevenboom, client at WWF “Many industries are responsible for the depletion of natural resources in our planet. WWF aims at empowering them and their employees with the right tools and knowledge to minimize their impact and insure they behave in an ethical and sustainable way. Indeed, some industries may pivot from polluters to promoters of a greener economy.”
The Foo(d)tprint Project
The Foo(d)tprint Project we developed is by design a scalable service system that is addressed to small and medium-sized enterprises/corporations (SMEs) that are willing to promote greener internal behavior change. The focus point is to start by changes in food-related habits within corporations that are willing to minimize their CO2 impact on the environment. SMEs comprise of 60 to 70 percent of jobs according to OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development). Because of this, a substantial CO2 footprint reduction in SMEs can lead to dramatic improvement of the environment, so it’s important the system to be scalable and adjustable for different small-medium corporations.
Social trends in Corporations
Corporations usually prioritize productivity and efficiency rather than quality of life. Corporations soften forget that the working environment that they offer to their employees is a social context within which personalities are shaped, routines are formed, habits are adopted. Conservative Top-Down approaches in corporations are inflexible when it comes to changing business culture. Employees are used to receiving and executing orders from ‘above’ and their personal goals are of lowest priority while working. When Top-Down business models want to change behavior internally, they must provide clear directions and objectives, so that workers will know how to effectively accomplish the business goals [1,2,3]. Big corporations with high environmental footprint usually rely on corporate responsibility [4] to reshape their image externally, although, internally they damage the environment with their slow-paced bad habits. Many corporations fail to stand for an internal shared vision that can approach employees’ sensitivities and can give them individually and collectively the grounds to develop better, more aware and responsible personalities. This attitude of big corporation negatively affecting their functionality and efficiency as, especially the new generation of workers seek a quality balance between life and work. Bad attitudes by corporations are easily spread thanks to the world of mouth [5] boosted by social media.
Small Business for the Change
Luckily, remarkable changes are noticed in small corporations [6] who focus on providing a cool environment to their employees set and pursue social and environmental change internally and externally. According to Sushil Cheema [7] of entrepreneur.com “61 percent of small businesses are actively trying to go greener, 70 percent anticipate to go greener the next two years”. The styling, the materials, the structure, the events, the technology, the power usage[7], the food choices[8] are more flexible and sensitive putting collectivity and responsibility in the forefront. Small corporations because of their more ‘flat’ structure than Top-down corporations, usually have a young, open and fresh vibe that allows all the members to share common goals. They want to grow big together, be noticed and make a difference to the world. Their small employee size (10-50) enables them to be agile, develop interpersonal communication, affection and relationships. In contrast to larger longer-time established corporations, they usually consist of younger employees on average. The employees can boast about how their working environment helps them evolve a better self.
Food Related Habits in Corporations
Recent articles (see links below) discuss ways to increase employee productivity by changing food related habits within corporations. Creating lunch culture, providing healthy food can boost productivity up to 20%, giving choices, making eating food an experience with creative dishes. Eating together is an easy way to achieve bonding between employees no matter their discipline or their hierarchical level. Especially in corporations, eating food should be a worthwhile break from work.
https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/279546
https://www.thebalance.com/how-to-encourage-healthy-food-choices-at-work-1917961
https://www.fastcompany.com/3066077/these-companies-are-balancing-free-food-and-wellness
The Opportunity
According to Paul Zevenboom, client at WWF “Food is something that is ‘easy’ to change within a company (dining area). How can we help employees to change also their personal daily eating behavior? Think of it in a personal level, starting by changes in their eating habits. Important within that level is a step by step tooling where people will be helped on a daily base where they can influence the company back. Think of a bottom-up approach.”. Small-medium corporations are flexible enough and can easier tolerate cultural changes within their environment. Change refers to employers and employees trying new habits consciously together and ultimately adopting low carbon-emission food habits in a personal and collective level. A refreshed dining area, a passionate local chef, ‘greener’ local ingredients, less packaging, good communication of low-footprint habits. New, more knowledgeable choices and ambassadors of ‘good behaviors’ should be around. Within the corporation, people can have the opportunity to try new eating habits, explore with the help of others new food choices without being forced, learn and take knowledge from work to home and enjoy the benefits of a better health status. Starting behavior change internally can possibly generate momentum and attract more people. A respectful, qualitative, collective and joyful behavioral and cultural shift within the corporation can attract attention from external parties and as a result stimulate positive commentary about their green shift.
