Making Space in the Interface: Reimagining the Tactile Environment in the Transactional Scene

A Primer in Systems Design Research for a Self-defined Brief

Making Space in the in the Interface

miso dem Andrea Boscaro

A Primer into Systems Design Research for a Self-defined Brief winter 2019-20

Making Space in the Interface Reimagining the Tactile Environment in the Transactional Scene

miso dem in collaboration with Andrea Boscaro cover photo by Felix MĂźller

Special Thanks During the five months that bookended this whirlwind of sense-making, practice developing, conceptual heavy-weightlifting, communication building, relationship nurturing, and world-opening, many, many people have illuminated the path inwards and out, without whom I would not have written this book, which captures our process that is the end result itself, and I am grateful for each of those contributions, intersections, and even stumps and bumps. Through empathy and a commitment to persist, the systems design research I undertook has been a unique period of learning, and for that I am grateful. I would also like to express special thanks to a few individuals that have been present or accompanied me in mind or spirit for much of the way. Unordered: Francis Carter Thank you for so generously giving your time to get to know my work and helping me establish myself for the first time, in a world of formal academic boundaries, as a designer.

Cleotilde Gonzalez Thank you for providing me the backbone that allowed me to delve confidently and with a firm belief in my own particular set of curiosities into system dynamics and for looking at my failures with empathy that would motivate me each time I felt at loss.

Pui Kei Tam Thank you for believing in me and giving me the opportunity to step into an unknown, rich with potential.

Isabelle Makay Thank you for being at our side and on our side along the way. Your patience and passion completely took over me. The camera in my hand transformed from tool into an always-awaiting path for uncovering another world.

Anni Zhang Thank you for carrying me in spirit. Your power, even an ocean and a continent away, made me feel enabled to step out of the disciplinary shell I grew complacent in through my frustration and realize the agency I had in fact been carrying and during the semester was given, to make a difference, no matter how small.

Andrea Boscaro Thank you for being my other half in putting our heads and laughs together. Your detached irony, comic exaspiration, willingness to challenge my default responses, and overall presence in my every day has underlined my memory of the semester.

Table of Contents The minor

5

The assignment

6

Starting Off

9

Setting Up

25

Inspiration

33

Digging In

69

Looking Back

87

3

RADICAL ECOLOGIES Design Academy Eindhoven Minor Program The World Economic Forum expects robots in the realm of 3D printing, biotech, and nanotechnology to replace over five million human jobs by the end of 2020. Yet, in countries such as India, human-driven systems of mind-boggling scale and precision demonstrate that technology does not necessarily permeate every aspect of our lives. In Mumbai for instance, some 200’000 home-cooked meals are transported, delivering hot food directly from the workers’ home to workplaces. Considering such examples, how might we as designers operate within complex systems to design meaningful human-centered experiences? In Radical Ecologies, we will embark on a design research journey, focused on system design.

You will select and dive into an existing complex system and conduct in-depth research into how its component tools, workers, products, services, and systems interrelate. Observing existing analogue and technological systems, you will build your own unique visions for the future, learning where and how to position yourselves as a designer. Throughout, your most important question will be: where is the human in such systems?

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The Assignment Prompt Understand:

how do systems that encourage consumerism create waste which contributes to climate change?

Transform:

how can we shift such systems to reduce their negative climate impact and have positive impact instead?

Required:

research through the camera a cultural probe

What A primer into systems design research for a self-defined brief in food supply and sale, as well as a critical examination of problem conceptualization and documentation practices.

Why My primary motivation in undertaking this project was to learn how to conduct systems design, and gain an understanding and skillset in design research methods in order to complement my social science quantitative and empirical practices - learning new ways of knowledge excavation. I wanted to further evolve a pressing problem that I recognized presents itself in one of the most ubiquitious and basic human activities of food shopping for which I had not yet found any “solutions”.

How I entered the minor with a modest pertinent skillset from previous coursework in systems dynamics {hierarchical task analysis, causal loop diagramming, and simulation}, systems thinking via systems mapping, futuring {scenario planning, evaluating forces of change, conducting causal layered analysis, and setting up experiential futures}, and empirical research methods {data collection and analysis, database management, and experimental design for social sciences}. In the minor we were introduced to using the camera as a research tool with an “Ideas, Artifacts, & Activities” method, and were led through a workshop on running a cultural probe for collecting inspirational data.

“It’s up to you” was the resounding tagline throughout our design journey. I resolved to building off the skills in my “toolbelt” and learning new methods along the way. Bella Martin and Bruce Hannington’s textbook cataloging 100 design research methods for understanding complex problems, developing innovative ideas, and designing effective solutions served as our main “toolbox”, while IDEO.org’s online Design Kit provided a phase-based roadmap for us to follow.

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01

Starting Off A design proposal is the starting point of concerted action for intervening in a problem space.

Developing a clear and complete understanding of the problem and formulating the problem space is indeed already the first step in starting off on our design journey.

Formulating the problem space excerpts reality contained in a certain frame and relies on many assumptions left implicitly. The design process will require the designer to test their assumptions and bring in new insights, thus continually better aligning the formulation of the problem space with its actual conditions in the real, and much more complex world.

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Identifying a Problem From prompt to the real world A unique challenge in our design journey was coming up with a self-defined brief for systems design research. Therefore we sought to tie together key words from our prompt with an initial moment of friction that sparked inquiry.

