Planeat
Designing Sustainable Solutions to Minimize Food Waste
OVERVIEW
Creating a sustainable lifestyle through smarter meal planning
Planeat is a mobile app designed to tackle one of the world's pressing environmental issues: food waste. Through advanced personalized meal planning, engaging gamification elements, and an intuitive sharing platform, Planeat empowers users to develop eco-friendly habits while reducing their carbon footprint.
As my capstone project at Cyber University of Korea, I leveraged various technological tools including ChatGPT and DALL-E to streamline the development process and create more intuitive features. This project reflects my exploration of how thoughtful technology integration can inspire and enable meaningful changes in our daily lives.
MY ROLE
I independently drove the end-to-end design process from research to prototyping, creating user-centered solutions based on research insights.
TOOLS
Figma, Google Form, Chat GPT
TIMELINE
Sep 2023 - Dec 2023
(4 Months)
SOLUTION
Customized meal suggestions based on dietary preferences and available ingredients
Smart inventory tracking to prevent food waste
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CONTEXT
One of the most critical environmental challenges today is the climate crisis. Food waste is the third-largest source of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide, emitting about 2.5 billion tons of waste annually. While emissions from energy and transportation sectors are often emphasized, the impact of food waste is equally significant.
Korea's Food Waste Crisis:
Small Changes, Massive Impact
In Korea, 70% of food waste comes from our homes and restaurants : mostly from leftovers and expired ingredients. Cutting this waste by just 20% would have the same impact as planting 360 million pine trees.
INSIGHT
Poor Planning and
Purchasing Habits
Drive Food Waste
Research reveals that poor meal planning and impulsive buying are key drivers of food waste. Many people struggle to develop sustainable eating habits simply because they're unfamiliar with effective food management strategies.
HMW
USER RESEARCH
In-depth User Survey
for Food Waste Reduction
A survey was conducted to understand users' awareness and the current situation regarding food waste issues. The purpose of the survey is to find practical solutions for reducing food waste and to analyze users' attitudes and behaviors to achieve this goal.
Demography
85% Female and 15% Male
Primarily aged 25-29 (63.3%)
Participants
30
Timeline
Sep. 21 - Oct. 01 2023
The majority of respondents indicated that leftovers from meals and expired food products are the main causes of food waste. Additionally, it was found that the types of food frequently wasted and the causes of waste mostly originated from improper meal and purchase planning.
EATING HABITS
It was observed that most participants mainly dine at home, while also frequently ordering takeout or delivery food.
ENVIRONMENTAL AWARENESS
About 36% of participants responded that they 'don't know much' about the impact of greenhouse gas emissions from food waste, while around 46% said they are 'well aware'. The majority of participants have tried to consciously reduce food waste.
Process
Human-AI
Co-Creation Approach
This project utilized a Human-AI co-creation approach, inspired by the Wu, Z. (2021) model, to effectively integrate AI tools throughout the design process. This iterative model ensured a seamless collaboration between human intuition and AI capabilities.
PERSONAS
JOURNEY MAP
Final Design
Wireframe
Onboarding
Discover how Planeat's smooth onboarding experience can introduce you to the app's core features and ways to change your meal planning habits.
The introduction screen demonstrates the app's purpose of reducing food waste and aiding in personalized meal planning.
Setting
Before we begin the service, we conduct a brief survey to provide a personalized meal plan tailored to your daily life and eating habits. This survey includes information such as the number of household members, meal times, preferred types of food, and allergy information to understand your eating habits.
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Main Home
On Planeat's home screen, users can quickly see their sustainable eating activities. Here, they can track consecutive days of zero-waste meals and real-time CO2e savings, motivating them in their environmental conservation efforts and emphasizing their actual contributions
Meal Plan Suggestions
I offer personalized meal plans, crafted based on your onboarding survey results and the ingredients listed in fridge. ddd
Meal Adjustment
Various meal recommends are prepared so that users can adjust their meal plans. Through these recommends, users can compose their own custom meal plan.
Recipes
Fridge Ingredient Display
You can easily write a shopping list by clearly distinguishing between the ingredients you have and the additional ingredients you need.
Add to Meal Plan
By choosing the desired date and time and adding the meal to the calendar, you can prepare meals in a planned way.
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Challenge
The challenge section offers gamification features that allow users to joyfully engage in environmental protection activities by completing missions like a game. Users can earn broom icons through donations and sharing activities, adding ingredients to their fridge, plan personal diets.
By using the collected brooms to clean the polluted Earth and accumulating experience points, users can contribute to creating a cleaner environment.
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Share
This is a space where users can share and donate leftover ingredients with others. By facilitating such a platform for sharing, Planeat users can directly contribute to reducing food waste, strengthen community connections, and engage in responsible actions for the environment.
Write a Free Sharing Post
Each post can specify the condition of the ingredients, expiration date, purchase date, and the preferred location and time for exchange!
Chat for Sharing
Use the chat feature within the platform to communicate with other interested users and proceed with transactions
Donation
Planeat provides a platform for users to engage in meaningful donation activities in connection with the local community.
Food Banks are social welfare organizations that collect foods that are not sold in the market but are still of good quality and provide them to the underprivileged. Through the Planeat app, users can view a list of food bank centers in their area and check the required donation items for each center. This allows anyone to easily reduce food waste and offers the opportunity to extend a helping hand to neighbors in need.
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Key Takeaways
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Embracing Agility in Design
My solo journey in developing the Planeat app taught me the art of agility in design. I learned to embrace the 'try fast, fail fast' philosophy, where early iterations and rough prototyping became crucial for quick pivots and effective communication.
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Technology for Sustainability
This project wasn't just about building an app—it was about envisioning technology as a bridge to a more sustainable world and realizing that sometimes, the path less trodden reveals the most sustainable stride forward.
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Pivoting with Purpose: Planeat's Journey
Navigating the Planeat project highlighted the crucial balance between a product's vision and the practical realities of users' needs and legal limitations. Insights gained from user feedback and regulatory boundaries shifted our initial concept, steering us toward addressing the underlying contributors to food waste. This experience underscored the necessity of a holistic approach to design, blending creativity with an informed understanding of regulations and user behaviors.