Our Solution
The Foo(d)tprint Project engages employees in an easy & effortless way through a collective game to make ‘greener’ food choices in their organization’s canteen, raise awareness and reduce their carbon footprint. The game organizes employees in teams of 5, and they compete against other teams within the organization. We want to create a good-nature banter - a playful and friendly exchange of teasing remarks - like friends that support different football teams and make fun of each other. To promote behavior change and to form new habits to the individuals we run the game in Sprints of 21 days. According to Maxwell Maltz, writer of the Psycho-Cybernetics, “21 days is the minimum amount of time needed to adapt to a new change and start forming a new habit.”[11]. The Foo(d)tprint Project to function initially requires the following: A small-medium corporation (SME), with up to 100 employees, with a canteen, one ore more CEOs that want help and support to reduce their corporation’s footprint and some open-minded employees. The toolbox that we give the CEO includes:
WWF representatives: One or mroe WWF representatives of the project must help directing it. They helps set goals, implement the system and evaluate its outcomes. Part of this team should be a designer that will create info-graphic material, posters and food labels. Together with the CEO they will set project goals. What is the current employee situation? What are their eating habits? What does the canteen serve and what is the baseline CO2 emissions measured by food consumption in the canteen? Where do you see the corporation in the future? How much do you want to reduce your food-related CO2 emissions?
The Calculator Software: An interactive engine that calculates the estimated CO2 emissions of each item sold in the canteen. It takes in account how much land-distance traveled, water, energy and waste is required to produce and deliver it[14]. Unlike other engines [11,12,13] out there it should make it easy to calculate sandwiches, soups etc which include a mix of ingredients of different emissions. The calculator is an additional, plug-in software that has a database of the available food choices at the cashier and their impact to the environment (CO2 per item). When the cashier scans items that an employee buys, it shows in a screen how much CO2 each item and all in total emit to the environment so that they learn and try to make better, greener, choices next time.
The Ambassador software, the conveyor of the idea, the message carrier of the whole project through whom employees will know everything related to reducing their footprint by functioning in teams. The software runs on employees computers and appears in most touchpoints with the system.
Email templates: What should your employees know before they join the Foo(d)tprint project? How to form teams? What are the terms and conditions? How can they win and what is the trophy?
Tailor-made Posters and Styleguide: Raise awareness about the Foo(d)tprint Project in the physical context of the corporation! Posters with facts about food choices available at their canteen, the impact of red meat, the health benefits of beans, the fun they will have by joining a team and a Sprint!
Food Labels: They are replacing current canteen food labels and they include the estimated footprint to the environment (CO2 per item) and are in the style of the Foo(d)tprint Project with the Ambassador style.
The Leaderboard Screen: A large screen placed somewhere on the exit of the canteen which shows the ranking of each team on who has less footprint to the environment by their canteen food choices they make. Employees can see real time how their individual choices affected their teams but it is anonymous, because we don’t want to expose, judge nor point fingers at people that like to eat in a specific (meaty) way. Although, in the team environment discussions are promoted like, “hey guys, what happened today again? Why are we having more and more impact? I suggest today you eat meat and us eat pasta salad with fish. Tomorrow I’d like to eat crockets!”
The Idea Box: A physical box where employees can drop in their ideas, complaints about the system. It is important before the next sprint starts to take in account any employee feedback and re-adapt the system. We want to eliminate any threats and weaknesses on the system and keep it as simple, unobtrusive and fun as possible for everyone. People can also register their ideas/complaints through the ambassador software from their desks.
‘Collective Responsibility’ as core value
The Foo(d)tprint Project is all about working in collectively responsible ways to improve the working environment. From the projects and campaigns that already exist (analyzed later) we found out that it is not about the individual, it’s about creating a community and embracing the collective feeling. It’s also about responsibility - without pointing fingers. On your own it’s very hard to achieve a long-term goal, or a new habit, without sharing it or talking about it to keep yourself motivated over a long time. If you do it in a group and have people around you with the same long-term goal and motivations, you are responsible of taking care of each other and make sure you achieve your long-term goal more or less together with the others. And in our case of reducing environmental footprint, which can easily be underestimated, it can be easier to motivate people if ti’s about collective responsibility.