The friction between our actions and values would enable us to see a problem leading us to ask the question why that problem exists.

Key Words We kept some key words in mind to go from our prompt to finding an interesting problem to take on.

em t s y s con s

waste um eris

m

Searching During our active search we were surprised by the exessive amount of packing we found on produce across multiple supermarket chains, resulting in a lot of waste.

Initial Question We wanted to understand why supermarkets used so much plastic for produce packaging.

What is the relationship between food and packaging waste?

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Preliminary Investigation Site Visit #1: Milieu Straat We began our design journey with a preliminary investigation in order to refine our initially identified problem by asking ourselves Is this in fact a problem? and Is there more to what we’re seeing? This is the first step in defining the problem and situating it in its broader, systems context.

As waste was the undesirable outcome in the problem at hand, we first visited the municipal recycling facility at Milieu Straat in Eindhoven, NL. Our goal was to understand the product supply chain beyond consumption and assses the opportunities for plastic’s afterlife that might mitigate the issue of the exessive packaging we observed wrapping produce in supermarkets.

We learned that the city in fact maintained an advanced system of waste collection, filtration, and recycling. This somewhat mitigated the negative effects of the abundant packaging from produce and led us to shift our question to why so much plastic packaging is used in the first place, and if it is indeed necessary?

It is more environmentally beneficial to reduce production and use in the first place than to recycle.

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Preliminary Investigation Site Visit #2: Fris-Co Fruit & Vegetables BV We visited a produce distribution center outside Eindhoven where we met with Sandra, the founder and director, who gave us a tour of the facility, explained the operations, and sat down for an interview with us.

She pointed out the paradox that there is either food or packaging waste generated between when produce is picked and picked up by the customer in the supermarket setting.

This was a factor we had not previously considered and pointed us to realizing how much of supply chain operations are hidden from the customer and that customer demands of supermarkets to reduce plastic packaging is one sided.

Following from the interview with Sandra, we constructed a mind map of the various components of the produce supply chain leading to and from the distribution center.

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Problem Iteration Updating our question to address an ongoing problem

Initial question

What is the relationship between food and packaging waste?

Added considerations

Consumerism is ignorant of its complicity in the supply chain’s impacts. Why is the consumer ignorant of impacts from the supply chain? Why is there a disconnect between consumer choices and knowledge of their impacts? How can consumers become aware of their shopping choices’ impacts in order to improve their impacts?

Updated question

Why is there a disconnect between shopping choices in the supermarket and knowledge of their impacts?

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Solution Archaeology Digging deeper into earlier attemps to mitigate the problem Drawing from the wisdom of the Kees Dorst Frame Innovation method, where the first step of understanding the history of a problem leads to the second step of uncovering a paradox, we developed the belief that true problems can never be solved, only mitigated.

Problems tackled and resolved of the “problem solving� kind seem more like puzzles - resultative situations from numerous systems interacting in a way not desirable for the given problem owner in the situation. In such a case, the designer acts to untangle and better align the activities of stakeholders. Problems as we see them are descendants of wicked problems, scaled and bounded so that they seem more approachable.

The disconnect between shopping choices in supermarkets and knowledge of their impacts rampantly persists. In our solution archaeology we dug deeper to esablish who has addressed this or a very similar problem already and to note the strategies they used. What can we learn from them? What was ineffective? What else can be done?

True Price

Mission: True Price seeks to realize sustainable products and services that are affordable to all by enabling consumers to see and voluntarily pay the true price of products they buy. The roadmap vision paper is dated June 2019.

Objective: Compensate negative externalities (referred to as true costs) from production and consumption whose costs are not beared by those who contribute to them.

Screenshot: True Price Roadmap Vision Paper

Strategy: Sum the market cost of a product with the costs of reversing negative externalities from ie. carbon footprint, water pollution, or occupational accidents. The true price is expressed in the same monetary units to allow for comparison.

Photo: PHD Media, Manchester

Oatly

Mission: Make it easy for people to eat and drink without recklessly taxing the planet’s resources. First developed in 1994.

Objective: Provide a memorable, delicious tasting milk alternative with a significantly lower carbon footprint, paralleled with a transparent operations description and clear company environmental and social position.

Strategy: Stamp each carton with its carbon footprint (one of, if not the most promiment such product label across Dutch supermarkets), publish company values, explain rationale behind production choices, and maintain open communication channels with consumers.

Photo: Oatly.com

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Photo: Amanda McArthur, Sweety High

Tony’s Chocolonely

Mission: Started in 2005 in the Netherlands, Tony’s set itself the goal to become a 100% slavery free chocolate bar manufacturer and for all chocolate makers worldwide to share their vision.

Objectives: Tracking and improving across several factors including bars sold, kilos of cocoa beans purchased, farmers worked directly with, premium payments, child labor remediation at their partners, the Global Slavery Index, and carbon dioxide emissions, to name a few.

Photo: Grady Britton

Strategy: Online and in their annual report, Tony’s carefuly tracks and shares publicly their impacts and progress in a measurable way.

This sets a standard for transparency.

Their thick, delicious chocolate bars, colorful wrappers, surprising flavors, and memorable social mission make them a national favorite in the Netherlands.

Ton’ys furthers their mission with an annual carnival-style celebration and ongoing public education and engagement initiatives like a choco truck tour.

