GFPP | Greater food purchasing program
PC: Emma Dibbens
ASSIGNMENT
Research and prototype future infrastructural proposals to support the goals of the Greater Food Purchasing Program for a variety of community partners.
Develop system-wide interventions to support a future-oriented ecosystem designed to meet the challenges underlying the current food system.
Role + Responsibilities
DESIGN STRATEGIST & RESEARCHER
User research
Secondary research
Speculative prototyping
Systems design
Future-casting
Graphic design
Project management
Presentation panelist
Team
SUPERVISOR
Carlos Teixeira
TEACHING ASSISTANT
Hendriana Werdhaningsih
SPONSOR
Fabri-Kal | New Futures Lab
PARTNERS
Center for Good Food Purchasing
Chicago Department for Public Health
Chicago Food Policy Action Council
COLLABORATORS
Chicago Public Schools
Chicago Parks District
YMCA
Strategy
“The infrastructures prototyped and the systems rendered by students in this workshop represent feasible, viable, and desirable pathways towards equity and sustainability for the GFPP.”
We used the adjacent framework to understand how to leverage technological infrastructures to support the GFPP agenda. We used the framework in a bi-directional manner.
From Inside Out: Beginning with goals and moving outward, we sought to understand the necessary impact and requisite skill sets to further GFPP’s aspirations.
From Outside In: Beginning with features and moving inward, we sought to understand how technologies could support new behaviors or facilitate progressive agendas.
“It’s work like this that can truly transform our food systems for the better.”
Our approach was to identify emergent technologies that could potentially support the goals of the GFPP through a combination of service systems and innovative infrastructures. In this way, we worked from both ends—bottom-up, using technological capabilities, and top-down, using program goals and aspirations—to identify features that would support the desired programatic shift.
We used speculative prototyping to discover the affordances, or unique capabilities, of nascent technologies. After twelve weeks of prototyping, we arrived at a list of desirable human-centered activities that could be supported through the strategic application of select technologies, including blockchain and machine learning.
With our vetted list of affordances, we were able to synthesize a set of six features to form the basis of a two-stage invention: the development of a hyper-local procurement platform and a dynamic governance system.
PC: Todd Cooke
PC: Justin Bartkus
“Policy isn’t practice.”
We advocated a shift: from a policy proposal to a procurement platform that would enable buyers and suppliers to act in accordance with the values espoused by the GFPP, while interacting within a structured marketplace. Under the revised model, partners gain access to a sophisticated procurement platform that affords the opportunity to shop from local suppliers and vendors who meet the five GFPP standards:
nutrition
animal welfare
local economies
valued workforce
ecological sustainability
This provides participating food-service actors with the opportunity to effectuate change through collective action. Just as Whole Foods only sells produce that meets a certain threshold of quality, the GFPP functions as a bazaar for B2B vendors committed to the upholding GFPP principles.
Meanwhile, the dynamic governance model synthesizes the disparate data-based inputs to score participants’ collective impact. Using this score to rank search results, the model incentivizes participants to compete on a holistic criteria of quality rather than price alone.
The following situated actions, depicted below, show how such a system could function at the point of consumption, distribution, and production.
Interventions
Situated actions
Production: Production is situated within urban or hydroponic farms that facilitate small scale production designed to meet the needs of the local community.
Distribution: Distribution is situated in a B2B context, in which procurement sites rely on local vendors to supply them with prepared meals or raw produce.
Consumption: Consumption is situated in a school cafeteria, where students can: express their dietary preferences, understand the nutritious content of their meals, and trace the provenance of ingredients.
SELECT Design Interventions
QR compostable/reusable packaging: QR codes enable consumers to access the farm-to-table journey of their meals and understand the nutrition profile of what’s on their plate; the packaging includes compostable wrappers and reusable containers to support a closed-loop system.
RFID tracking: Food deliveries are tracked using RFIDs and scanned at numerous points throughout the supply chain, validating provenance and assuring that produce has not been tampered with or misidentified.
Electric delivery vehicles: Electric vehicles are used to distribute food produced locally throughout the city using a carbon-neutral distribution network.
Smart trash bins: Trash bins measure and determine the composition of food waste to inform strategies for waste reduction or diversion.
Personalized vending machines: Vending machines pair consumer choice with preferential data to inform procurement decisions and support meal-service locations without access to open kitchens.
Soil and light sensors: Soil sensors provide real-time data on light quality, soil moisture, pH, and temperature on local lots to track crop health and yield.
Interfaces
for GFPP Managers | Macro-level view
At the macro-level, GFPP managers need to understand demand, supply, waste, and compliance over time. The screens to the right provide visibility into an organization’s compliance, demand profile, emissions and waste, and cost savings.
for GFPP producers & distributors | Meso-level view
At the meso-level, producers and distributors need to be able to monitor production yields and allocate inventory to meet city-wide demand. The screens to the right provide visibility into projected demand for specific crops (e.g. lettuce, tomatoes, etc.) for the upcoming season, so that producers can adequately meet future demand volumes without generating surplus waste. For distributors, the interfaces help allocate available produce equitably across the city, ensuring there are no food deserts.
FOR GFPP CONSUMERS | micro-level view
At the micro-level, consumers can verify the provenance of their food and understand the breakdown of their meal. Over time, personalized consumption data can be leveraged (pending user approval) to suggest changes in eating habits and forestall preventable diseases, such as Type II diabetes.
Presentation
Process
Phase I: Research & Analysis
As a team, we cycled through 3-week rotations so as to engage with each of our partners and stakeholders in a one-on-one context.
This round-robin format enabled us to quickly cycle through multiple rounds of research and ideation while constantly subjecting our prototypes to a gauntlet of competing desires, constraints, expectations, and concerns according to different organizational needs.
Throughout the process, we relied on a combinatorial approach to primary and secondary research, using a variety of methodologies to bring each particular organization’s POV to bear on subsequent prototypes. These included:
secondary research
stakeholder interviews
contextual inquiry
user research
ethnography
socio-technical systems analysis
co-design & workshop facilitation
Phase II: Speculative Prototyping
Each week, our group produced a speculative prototype designed to address one aspect of the system. Above, you can see an example of an RFID-enabled tracking device designed to monitor an item as it moves throughout the supply chain.
These prototypes were designed to surface the affordances, or capabilities, associated with different technologies. The list of human-based affordances we discovered include:
tracking
connecting
profiling
recommending
informing
incentivizing
localizing
collecting
approving
verifying
distributing
matching
diversifying
monitoring
analyzing
Phase III: Evaluation & Critique
Prototypes were then subjected to peer review and critique. Often, ideas from one prototype would germinate new ideas to test or develop. On the other hand, it was not uncommon for several prototypes to be distilled into one innovation. Prototypes ranged in fidelity, from low-fidelity paper prototypes to high-fidelity technology-enabled prototypes.
The most compelling concepts were subsequently integrated into the final report and utilized in the situated actions depicting consumption, distribution, and production (shown above).
Report
Press
Shortly after we shared our report, The New York Times published an article that independently corroborated many of our findings in an expose on food waste during the COVID-19 pandemic. The article – Dumped Milk, Smashed Eggs, Plowed Vegetables: Food Waste of the Pandemic – pointed to similar problems that we identified within our reporting, including inflexible supply chains and an over reliance on mass-market buyers.
Media coverage includes:
Core 77 Design Award
Our work was named runner-up in the “Design for Social Impact” category as part of the Core 77 2021 Design Awards.