Scenario
Before lunch: Tomas is sitting at his desk working and it is close to lunch time. Tomas’ friend - Vincent - from another team walks by and asks him if he would like to join for lunch. Tomas agrees and gets up to go for lunch. While walking to the cafeteria, Vincent asks Tomas if he is prepared to be beaten for the third day in a row. Tomas grumbles a little bit and Vincent talks about how his team is be`er than Tomas’ and they are going to win.
At the canteen: Tomas enters the cafeteria. He browses around to see what food he wants. Vincent laughs and asks him to get the beef so that his team can get an advantage. Tomas is a little annoyed. He looks at the labels for prices and the footprint of the food he is buying. He is a little concerned about his team getting a bad score because of him. So he decides to buy chicken instead of the beef to keep a be`er score. He goes to the register and asks for a chicken. He sees his score for his order on the register. He adds an environmentally friendly food like banana. His score increases and the screen shows the footprint of his entire order (chicken + banana).
Eating lunch: He confirms the order with the cashier and pays by card. The system knows who has paid and adds the score to Tomas’ team. Tomas waits for Vincent to complete the order. When both of them are done, they look at the big screen to see their teams’ scores. Turns out, Tomas’s team has ‘cut’ the points gap on Vincent’s team. Tomas jokingly warns Vincent to watch out for his team because they are going to go ahead of his team very very soon. They walk towards the table and see their colleagues sitting there and join them. Emily smiles at them and asks who did be`er today. Tomas tells her that his team just kicked Vincent’s ass. They laugh and sit to eat.
SWOT Analysis
Strengths of the Foo(d)tprint project can be distinguished into Individual benefits and Company benefits. Individual benefits refer to personal, practical and social meaning added to the life of the employees whether they participate to the project or not. Individuals that participate raise awareness in a personal level, they realize the choices that are available and can finally see, measure and try without mental or physical effort. Their tries are beneficial to themselves as they improve their health status, to their team as they raise their chances of winning the trophy set by the CEO - which can be cash, extra vacation days, devices, discounted food or free subscription for green food packages delivered at their doorstep. They must have something to fight for in an easy and effortless way. The system is designed to reflect on the Unilever’s 5 Levers of Behavior Change [13] and it raises awareness in an experiential way (by trial and ‘error’) on food choices; makes it easy to taste new experiences in an effortless way as the system informs you so you process it subliminally (“Wow pork really `dragged the line down`, i should check the alternative food choices the Ambassador gave me and Emma told me about yesterday”); it does not force you to change your routine but just gives you knowledge and waits for you to act (or not); makes it desirable to contribute to the team efforts, to your new personal goal and to the new vision of the corporation to collectively become one of the first greener organizations from bottom to top (from employees to CEOs) in a “we are all in this together” way, does not punish, keeps it all anonymous on the leaderboards; it is rewarding as it gives some practical trophy to fight for as mentioned before but also the individual receives social acceptance and recognition as a “fighter”; it promotes habit adoption through the Sprints which challenge trying new food and minimize the impact to the team and the environment and 21 days might be enough to break the bad eating habits “Now i go to the supermarket and I ‘feel’ the CO2 impact of many products; I feel the micro-environment of the canteen has impacted my life and made me wiser on what food replacements I like. For example i feel better to get white meat instead of red meat as i recall it having more than half the impact to the environment.”.