Swiss (brand) Chocolate Though not presented in a measurable and comparable format, Swiss Chocolate packaging depicts the distinct steps in the supply chain of getting chocolate from its source to the customer, showing the chocolate consumer how the bar got in their hand.

Starbucks A Starbucks branch in Amsterdam’s Overtoombuurt neighborhood contained a showcase of coffee bean sourcing, focusing on ethical sourcing, conservation efforts, sustainability, geography, and the inlfuence of different climates on flavor.

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Problem & Response Configuring our Proposal Proposal Function Updating our question and refocusing the problem was the first step in starting off our design journey. This is the step characteristic of a self-defined brief in which we ourselves choose the problem to address. Essentially, the proposal formulates the unsolved problem, restates it as a why question, attributes a plausible cause to the problem, and lays out a plan of action, based on knowledge of a history of past attempts, that we hypothesize can mitigate the problem. As we begin and continue to improve our understandsing of the depth and complexity of the problem we will update and refine our plan of action, or even altogether reject it.

Our Response The supermarket food shopping setting effectively functions as a flat interface, “take and pay� - a fiction of branding, marketing, and consumption habituation that disconnects consumers from the many impacts of their purchases. Reasoning that tactility and taste could better withstand the manipulation of the various interfaces of consumerism, the aim set for our design intervention is to reimagine the tactile environment in the transactional scene to trace and communicate the impacts from the complete supply chains of produce in order to shift consumption patterns.

Process Reflection An important note here is that the plan of action, what can be called the proposed solution, could alternatively be withheld at this stage until a more thorough understanding of the problem is developed. We chose to already include it for our own learning benefit of working to also intervene in the problem at the cost of being more certain that our intervention is the most effective one, given our short timeframe for the project.

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02

Setting Up The plan of action stated in our response to an unsolved problem that we identified requires clarification and structuring, in order to merge our design team’s understanding of the problem and priorities, ensure feasability of timely completion, integrate input from experts, identify our design strengths and research methods we will need to acquire, and effectively utilize resources based on our physical proximities and constraints.

The proposal allows us to measure our accomplishments with our intents, while the strategy serves as a roadmap outlining more specific, hierarchical and sequential subgoals, which all together comprise our final goal.

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Our Proposal Organizing the Design Process In short

Considering the waste from the complete produce supply chain as costs makes for a The information available for concrete way to measure impact, in terms of communicating consumer choice impacts is the environmental toll, with a direct insufficient for persuading consumers to relationship between cost and negative shift their choices. environmental impact. Elements such as energy use, packaging, ethical labor, and food One factor contributing to the disconnect is waste offer more comprehensive and specific lack of awareness/knowledge of purchase criteria for measuring impact, and thereby impacts. The system of food supply and sale bringing the sustainability perspective more encourages consumerism due to its wholly into consumption. The company True convenience and ease, but at the same time Price based in Amsterdam, NL has developed propagates disconnect between purchases a method for uncovering and consistently and impacts from “behind the scenes� communicating the costs for mitigating such operations. impacts (for which companies are currently not responsible), hidden from customers in We hypothesize that the tactile environment food purchasing settings. This, however, still can add richness to understanding impacts has shortcomings, as it perpetrates the that price elaborations or exclusively print damaging consumerist mindset that media cannot. everything is attainable with a price tag - a price to pay.

The mode of transactional exchanges establishes a logic that seems sustainable because as a system in itself it is sound.

Nutrition is one of the core necessities for sustaining life, a need facilitated in large part However, though we might always have monetary currency to spend, meanwhile by supermarkets. We restrict the food energy to use, materials to dig up, or people to domain to whole foods, seeing this as the exploit will run out or perish. We have to basis for all other food forms in a healthy think beyond the price tag. Branding, future, and focus on the produce food marketing, and consumption habituation category. Idealistically, an always ripe form a barrier of misunderstanding between produce item can be taken from its source the intentions and consequences of consumer (the ground, a tree, etc.) and used for activities. Furthermore, digital activism has preparing a meal. However, certain detrimental side effects in that it often pushes constraints introduced through the food companies to tackle issues superficially supply system such as timing (shelf life), instead of systemically. Though they have distances (transportation), and consumer become a convention, endless acquisitions hygienic standards form the reality of the journey of produce, which introduces waste. facilitated only by price tags are not This is one type of impact hidden behind the sustainable. Stores create environments that seem innate for products, as if they’d always shopping interface. been there and price tags fall short in telling the tale of impacts.

1.1 Research Domain

1.2 Research Question Formulation Tactile experience has the ability to inform and persuade consumers to shift their consumption patterns. For this reason, we seek to extend the “interface” of food shopping settings to involve tactile experience in the consumer decision making process in order to evolve the mentality of consumerism beyond paying a price or charity, as well as to consistently inform consumers of the real impacts of their shopping choices. Doing so, we ask: How can the ‘transactional scene’ of grocery stores and supermarkets be reimagined using the tactile environment to trace and communicate the impacts from the complete supply chains of produce in order to shift consumption patterns?

1.3 Motivation Our society is increasingly becoming rooted in our credit and spending, as consumers. Goodwill is being replaced by service economies, rooted in techstartups. The magnitude of other’s wanting what you have and that being demand drives the price value. So everything is attainable with a price tag.

But price tags desensitize to costs - what actually goes into making desires materialize? The processes are left out in constant demand-driven attentional bias to products - not just seen as the produce laid out in supermarket bins but understood as products that are the salient embodiments of an industry’s output from layerings of supply chain operations.

