Blend
C&A
B&E
U&S
T&R
In short
A healthy lifestyle is of great importance, even more for people with a chronic disease as poor nutrition can have negative effects on their health. Due to a proven lack of vitamin and fibre intake within this target group during a semester-long design project in the 2nd year of my bachelor's in Industrial Design, we have developed Blend. Blend is a smoothie-based service supporting vitamin and fibre intake of adolescents in high school environments. By buying fruits and vegetables in the canteen, students gain points to be exchanged for a smoothie at the Blend machine. Through social learning and comparison, direct rewarding of healthy nutrition and personalized feedback and suggestions, Blend supports behaviour change towards better nutrition.
grade
collaboration
course
COACHES
Excellent
Lu Yuan
Carlijn Valk
Gijs Wevers
Marit Hulsinga
Ramin Latify
Project 2
Inclusive Design & Thoughtful Technology
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The application
Other than tracking the student's progress and providing suggestions, the app provides several other features. The aesthetics in the app are chosen to correspond with the colour-based theme of the concept. The use of the colours throughout the app provides an intuitive interaction to efficiently find the desired information. Furthermore, several features, such as the walkthrough after signing up, correspond with the overall inviting theme of the humanoid vending machine. This supports the feeling of guidance by a friend rather than technology, suited for the age of our target group. The main functions the app provides are progress tracking, giving healthy suggestions through educational material and showing the progress of selected peers in a collaborative platform.
The added value of the vending machine is to provide a reminder in the school canteen to stimulate the use of the service. The humanoid look evokes an inviting environment to interact with. The shape of the machine is iconic due to the recognizable theme of smoothies, as this is where you retrieve your reward. The aesthetics are minimalistic to fit within any high school environment. The smoothies provided by the service are premade, which contrasts with the statements of experts that premade smoothies do not sell well compared to freshly made smoothies.
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However, due to the large scale on which smoothies will have to be provided and the inability of school staff to provide fresh smoothies on this scale, premade smoothies are unavoidable. Furthermore, developing a vending machine which produces fresh smoothies on the spot was dismissed as an alternative due to hygienic constrains. Therefore, we aimed for a rich interaction, co-designed with users, to provide a 'fresh’ smoothie-making experience. This is done by visualizing the blending process of chosen ingredients, after which an interactive experience follows in which the user ‘presses’ the freshly blended liquid into the bottle.
The vending machine
The smoothie
The final content of the smoothies is developed with the help of nutrition experts, in which especially the loss of fibres by blending is compensated by added fibres (e.g., oatmeal, flax seeds). There are no other additives and part of the content exists of water to prevent an undesirable thickness of the consistency. Furthermore, the bottles contain 200 ml of liquid, to maintain a balance between a desirable and motivational reward and healthiness, especially when targeted at people with chronic disease (e.g., diabetes). The resulting recipes are colour-based to correspond with the variety-stimulating theme of the service in terms of fruit and vegetable intake.
Learning points
Throughout the project, major learning experiences occurred in the development of my professional skills as a designer. In the past, I have experienced a willingness to take on an overload of tasks to maintain a sense of control. Although this willingness to take initiative may be considered a strength, I recognize it is also a weakness while taking away learning opportunities from others and causing an overload of work leading to a vicious cycle of stress. Therefore, I considered this project as an opportunity to learn to take a step back and trust the work of others. By doing so, through equally sharing ideas and dividing tasks, I experienced the constructive atmosphere being created within the design team and noticed that collaborative team efforts surpassed the contributions which I would have been able to deliver individually.
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Furthermore, design requires extensive communication with various stakeholders (team members, users, stakeholders etc.). However, before this project, I had very little experience with communication beyond the
design team, coaches and peers. Due to the wonderful opportunity of taking part in a project which is part of a greater alliance, I noticed great opportunities for improving my communicative skills in this area by reaching out to experts and stakeholders beyond the university.
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However, when asked what my main takeaway message is from the experiences in this project, it is the importance of adaptability. Due to challenges that may arise when working with vulnerable target groups and my inexperience with the procedures required for this, we often collectively lost sight of other priorities. As a result, I learned that having a clear and structured plan for the project approach is not sufficient. Due to unforeseen circumstances, the domain in which we operate during a project is in continuous development and may differ significantly from the expectations on which the initial plan was based. Therefore, it is a must to consider plans B and C too in advance, even worst-case scenarios, rather than relying on the success of plan A.