Opportunities arise before starting the game, during and as it ends. Before starting the game CEOs have the opportunity to measure their baseline CO2 emissions produced by food consumption at the canteen by all the employees. Together with WWF they implement the calculator silently, and for several weeks they gather metrics and data: What is the most preferred thing to eat each day? Do people eat less meat on Mondays? What happens if we take popular meat away for a day and at the same spot we put some exclusive chef meals made of beans? What happens if we introduce smaller plates? The same tests can happen during and after the Foo(d)tprint game ends. The calculator reveals opportunities to observe habits and see if negative reactions arise. During the game people will have the opportunity to meet other employees from other teams. Lunching together in a common place is an easy way to bond and the Foo(d)tprint project aims at adding high Social meaning to the life of the employees (see Quadruple Bottom Line of Sustainability by Stuart Walker[10]). It’s a very interesting opportunity to help people get to know each other within the corporation of 100 employees, from different departments, of different sexes and different ages. The old vegan lady can finally express her opinions more freely and help educate others. Taboo about vegans/vegeterians can be eradicated. During the game there are Economic and Practical opportunities to measure teams’ performance. It’s interesting for the CEO to know how the system they just paid thousands to implement affects their corporations outcomes. Simple questionnaires, discussions or observations can reveal the potential of a collective game to help the corporation function better. Are the employees more bonded than before? Are they smiling and laughing more? Are they having a moment to forget about their responsibilities and enjoy that ‘playful banter’ with other co-workers? Are they feeling more positive about catching the deadline by the end of the week? There are opportunities even by the end of the game. Yes, the game has an end after three sprints (21+21+21= 63 days of sprinting + 7+7 days of reflection and readjustment before each sprint = 77 days in total). After three sprints it stops and the large screen with the leaderboard goes away, but the food labels can stay. There is a large opportunity to introduce the Foo(d)tprint Ambassador app for personal use to make the habit stay. It will be a tool that has a friendly-to-use CO2 food calculator to easily compare food choices on the go. The database will already be large after many corporations will have shared food information and barcodes of products they sell at their corporate environment. The database will keep on becoming larger easier there after since funds will have been collected by WWF corporate and they will be able to calculate CO2 emissions of all the very popular food choices at the supermarkets or at the local market. Local producers can potentially join the Foo(d)tprint project and be benefited and receive small funding or free environmental-friendly packaging of their products by WWF corporate for continuing their good ‘green’ work. I believe there is a large opportunity to raise awareness and give consumers knowledge through an easy tool to make new habits that benefit the environment. WWF can start small with this corporate project, generate ‘momentum’ and trigger a chain reaction. For example an employee is likely to confess that “after three sprints ended in my corporation, I treat my family as if we are a team. I tell stories about what i learnt trying different food and how we worked together with my team in my corporation to tackle the challenge. How subconsciously my preconception about what I like to eat changed and now I have wider choices to make. A lot of discussions were initiated at the table and at the supermarket and we all tried new products. For example now my kids replace cow milk with soy milk every other week as its more beneficial for them and tastes as good with their cereals so its a win-win situation!”
Weaknesses of the Foo(d)tprint project can be attributed to its persuasiveness (not being persuasive enough or being over-persuasive), to its complexity (staying too superficial or being too complex without a reason), to its time consumption (consuming a lot of time by the CEOs managing the system), to its implementation process (cost to implement and friction with stakeholders). Persuasiveness of the Foo(d)tprint project must stay medium-low for the simple reason that it should be unobtrusive and fun to use. The game should remain a game, and by no means should it turn to extreme competence between employees. The nature of the game is Social and collective it can potentially generate feeling of bad exposure to the individual, hiding away their choices, being too critical on themselves, attempting to please everyone - make the team and CEOs proud - which can suppress feelings and personalities. We want to keep individuals as anonymous as possible and we don’t want to force behavior changes without their will. We want to support everyone try new food choices, replace eating habits and discuss about them. We made the system simple and integrated in the employees every-day routines and kept the the new touchpoints to as little as possible. For example the Ambassador software must bare intuitive affordances and easy interactions so that it’s easy for everyone to use regardless of their familiarity with computers. We used Microsoft’s ‘Clippit’, the default assistant in Office 2000/XP/2003 as a reference to make it usable and understandable to everyone. We designed the Ambassador to not embarrass the employee if it pops-up on their computer during a meeting: Only a label is popping up in the colors of the Foo(d)tprint project. details are shown only if the user clicks on it. The Ambassador must be easy to dismiss or mute and it must automatically go away after some time of not interacting with it. The system takes time to implement because it requires that all the food sold at the canteen are calculated. Luckily there are information out there about how much CO2 each food emits to the environment so its easy to make an easy estimation as we did in our prototype according to some examples[15,16]. Stakeholders
Threats. Individuals might try to please everyone and it might generate bad commentary about “he/she is too focused on the trophy”. Discussions will be initiated and they can be positive or negative. There is a high possibility of people trying to embarrass others “Lets see how you mess up our efforts” or even kick people out teams because they don’t want to put more effort, or simply don’t have the money to make greener/less impactful choices. For this reason we the participation is optional We need to clarify that not participating does mean nothing to the CEO and their position is not threatened. That’s why the WWF representatives must be around once in a while to ask employees how they feel, how the CEO believes that the employees feel and try to eliminate bad perceptions of the CEO. For example the CEO might be a 60 year old who has always been a vegan in their life and has strong opinions about what behaviors are good and which are bad and they might be too critical towards the employees that are ignorant or are not trying enough. Setting goals is critical to creating a shared vision with employees and that should be explicitly communicated to them. CEOs might underestimate this initial step and my think that it is WWFs responsibility to communicate this vision. But we believe if WWF appears around with their branding (WWF, pandas, environmentalism) people are going to be demotivated. That’s a very important reason why we provided a different branding for the Ambassador and the whoel Foo(d)tprint project. Did you see Pandas or WWF logos anywhere? NOPE! Its something that comes from the internals of the corporation, from the CEO. And they must eb in position to set the new greener vision: How much do you want to reduce your footprint after each sprint? Where do you see your corporation in 1 year and in 3 years regarding environmental awareness?