Commerce steadfast digitally morphing misses the opportunities tactile experience provides for informing and persuading consumers, and instead shifts our mechanisms of desire to operate and be acted upon in realities over which we have less control, awareness, and understanding. Finally, a significant portion of companies communicating their supply chains do so visually, through photos that accompany products either on websites or on packaging.

However, the uses and subjugation of certain imageries contributes to industries of dehumanization and pretenses of charity, while simultaneously perpetrating contemporary forms of colonialism.

1.4 Key Concepts Defined Shopping interface Combination of product access/proximity and exchange promises (ie. queues, opening hours, competitive architectures of product layout); the level of shopping where only what the customer can see and read in a store and on packaging is available Goods As in ‘goods’, a product; an acquired utility; an acquisition or a distributed resource Waste Material that subjectively no longer retains a functional value relative to some beneficiaryuser; condition of abandoning potential Transactional scene Product installation/display, browsing, comparing, selecting, carrying, “requesting”, paying, bagging, and taking; entails an atmosphere of socio-economic bonding; complete set of procedures

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Strategy Specifying the Plan of Action

We organized our plan of action according to the above model. In response to the prompt we were given, our strategy for shifting the food sale and distribution system in the Netherlands in order to reduce its negative climate impact is to enable consumer-driven system change. Our tactic is to introduce a new shopping interface that invovles counterinformative tactile experience, leading to shifts in supply and demand patterns. The tactic takes root in the existing system of consumption in order to shift it.

Our strategy outlines the activity we want to see come about in the world (in our defined context) via the tactic that outlines our own activity, or in other words, the actions we have to take to make it happen. We recognize that our activity, though, will take place in a process of co-evolution between Problem Space and Solution Space.

As we better understand the problem, with regards to complexity and depth, we will better see where and how to intervene, and as we eventually assess the impacts from our prototypes and smaller-scale intervenings, we will better understand the interconnections within the systems we are dealing with. We also acknowledge that we operate from a “Designing For” and not a “Designing With” model in this case.

activity #1

activitiy #2

activity #…

We will conduct research to expand our understanding of the problem, while making will evolve the Solution Space. As at the outset of our project, we can learn what works and what doesn’t based on what’s been done before. Because the “Solution”, outlined by the strategy, is informed by the Problem Space, we began our design journey with research into why the problem exists.

Our problem is the disconnect between shopping choices and knowledge of their impacts. We broke the problem at hand down into two sub-problems of in-store information gap and nonaction when the information is there. From this we established the following research priorities for understanding the sub-problems: • • • • •

quantity and quality (type, or kind) of available information supermarket layouts and environments (role of tactility?) food supply chain stages - the “backprocesses” emissions and waste tracking and reporting practices consumer information needs and criteria

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When we broke down our problem at hand concerning the disconnect into two sub-problems we realized that just as the given problem was composed of smaller (sub) problems, the given problem itself was most likely part of a bigger problem too. We called this the super-problem, borrowing the nomenclature from mathematical notation. This insight into problem composition formed the key connection to using systems thinking in how we approached our design challenge. In short, we would have to investigate both the details and the “bigger picture”. We would need to step out of our own subjectivity to find possibilities for how the interface can be reimagined. To find we need to look, and looking requires a focus.

“Looking requires a focus. We’re looking at interfaces, both to find out what lies at their forefront and what they reveal about the roles of produce supply chains in society.”

In order to implement the new interfaces first step from our strategy, we would need to combine our assessment of the transactional scene (its information and ignorance) with a functional understanding of tactility in food shopping built environments. However, in the context of the problem, in the Netherlands, there was no precedent for tactility in food shopping settings beyond the level of touch during selection at farmer markets and literature on tactile design.

“We’re stuck inside the problem. We don’t know how to get empathetic information because we don’t have access to it.”

Getting Out of Paradox The point of sale, the transactional scene where “supplying” turns to “supplied” consists primarily of an interface level interaction that separates consumers from the supply chains and therefore from the impacts of their shopping choices. In the Netherlands we found ourselves “stuck” inside the problem of only being able to interact with food supply and sale at the interface level during our research, whether at the supermarket or with administrative representatives of companies in the supply chains.

Our study exchange in the Radical Ecologies minor at Design Acadmy Eindhoven included an exchange-within-exchange at the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad, India. We looked at this trip as a double opportunity for both seeing the bigger picture and finding inspiration for tactility in food shopping settings. We could step outside the paradox of our problem space of trying to add depth to a flat shopping interface while being stuck in it.

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03

Inspiration Ahmedabad, India In India we got to delve into our super-problem by seeing the “bigger system� at play and engaging richer interfaces that communicate the backprocesses of the supply chains behind them.

From an analysis of our records we developed three different lenses that told three different stories about the food supply and sale system. This would inform the types of interventions we would later consider during the next phases of our design journey back in the Netherlands. During our trip, we also found thematic parallels for supply chain logistics that perpetuate the interface problem in the Netherlands.

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Camera as Research Tool Ethnography and Observation We understood the benefits and contributions of ethnography as a design method that would bring to life our system components understanding of the problem space acquired from descriptive, secondary sources. Video is a record of observation, which can reveal rich insights into a system that otherwise described only in a “top-down” model would not show, because video captures the interactions where the “human factor” is at work.

