dfafoodteam-blog

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Can you spot the produce room?

The supply and demand for fresh produce at El Vecino are surprisingly high, considering the lack of signage dedicated to it. Sandra, the store's owner, knows that if it were better advertised and more accessible, more customers would buy fruit and vegetables. Our team is working on graphic design to make the produce as attractive and accessible as possible-- this week we went to take measurements and are drafting posters to present to EJLRI, Sandra, and other stakeholders, hopefully to have second iterations to show at final critique next weekend. 

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Fall 2013 crit notes

merge the 2D and 3D campaigns: develop the "accessibility" part of the mission further

bring in economics

develop a more systematic design, based on data and an awareness of what's healthy (basically, scientifically ground our campaign)

connect different people from the community

make it easy for customers to compare prices

are we conflating access and availability? 

identify the goals and the audience: is this really the crux of both parties we're trying to connect?

idea: visual hierarchy to represent nutritional hierarchy or price hierarchy

idea: coupons

idea: website

idea: research what people buy, then calculate an alternate bundle that cost the same amount but has more nutritional value

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Ben, Janice, and Maddie cranked out some prototypes of a logo for the Providence Healthy Corner Store Initiative. We know what matters to some of the stakeholders (EJLRI and Healthy Communities Office), but next steps are to get a better understanding of El Vecino customers' and owner's preferences. We hope that presenting multiple designs will give them the opportunity to point to features in each that they like or don't like. 

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Our phenomenal mentor, Alex Tee, invited the team up to Boston to visit Altitude Inc., the design firm he works for. It was awesome. Alex led us through an exercise to map out all the information we have and get us on the same page before creating a series of "how can we"s. He really got us out of our heads and seeing the big picture again. 

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"Working at the Mobile Market, I talk to a lot of moms, and many of them tell me, 'I don't know how to cook.' A lot of them are teen mothers. They pick up vegetables and say, 'I don't know what this is. Is it good? Is it hard to cook?' " Harris says. So she talks up the squash and the Swiss chard, offering tips on how to store and cook them.

"You can bring the food to people's doorstep and make it affordable. But if they don't know how to cook what's available, in the end, you haven't changed anything," she says.

[dfafoodteam-blog]

Making fresh produce more accessible in food deserts is found to have little impact on eating habits. 

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Healthy Communities Office Meeting

Amelia Rose invited us to the Healthy Communities Office meeting on November 21st, where Ben and Maddie had the opportunity to present our prototypes and learn about learn about all the other initiatives going on in Providence, like zoning ordinance reform to promote walking and biking, as well as the Healthy Corner Store Initiative (presented by Amelia Rose and Ellen Cynar of the Healthy Communities Office). Then, we briefly introduced ourselves, explained DFA, and presented the prototypes. The feedback was general excitement as well as suggestions to look at existing successful supermarket campaigns. Overall, it was just an amazing experience to learn about how the city departments work together to try to make Providence a healthier city. 

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Prototyping

Wow, it's been a while since we updated! The end of the semester has gone by in a flurry. After our community crit we felt we could either go back and dig deeper into certain areas of research, or we could spend a week building quick models to a) learn the prototyping process and b) have a physical conversation starter as we moved forward with on-the-ground research. With only a few weeks left before final crit, we decided to prototype! Splitting our strengths into teams for "graphic" design and "industrial" design, one team built space-conserving displays and the other mocked up a series of graphics to advertise and direct customers toward produce. They were quick and messy, but bad ideas can only lead to better ones! It was great to be able to have something to physically show at our Healthy Communities Office meeting and meetings with corner store owners. 

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Insights from the Community

Glorybi and her 9-year old daughter, Giada, live on Broad street just a couple blocks down from the first two cornerstores we visited, El Vecino and El Bombazo. I spoke with Giada's godmother about food availability and food culture. 

Glorybi has been lucky enough to have access to a car, which means that she buys food mostly from Stop and Shop, Price Rite, and other discounted grocery stores. Before she had a car, family friends would pick up groceries for her, or she and her friends would organize a group trip to the supermarket. The meals she cooks are Spanish dishes she picked up from her stepmother and other women in her family. Most nights, it's rice, beans and chicken. 

Giada's godmother has taken a class on nutrition, and when I asked, admitted that their typical diet is lacking in certain nutrients. For example, she said that when Giada is over for dinner she asks what the green things are-- "we don't eat these at home." She knows the names of only a few vegetables, such as broccoli. She loves corn, though (a starchy vegetable).