Our process
To deal with the challenge we split the process in five main stages: Discovery, Research, Concept, Prototype, Document.
Discovery
Individually we took 1 hour to make an interpretation for ourselves right after we talked to the client. I developed a schema that explained my point of view of the project aim, and clients’ - Paul and Claar - ambitions for the project. “Easy, feasible, comprehensive approaches for reducing employees’ footprint within corporations.”. I like to work with stakeholder’s visions. Paul ideally wanted to approach big corporations and sell a green toolkit; As he said, “dear ING, this is a green-behavior plan that will help your employees embrace the value of sustainability (..) from within the company and expand it to their personal lives”. His focus point: processes, business, selling plan, promote WWF corporate. Claar has a focus point on the food choices employees are given within the organizations they work. She strongly stands for giving “Power to the beans! Food is a big deal now, we have a lot of research. Don’t try to become experts on that field. Focus on what can design do for upgrading the food-related habits in corporations to substantially reduce their footprint !” Both agreed that there is no solution for what we are looking for. My first thoughts were:
Make employees feel they are part of a bigger movement.
How can design (service, product, digital, graphic) promote better habits, attitudes, mindsets?
To check sustainability [9] frameworks from Stuart Walker [10], Professor of Design for Sustainability at the University of Lancaster, as i utilized them in my previous studies.
The core idea was to start small, provide a small motivated company with a service system to reduce effectively their footprint, feedback and reflect on the outcomes, then scale up the service system and adapt it to empower equal or larger corporations, then repeat and, as a result, empower the planet. The feedback loop is essential to measure environmental feedback and emploee’s behavior change, embrace opportunities for redesigning the service system, minimize possible threats and grow wiser as WWF-corporate.The company profile as suggested by the client was mid-sized corporations with up to 100 employees, with an open mind who are interested for help from WWF to reduce their footprint.
Research
Corporate CEO Interview. As proven by an interview with a corporate CEO, they engage their employees in Meatless Monday challenges, they lunch all together at a shared dining place, although there is a food-from-home culture. Many employees source food from a local biological farm and they are proud of this.
MeatlessMonday.com. A campaign where they support in just skipping meat for one day a week. Values are: it’s good for you, good for nation’s health and better for the planet. With high-influencers like Oprah they managed to be active in 44 countries and motivate more individuals and companies to join with Meatless Monday. High influencer people promote baby step, also for meat lovers, to change eating behaviors offering an online place with a big database of recipes and a lot of resources and knowledge.
Tidy street project Brighton. A neighborhood energy-awareness campaign that aims to show how electricity usage on Tidy Street compares to the rest of Brighton. It was about challenging people collectively. A community-feeling was developed and they all wanted to get better results on energy saving every week. Creating a community feeling and working towards a common goal shows increased engagement and high levels of joy and fulfillment.
Apple #closethering competition. Internal corporate campaign where teams were formed and challenged to be physically more active as much as they can. Employees who completed all activity challenges on the Apple Watch each day for a month earned a physical and a digital badge and a matching T-shirt. Employees were very enthusiastic and competitive to win, so they encouraged the rest of the team by moving more to win. It was not about the price or the exercise anymore, it was just about winning. Persuading people by making a game out of something and putting people in teams to make them feel responsible. Creating a competition with teams creates this competitive feeling of winning and creating responsibility for each other to maintain the highest score and stay motivated.