The bottom-up invesitgative model above afforded by ethnography illustrates the case when the focus of observation is activity, specifically human behavior. Activities, together with objects and ideas comprise the three foci of the camera used as a research tool. We sought a method to ground our inspiration in our observations in a traceable way.

We intially structured our work “in the field� into four steps: (1) discovery, (2) turning observations into data, (3) data organization, and (4) clustering data for analysis. By the third step where we grouped the insights from our data, we saw that similarities between insights could allow some groups to combine into broader themes, and thus the fifth step is (5) developing themes.

Step 1.

Step 2.

Step 3.

Step 4.

Step 5.

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1

During this part of our research journey we were participating in a study exchange together with students from the fourth year product design class at the National Institute of Design located in Ahmedabad, India: Govind Mohan, Yash Monde, Felix Müller, and Amal Teerthankar.

With their lead we visited a number of sites to conduct interviews and record our observations. We worked “in the field” for five days followed by two days in studio.

2

3

I reviewed all of our footage shot by shot, each which during filming was focused on a singular object/artifact, activity, or explanation of a concept/idea, and wrote down what I was looking at and focusing on in the shot in words. I organized the subsequent textual descriptions of observations by location, and for each location by sequence of our encounter. The reasoning was to find insights using textual analysis as well as from personal impressions while reviewing the footage.

I generated insights from the list of observations (highlighted in orange). The word “insight� came up a lot during our design journey so we decided to define what an insight means to us and outline our approach for generating insights. For this we consulted a number of design consultancy websites and design blogs, each laying out their perspectives that we then synthesized.

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How We Generate Insights Ethnographic research “a focused discipline of curiosity” explore: context, culture meanings, behaviors Observation: textual description of what was perceived via senses Insight: understanding a previously unrecognized causal relationship within a specific context Insight = observation

+

how & why underlying motivations

should envision an improved scenario that addresses gaps through pattern recognition

Steps to seeing the world differently: observation + prior knowledge + interpretation (of findings) + unmet needs

1. What suggests interrelated connections?

2. Why is this a pattern?

3. Why is this unexpected?

—————————————————— .:. Why is this meaningful?

Understanding —> (correction areas) superficial flawed limited in experience mundane not shared by others

Intervention product service environment organization system experience a form of communication

4

5

We looked at the insights all together and discussed how to group them. We rearranged the insights in a word document until each group seemed unified.

Finally, we gave each group of insights a name based on the theme we found unifying the insights. We then tried to express each of the themes as a story based on our research experiences.

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Themes

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Public View of Food Production The centralization or localization of food production and supply largely determines the size of the lens people have on food production by means of visibility and awareness. A centralized structure tends to designate commercial zones for confined food production as separate from the social activities coherent within an individual’s daily life, thus reinforcing individual mindsets towards food production as yet another “good manufacturing process”.

Photo: Felix Müler

Additionally, a system that promotes the visibility of only final products marginalizes the individuals involved in their production and transfigures them into the set of qualities that are massproducible, threatening with an imminent state of uselessness to come if the production falls below or outside the threshold of demands. At the same time, centralized structures did come into being as a means of efficient supply and distribution, which ultimately reduces many waste processes.

Localized structures strive in a relationship-at-large of direct contact and exchange, allowing for physical and/or psycho-cultural embedding of otherwise designated backprocesses into the familiar consciousness. Across the two polarities in structure of centralization and localization, the transactional scene stands as one of the permitted intersection points between public and private spheres of activity, even if one mediated by the supermarket, which makes it such a critical intervention point for empathetically widening the lens that people have on food supply chains and their societal, even trans-societal, impacts.

What is typically reserved as backprocesses of food supply in the Netherlands, was visible and embedded in the shopping interface of the markets of Ahmedabad. The APMC distribution center was just across the road at Jamalpur, where stock deliveries, unloading, inventory taking, and sorting all took place within sight and were publicly accessible. Suppliers and distributers were in close enough proximity to one another that they conducted their bidding in person at a designated auction space by the distribution center.

Photo: Felix MĂźler

Notably, almost all the work we observed in the markets and distribution centers was done manually with an absence of machinery, which indicates a tactile knowledge of food supply related processes.

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Photo: Felix Müler

Photo: Felix Müler

Customer-Seller Relationship A human system is built up of many human relationships. The interactions between customers and sellers at street markets and vendor carts emphasize this structure of the food supply and sale system, which is less apparent in a system built of transactional relationships between the individual and an organization. Trust came up as a key value of exchange in transactions in the many instances of cooperation between the seller and customer in selecting produce and filling up their bags for purchase.

Implicit guarantees of produce assortment freshness and quality overall emerged notably from individual sellers, not organizations, due to the fact that the analogous process of quality inspection at street carts and markets occurs immediately before or directly at the shopping interface level. Because of the order of these steps, there are different practices for ensuring and communicating freshness. “Fruits are best left loose, away from plastic wrap,� commented one customer at the Jamalpur street market, and this almost ubiquitous practice is often accompanied with the seller sprinkling water onto the produce throughout the day.

The customer-seller relationship is predicated upon individual trust and responsibility, and is sometimes even animated by an element of amicability and familiarity, seen in cases where sellers recognized their clients and already knew what they needed, and in turn customers having their trusted vendors that they exclusively go to. Trust seemed to come from familiarity having something around you instead of confined to one designated commercial space.