Beans, rice, and chicken make up the majority of the family's diet for two reasons: first, they are cheap. Second, they preserve. You can't buy produce in bulk, and you have to eat it before it spoils. Also, vegetable dishes aren't a significant part of the recipe repertoire passed down through generations. 

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Last weekend our studio had a community critique. Each team went up and presented their current research and future plans. We then got feedback from locals, professors, consultants, and entrepreneurs.

Our presentation goal was to get advice on what part of healthy food access we could focus on. We presented our research on existing food initiatives in Providence and unhealthy corner stores. We then displayed a few prototypes of shelves, containers, and programs to increase produce consumption in corner stores.

Feedback highlights include: Melina Packer, a graduate in Public Policy at Brown, provided new examples of initiatives like ours to learn from. Experience designer Cornydon Luxmoore advised us to consider the whole supply chain, not simply the end store. Finally, Jeff Chapin from IDEO said we should find a user to integrate into our process as we continue prototyping.

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Meeting 4 - Work Day

This week, Noel Lefebvre came to talk to all of RISD/Brown DFA about her work with RISD's Public Health and Public Space, a project to develop a community engagement model for RISD.

Afterward, we skipped the planned studio crit to work within our teams. We focused on the working research question: how can we make healthy food more appealing and accessible in cornerstores? A quick visual brainstorm (pictured) resulted in many rich ideas, and this week each team member will research a particular focus area before we meet to prepare for next week's community crit. 

Ben - shelf space

Cathy - displays, sampling

Janice - ethnic markets, "meal in a box," current initiatives

Layna - The Fun Theory, and miscellaneous

Maddie - decision-making psychology, traditional recipes

Matt - physical prototypes

Excited that we have a focus, and for the feedback that will come from this year's first community critique!

[dfafoodteam-blog]

Meeting 4 - Focus Developing and narrowing our mission and timeline, today's meeting was about taking our preliminary research and clarifying a path from here.  ...But who are we kidding, the highlight of today's meeting was really our team leader's birthday -- Happy Birthday, Matt!

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In food deserts, large grocery stores are scarce. But these same communities have plenty of corner stores. That€™s usually seen as a problem because corner stores often stock more junk food than fresh produce.

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Wednesday evening, we took the bus down Broad street, to El Vecino Market, a corner store that had been part of the Environmental Justice League's Healthy Corner Store Initiative. We took many notes and pictures, and here's just a sample. Some salient observations were moldy produce making neighboring fresh produce unappealing, produce sold in impractically small quantities, and an energy inefficient "refrigerator room." 

We had some extra time to kill before the bus came, so we walked back up Broad and ventured into El Bombazo, another corner store. It turned out to be a great point of comparison, in terms of prices, size, and presentation. They carried a wider variety of fresh produce, it was more appealingly laid out, and it wasn't spoiling. This store was more populated, and it wasn't too hard to see why.

These two corner stores both sell Spanish products and are just a block apart, which creates a great opportunity to establish a control if we experiment. 

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Meeting 3 - Studio Crit

This week's meeting was a studio-wide crit, where each team got to hear what the others were up to, ask questions, and give feedback. The Food Team debriefed our researching and "how can we"s, and got some great feedback on things to think about:

What have food stamp programs tried in the past to get around low income constraints? How are convenience and price reconciled in places strewn with food deserts? How can reclaimed sidewalk strips be used for urban farming? How can we use the existing network of Providence organizations-- could we design partnerships between urban farms and cornerstores? How can we address the double-edged sword of urban farms; when urban farms make a neighborhood "hip," how can the ensuing gentrification and displacement be prevented?

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TED talk: food deserts of South Central

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Last week I met with Brown Environmental Studies professor Kurt Teichert. He shared his knowledge of all the existing healthy food/food access initiatives that already exist in Providence, and pointed out a couple areas that could particularly benefit from design: compost bins and waste/recovered food transport.

I learned from BUDS employees how many trays of extra food are just thrown in the trash every night at the Ratty and VDub despite the Food Recovery Network initiative, and I was inspired to think more about ways to collect this extra food and transport it to those who need it. Antsy to think visually, I very quickly sketched out a couple different ideas.

It seems that many of our team members are interested in designing and building something physical rather than systemic, so food recovery and transport seems like a promising area. How can we make the restaurant to shelter journey more efficient? How can we turn food waste into a resource?

-Maddie