WWF Food Expert Interview: They are having different strategies to reduce footprint: 1. Change the whole system of the Europe agriculture policy 2. Changing the eating habits 3. Creating a better version/other tool like the Footprint test 4. The subject is very delicate, everybody is scared to point fingers and no one likes to tell people what they can and can’t do (key point). “At WWF, we facilitate and promote the good ‘green’ behavior but don’t undermine others. Its fine if they want to bring their own food although most in-corporate canteens don’t make ti easy to make greener choices”, the WWF Food Expert explains. People tend and want to see how they score on something compared to others. They don’t want to score lower than the others, so it will motivate to score better. It is really difficult for people with habits. They have to do it for a long time to make sure the new habit will stay. So there would be a challenge; how can we make sure that they maintain a new habit for a longer period than just a couple days? Biggest threat: Not punishing others. It’s difficult to change habits
Expert Feedback and Reframing:
Reframing school project with the team and with the support of Per Liljenberg Halstrom. Promote one or more collective activities that can turn into individual habits that, indirectly, reduce the total corporate footprint. With the application of our proposed systemic solution, corporations can boast a better working environment, better atmosphere, more collective thinking that can attract more attention from the competitors and fans and consequently attract investors, sponsors and new, better, more conscious employees. The new food-related trends that raises the confidence, the satisfaction levels of current employees. Managers and CEOs need to follow and give the good example, recognize and reward the new, more beautiful way that employees treat each other and support the values that the corporation wants to represent.
CO2 Calculator: Try out our simple custom calculator we made on Google Spreadsheet here. The goal was to prototype our system and use real carbon emission values in our Cashier register prototype. We can understand the carbon emissions from food by observing the stages that it takes for it to be produced and to be delivered to our hands. How much water is required for the item to be produced? How much land does it have to travel? How is it packaged? How long do we drive our car to take them to our home? For the prototype we used readily available grams of CO2 emissions per kilo for some sample foods (g/kg) which then were converted to CO2 grams per gram of food (g/g) and then multiplied by how each portion at the local (for example HvA) canteen weighted e.g. they sell roast beef slices of 20 grams (1 portion) and each gram of it emits 13.3 grams of CO2 to the environment, which means 20*13.3 = 266 grams of CO2 to the environment (g/portion). Similarly, and to put it in context, an Apple emits 44 grams of CO2, but it is four times bigger portion than the roast beef (80 grams vs 20 grams) meaning that you will consume less food and will have less impact to the environment and to your team. To make it easier to read and to communicate and have score unit for the game, we divided by 10 each g/portion (meaning (g/portion)/10 = (g/10)/portion = decigram/portion). So now the minimum thing you can find at the canteen is White bread which score 2 impact to the environment (Fun fact: Brown bread scores 3!) which is the minimal choice someone can make.
Reflection
1. Behavior Change Study
In this project i explored how to design for behavior change, shared my insights with the team and evaluated constantly the system we designed on its behavior change aspect. I uncovered some previous knowledge, studied theories and put them to practice with our design. Designing for behavior change needs to provide meaning to the individual. For this reason I introduced the team to Unilever’s 5 Levers of Behavior Change[13], to Ken Wilber’s Behavior Analysis based on the Integral Approach [especially check the video 16,17,18], and to the Quadruple Bottom Line(QBL) of Designing for Sustainability by Stuart Walker [10,11]. The project aim was to create collective responsibility and both are very sensitive words: Collectivism requires that you create bonding, reasons to speak, discussions to initiate, arguments to raise, ideas to correlate. Responsibility requires the individual to try understand, reflect, act accordingly. Having also a personal vision and sharing it with others is what makes it powerful; Collective Responsibility. Even those that disagree on adopting greener food habits have, all of a sudden, found a reason to talk with each other and argue with those that are willing to change. In this social interaction we don’t want to lose the individual and for that reason the system must add personal meaning. The employee must be able to reflect on what’s happening, to understand and feel free to make a choice. Personal aspirations like sense of achievement, recognition are underlined by design of the system since it implements social and practical rewarding mechanisms. The individual realizes the practical meaning of participation while they are in the game and after the Sprints have finished. The individual is a little more aware while they make choices at