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Daily Activities The individual together with one’s individual needs, shopping patterns, cuisine cultures, budgets, and other priorities, becomes part of the supermarket transactional scene through the individual’s daily “food acquisition" activities. It was clear how the street markets were not a separate destination for many but rather part of where they were already going, or on the other hand a location part of a daily ritual of acquiring food for the household.

In the case of motorcyclists driving home, presumably from work, at the end of the day, the market was effectively meeting them, in a reversal of having to go to a separate destination for food needs - like a food shopping drive thru. A downside that emerged from the convenience of having a food shopping option on the way was that the customers didn’t have reusable bags with them, and were being handed instead a separate plastic bag with produce from each seller. It was also notable, that the majority of the single use bags were of plastic, not paper.

Illustration: Yash Monde

Looking at the food supply system through the lens of the individual reveals that habits related to food shopping and consumption stem from and also feed into the existing systems, so behavioral change is dependent on the shopping environment. If changing individual behavior can change demands then the supply chains would adapt as well, possibly reducing their negative impacts.

A great source of richness in the street market shopping interface is the tactility involved leading up to transaction. The customer picks directly from the stock on display, using sight first, and then tactile information next, assessing the produce’s skin thickness, firmness, and shape. The selected items are placed in a plastic bag that is weighed and paid for, while the rest of the produce is thrown back into the pile. To understand how such activity stems from and is a part of people’s daily activities, we shadowed one individual who lives in an oncampus house for university staff and family. She showed us the role of tomatoes in her kitchen and told us about her shopping habits related to preparing food for the household.

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Tomato Case Study While we were exploring possibilities for richer food shopping interfaces we turned to ask what backprocesses the interfaces brought to the forefront of transactions.

What activities and impacts from the supply chain should customers know about to inform their choices?

From our preliminary investigation in the Netherlands we already saw how centralized systems can be efficent in delivering well preserved produce to supermarkets, but this model creates a good deal of waste and benefits the supermarkets much more than the farmers. In India we looked for inspiration from another supply chain and distribution model that brings more value to farmers, has a smaller environmental impact, and still delivers fresh produce to customers.

Photo: Felix MĂźler

Photo: Felix Müler

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Photo: Felix Müler

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Photo: Felix Müler

Photo: Felix Müler

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Photo: Felix Müler

Photo: Felix Müler

Farms to Distribution Center

60 km Distribution Center to Stores

Most of the food going into and out of the APMC distribution center that we visited travels short distances. The farthest farm was 60 km from the center and the stores represent the farthest destination that the center sends food to - much of it goes to street vendors, some as close as right across the street. Another interesting finding from our study of the intermediary agents (“middlemen�) was about the role that tactility plays in facilitating food transactions. The traders gather in person and place their bids with a hand shake protocol.

Illustration: Yash Monde

Above: Traders gathered at auction Right: Table of sales recordings 65

“Waste no Waste” Artifact Analysis for Cultural Context Though trash is usually reflexively thrown or placed in a designated space, it is no doubt a cultural product, worthy of analysis as an artifact, even if one created without the deliberate intention of “creation”. Perhaps, this is a consequence of the paradox of the situation due to the mindset and point of view of disposal. In the act of throwing away, throwing out, we reject an object from our personal domain without keeping in mind that it continues to exist. We no longer think of the discared object in relation to ourselves, but rather as an indivisible chunk of a conglomerate mass we call waste.

Conscious of the fact that waste is an attribute relative to the point of view that assigns value to some product, we recognized in the street markets of Ahmedabad an assortment of products that have outlasted their most conspicuous uses and were repurposed in established upcycling channels, responsible for a degree of waste reduction. In one example, crates kept their structural properties in tact and were directly reused for subsequent deliveries, showing how product design for direct component reuse is an effective waste reduction practice.

Illustration: Yash Monde

This observation made us ask the fundamental question: when is waste “waste”? That is, when is the disposed item, no longer useful and therefore no longer desirable in one frame of functionality, relegated to a category beyond bounds?

The attitude in binary judgment of material and living objects as either useful or waste enforces a code of strict utility for all objects of ownership within the individual’s daily purview. This is a vicious attitude that lacks material thinking and needs to be mitigated with the set of considerations: reuse, reduce, recycle.

Reuse speaks to giving and extending objects new lives and therefore reducing the need for the production of new ones; reduce addresses the mentality of desire always growing or being hungry for something and instead reducing needs, which in turn demands lower production levels; recycle applies to the cycles of material, though no longer emotional, existence and endurance of objects that have been cast outside the paradigm of utility by its possessor and is susceptible to psychically commensurate physical transformations to come.

Photo: Felix Müler

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04

Digging In We began developing our systems understanding of our given problem with research into the super-problem first.

Using the camera as a research tool, we generated insights from our observations and interviews.

The three different stories gave breadth to the Problem Space.

Next we had to dig in to uncover depth.

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Problem Compass 1 Systems Mapping By looking at the super-problem through the three different lenses we developed based on our research with the camera, we were able to establish a systems understanding of our “disconnect” problem at hand. We were now faced with two parallel views of our problem: one of the superproblem on a macro scale and the other of the sub-problems on a micro scale, connected back to our research priorities laid out together with our strategy. We refrain from calling the super-problem the systems-level problem because we maintain that a system encompasses both the macro and micro interactions, and it is layered across scales.

In our proposal we hypothesized that designing for the tactitle environment in the transactional scene could expand consumers’ knowledge of their shopping impacts and influence their behavior.