the supermarket, they bring knowledge back home and raise their children with more awareness. Knowledge is a practical tool that can help them achieve their personal and social goals in a meaningful way for them as it’s reflected from their experiences and their (new) beliefs. In short, Stuart Walker’s Quadruple Bottom Line (QBL) for Design for Sustainability fitted the situation perfectly with the Foo(d)tprint project! We achieved to design a system that adds not only Economic value to the people involved (rewards, productivity) but also Personal, Practical and Social meaning to their working and non-working lives. This underlines that my role went beyond a ‘doer’ and ‘maker’ as I utilized, adapted and adopted frameworks to design for the given brief. For example, QBL helped us propose a system that is meaningful for the client’s needs (Paul Zevenboom), for the corporation, for the employee, for the future of WWF Corporate (by describing Opportunities), for us as a team of young designers that want to make desirable and valuable products. During the process I realized there big commonalities between Wilber’s behavior analysis and QBL and as soon as we figured out the Foo(d)tprint Project system to fit at QBL it almost fit Wilber’s model too! That happened because Wilber speaks about attracting the Individual Internally (give me a reason to do it) which reflects also on Walker’s Personal and Practical values. Similarly Wilber talks about using Social values to motivate the individual, using practical values to explain how and why, using practical and economic ways to make it easy and affordable for everyone to behave in a similar way. Unilever was critical and important to persuade the client that we created a system that reflects the brief and makes it easy to adopt greener behaviors. Some tangible outcomes of my analysis were three personas, scenarios, value proposition map, scenario for each one and proposed that in the context of a working environment employees might ‘jump’ from acting as one persona to another.
2. Creative Technologist
My experience in technology brought me in the forefront of understanding and revealing potential use cases of existing technologies in corporations and canteens and to coordinate the prototype development. What technology should be used to minimize intervention in employees routines? How environmental impact is calculated for each food? How do you communicate employees the concept of ‘impact’? How do you visualize it?
After understanding People and their motivations to change behavior I thought that fitness trackers and ‘quantified self’ solutions do not provide strong Personal, Practical nor Social meaning to the people’s lives in order to encourage different, healthier habits. Half of them who try these fitness wearables, including me, are stop using them short after buying them[19, 20]. Although the technological trends showed that the quantified self would take over our lives, it wasn’t until very recently the ‘inventor’of the word and co-founder of WIRED magazine stopped using it. They talk more about a term called Quantified Us and talks about the shared value of working towards a common goal [21]. We admit giving out numbers, animated graphs and loads of context-aware notifications doesn’t provide value to the life of the user. Especially in our case, we wanted to minimally intervene in the routine of the employees with a digital system. Going for smartphone apps, notifications, personal footprint trackers, real-time leaderboards on their smartphones wasn’t an option. It would only promote individualism, increase the touchpoints with the system, give freedom to interact with the system whenever the user wants and would take extra effort and time from their working tasks. We believe the system constrict the ‘green’ efforts to only very few, highly motivated (vegan) employees as the collectivism would be nonexistent.
The outcomes of my role as a creative technologist were concepts, the CO2 calculator, an affinity diagram, an After Effects animation of the Leaderboard, two working Android Prototypes written in Java, a working Wi-Fi employee card reader written in Arduino C.
My concepts range from exploring the main idea to visualizing the ‘impact’ system and how it behaves. In the following series of pictures you will see initial concepts ranging from personal apps that show interaction with technological artifacts used in corporation i.e. employee RFID card, blockchain technology which could help prove the ‘origins’ and the impact to the environment of all the food resources available at a canteen, a new canteen menu with smaller plate study, loyalty points and reward system. I explored different contexts of canteens as some of them serve food in a linear process (there a distinct enter and exit) where its hard to wander around in contrast to non-linear canteens (most cases, i.e. HVA) where the employee can have more freedom in choosing, trying, leaving stuff and explore how people behave.
We ideated with the team around how the Ambassador should look like in terms of color, shape and how will it stand for our client’s aim to ’reduce carbon footprint’. We all agreed that using earth colors is a good idea but should not resemble too much of WWF and environmentalism. Thats why we came up with shades of dark blue and orange/yellow.
The design is always initiated collectively in our team. The ambassador, the food labels, the cashier’s screen, we all ideated together in a shared space. Reflecting back, the ideation process was super fast, where we all took decisions in one single day. The vision was clear, the structure was clear, the affinity diagram was there, the technologies where there. The only thing that took some more time for iterations and refinement was the leaderboard. The leaderboard was conceived in the next day and each one of us had at least one iteration on it: Me with sketches on ‘flying hams’ and making graphs on the whitewall, Pinar encompassing all our insights in a final sketch, Edwin making it in high-fidelity in Illustrator, Rose aligning the design to the branding colors and bringing the Ambassador in the scene, and me, making it animate on After effects. When one was busy on the leaderboard the rest would work either on finalizing other designs, making the prototype labels, printing, gluing, organizing the demonstration, testing out the android prototype. Reflecting back on this process i like how fast and interestingly the design evolved after each one’s point of view. Although there was time pressure to finish the project and we had no other choice, I would try again this multi-iterative process between us. The high-fidelity design of the rest artifacts was split among the team members. Rose would describe, research and deliver the Ambassador to fit the requirements and add value to the system. She requested feedback from the team before making decisions helping us all stay put, and bring balance to the design. Feedback between us helped making the ambassador neutral-looking, the cuteness was mildly intentional as we wanted to speak in a simple and fun language. Even the ambassador’s cuteness could initiate a conversation in the employees’ environment. Pinar designed the cashier interface, made multiple cases of the same interface so that I can develop it on Android Studio with code. She made it interactive using Sketch and InVision.
Edwin would focus much on collecting and framing the benefits of the system, internal and external benefits, to design high fidelity interfaces. Regarding the impact visualization:We came up with a horizontal line that represented the zero impact. Each item that would be placed on the line would impact the environment. The metaphor used was the weight: the ‘heavier’ the item for the environment the more the line would ‘bend’ downwards. In one day we managed
I used the high fidelity designs to develop a working android prototype. Here its demonstrated the evolution of the looks of the interactive ‘bezier’ curve in the process of coding:
The final working prototype: The foodprint calcualtor can now demonstrate how the cashier will tap in the system the food choices of the employee. On the left side it’s the cashier screen and onyl they can see it. On the right side, it’s the employee screen and its pointed to them so that the cashier can not see it. Both screens are connected to the same application and they update each other live. We noticed by the prototype that less impactful choices can be significantly healthier, cheaper and bigger portions. See how it works:
The Affinity diagram describes which technologies show up in the system and which are the user touchpoints. Find it also on the pictures in the beginning.
And typical me explaining technologies and working with them. Featherboard Huzzah and Android app exchanging messages through wifi when an rfid card is detected. Feather huzzah supports I2C also (less cables around) but it can not provide enough power in this setup to run the RFID reader chip (See documentation and issues of others[1],[2],[3]). For this case I soldered also the SPI pinout series and connected the devices in SPI mode.
Huzzah Pinout -> PN532 pinout:
14 -> SCK 12 -> MISO 13 -> MOSI 02 -> SS
NOTE: Make sure to set the little toggle switches set to SPI mode [0,1]! GitHub codePN532 Example code “iso14443a_uid”. Below a demonstration of me explaining to the team the principles of Near Field Communication and how it can be integrated in the Foo(d)tprint Project:
Below the NFC card reader: It’s mission was to demonstrate how employees will pay their food choices at the cashier by tapping their employee card (or credit card). The interaction is fully integrated into their routines keeping the Foo(d)tprint Project’s interventions to any canteen to a minimum:
Below, the process of converting a high fidelity sketch into a high fidelity user interface in Android Studio.
Other references used
Sustainable Diets: What You Need to Know in 12 Charts | World Resources Institute. Available at: http://www.wri.org/blog/2016/04/sustainable-diets-what-you-need-know-12-charts. (Accessed: 2nd January 2018)
Boucher, P. How Blockchain Technology Could Change Our Lives. Eur. Parliam. Res. Serv. 28 (2017). doi:10.2861/926645
Cares, W. Behaviour Change and. Environment (2006).
Wilber, K. Introduction to the Integral Approach (and the AQAL Map). 1–46 (2006).
Hoekstra, A. Y. The water footprint of food. Jonas Förare (Ed.), Water food. Swedish Res. Counc. Environ. 109, 49–60 (2008).
Stehfest, E. et al. Climate benefits of changing diet. Clim. Change 95, 83–102 (2009).