Given our time frame for the project we identified the parts of our super-problem systems map that most closely relate to our proposal to dive into deeper. This expanded our research priorities to include: • • • • • • • •

quantity and quality (type, or kind) of available information supermarket layouts and environments (role of tactility?) food supply chain stages - the “backprocesses” emissions and waste tracking and reporting practices consumer information needs and criteria atittudes towards touch regarding desirability and hygienic standards price quality and oscillations role of locality/globality in food demands

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Adding Super to the Market Cultural Probe

Supermarkets and street markets are both destinations for the same activity, buying food, but they embody completely different transactional scenes. The difference in activity, layout, navigability, availabilities, selection, and energy are quite stark. What isn’t apparent in the two different scenes is the environemntal impact from the backprocesses and supply chains that lead to each destination for food. That is not to say that street markets are better than super markets, as we’ve heard arguments that centralization makes supermarkets actually more efficient, but their impacts are different. We wanted to engage the public and understand their impressions and beliefs based on the interfaces with which they interact.

We conducted a cultural probe where we embedded a supermarket style of produce display in a street market. In India, supermarket and street market goers are two very distinct consumer groups so we sought the responses and ideas that people who are only familiar with street market shopping had about plastic-wrapped tomato packages. As part of this probe we also conducted a frame juggling exercise to explore the conceptions people have about hand touch and machine touch.

“Artisinal” versus “mass-produced”.

Photo: Felix Müler

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Tomato Soup Tasting

Cultural Probe & Questionnaire We conducted a cultural probe to test two common conceptions: that pretty produce is better and that farmer markets are greener (more enviornmentally friendly). By inviting people to sample two different tomato soups, one made from pretty tomatoes bought at the supermarket and the other from bruised or damaged tomatoes bought at the farmer market, we sought to gain insight from asking:

does using prettier produce make the meal taste better than using bruised/damaged produce? and what are the environmental costs associated with produce bought in a supermarket compared with a farmer market?

We took “pretty” to mean shiny, uniformly plump produce, which often came already packaged. It is also important to note that we were conducting our research primarily in the city Einhoven in the Netherlands, where shopping at the farmer markets is cheaper than in supermarkets, unlike in the United States where the opposite tends to be the case. Because of food regulations, we couldn’t take our probe outside and thus our insights are limited to a small group of participants at our school. This probe serves as a functional model for how we could take the probe “into the field”.

Posters we set up around school to advertise our soup tasting event With this probe we wanted to debunk the two conceptions in order to determine the optimal supply chain. We constrained the criteria to minimizing price and waste, while maximizing taste. If either the supermarket or the farmer market dominated the other across all three criteria, the better performing model is clear. If one performed better than the other across one or two critera but not all three then we could understand the actual trade off that people face in buying food.

17

1hr 40min

participants

probe runtime

All responders considered themselves mobile

X

X

None of responders indicated a preference for GMOs

Most

X

X

responders prefer to pay by card

If cooking with pretty produce results in better tasting food, then there is indeed incentive in supplying pretty produce beyond customer expectations of what produce should look like, and if preservation and packaging waste resulted in less food waste on the customer’s end, then there is indeed value in its use that the “plastic wrap in the supermarket� criticism overlooks. It is commonly believed that the plastic wrap is added for presentability in the supermarket. In fact. the wrap serves an integral purpose often early on in the supply chain. This is the hidden trade-off between packaging waste and food waste we learned about during our visit to the distribution center in our preliminary investigation.

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Interface Tactility Picture Boards

Self-order Kiosk McDonalds, Eindhoven You used to have to queue at the cash register at McDonalds, which was at the front of the kitchen. You could see if the nuggets you ordered had been laying on the shelf for a while or if they were just brought out sizzling. You could smell the frying oil and see the basins from which the fries emerged.

Now, more and more locations use the clean, flat interfaces of kiosks that picture glossy, volumous food items and put limitless customization at your fingertips.

Nevermind that the back process is very different. After order submission, the experience very often goes from screen to screen to ding - kisok, phone, counter.

Ticket Machine Brussels Metro This machine struck me for its anachronistic features - the first one I saw that had a knob. The screen display seems of modern day, but thick glass separates the contents from the hand.

There is a credit card slot on the right while a coin slot on the left lets you experience the weight of currency and its dispensation gives physical cues of the exchange taking place: the weight in your palm lightens as a crisp, thick block of paper (the ticket) comes out.

Fashion Minimalism Organicbasics Website A website already exhibits a degree of minimalism, rendering all content in 2D, aligned on one plane. Minimalism also has its graphic cues: muted colors, limited color palette, photos of texture, relaxed transitions between colors.

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Vitrine Shopping Mall in Ahmedabad This vitrine shows how a product for sale can look like in context after purchase, which served as inspiration for showing the opposite: showing what the object looked like before it got to the store - connecting it to its roots or history of production.

Store Interfaces Various Transactional Scenes Isolated from the rest of the store environment and photographed “head-on”, these four store interfaces exemplify the interface quality of the store setting. For anyone familiar with this type of shopping, it immediately beckons an automatic set of response and interaction: scan the shelf, take an item, move on.

The saturation of color, abundance of stock, and rigid repetition of packaging reinforce the setting in its own right. In this view, the four store interfaces can be seen embodying an element of staging which reveals that there has indeed been an “invisible hand” involved here, as how the food meets us is very different from the conditions where it was produced. Finally, the differences in the interfaces demonstrate different transactional scenes, in terms of taste preferences and socio-economics.

Photo, top: Job Claassen, Welcome Mr. Mayfield Photo, second from top: Wuhan Market, NYT

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Meal Sharing with Friends Social Experiment

As a response to the more expensive and wasteproducing meal delivery options, together with two friends we conducted an informal social experiment: could three busy students with agreeable dietary preferences work out a system to make food for each other on a weekly basis?

We challenged ourselves to find a solution that is primarily offline and non-app, that simultaneously builds community and strengthens social bonds in relation to meal time. Additionally, we set a limit for each meal to cost 5 euros or less - half of the typical subscription service charge.

I kicked off the week with a vegan tikka masala. I use full fat coconut milk mixed with tomato purée on top of a generous sautée of finely chopped white onion and minced garlic. A heavy addition of spices, followed by chickpeas, lentils, carrot, and peas added in. Stir continually on med to high heat towards end of cooking. Serve on top of rice with oven toasted naan bread.

On the second day Yuvie made this amazing gluten-free broccoli lasagna served with a streak of Sriracha and freshly picked herbs from my porch sprinkled on top. Oh and a puff of paprika powder at the end.

On the third day the inspiration came from a recipe from a Chinese restaurant Ela worked at in Leipzig, with tapioca noodles in the starring role. The veggie side features edamame most prominently and green cabbage, but this can be replaced with Chinese cabbage or bokchoi. Roasted with sesame seeds and topped with homemade kimchi. Tofu optional but word of advice: you’ll never make enough of it. Served hot vegetables on cold noodles, these two components swerve together for the ideal, Friday night comfort food.

Eat good New hobbies Reduce waste Build friendships Start a movement We looked for recipes together and made a weekly meal list in G-drive Excel. At first we wanted to track the total costs and divide them among each of us evenly, but decided instead not to track costs and cook the best we can within our budget.

All our activities in meal sharing had a 0-crabon footprint, except for using the G-drive. We couldn’t find an alternative for planning our meals to reach 0, as any tool would have been part of a chain of production with emissions. Otherwise, we only used heat and water.

We ate entirely vegetarian and gluten-free. All our ingredients were either produce or pantry items. We bought most of our ingredients at the weekly farmers market which we biked to and where there was no packaging, occassionally added our apartment-grown herbs, and deposited all unused food bits into a compost pile. Our pantry items were mostly in glass jars, which we reused for food storage or brought to our school’s supply drop-off. We recyled metal cans separately.

We ended up continuing making food for each other for the rest of our exchange semester. Our hope was for our meal sharing group to serve as a model for a DIY online starter kit for making and sharing meals at under 5 euros per serving.

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Tracking Touch Customer Journey

Mapping touch in a customer’s shopping trip seemed like an interesting research endeavor that could lead to unanticipated findings and uncover hidden patterns or links. The y-axis charts a range of either surfaces (hard to soft) or temperature (hot to cold). The x-axis marks total time spent in the supermarket up until any given point and also measures selection time for each product, end-marked by a gap in touching while the customer navigates to the next product or product category. We hoped to shed light on the sensory experience of food shopping this way.

A goal that followed all our individual activity focused interventions is behavioral change, which we categorized according to two functions:

v —> V

Reinforcing positive behavior

x —> v

Behavioral change

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Problem Compass 2 Problem Space Matrix As we investigated deeper into the macro and micro components of our “disconnect” problem and developed three different lenses for looking at it, we recognized additional ways of looking at the problem. We believed giving the viewpoints a distinguishing as well as coherent structure would enable us to intervene more strategically and effectively. The three themes became three filters, or lenses, for seeing where the problem exists. People’s View on Food Production became the lens looking at (1) All Humans; Customer-Seller Relationship became the lens looking at (2) Human to Human; and Daily Activities became the lens looking at the (3) Individual.

Just as every problem has a history leading to it, every problem has a future ahead of it. This nature of problems is overlooked in a problem-solving mentality. Our considerations of incorporating futuring and transition design in our approach led us to acknowledge the fuller scope of the issues we were tackling. We divided our Problem Space based on temporal proximities to the present - immediate, impending, and distant futures. This allowed us to situate our intervention in the problem, in terms of both system and timeframe: we know where we are and when we are.

“Don’t just plug in the holes. Address the problem in its broader systems context.”

Systems-thinking allowed us to map the problem within the super-problem, its bigger context, and is visualized on a systems map where we connected various themes. Using the map, we then dug deeper into the various sub-problems using a number of design research methods.

Through ethnography and interviews we developed three themes that we turned into three lenses for looking at the components of our systems map. Futures-thinking allowed us to expand our view of the problem by adding temporal distance to our consideration - different stages of immediacy. We sought a visualization technique for combining the systems view with the temporal view according to the three lenses - three perspectives for seeing how the problem evolves - to locate our invovlement in the Problem Space.

We visualized the problem space using the metaphor of a cube with three axes, each bounded for practical purposes. The x-axis contains the lenses. The y-axis contains the temporal proximities.

The z-axis is the scale of the issue, or in other words, where we are on the systems map: zoomed into a specific problem, looking at one of the component problems, or in map-view, which correspond respectively to micro, singular, and macro. Engaging the problem using this model as a guide would help ensure that our intervention would not just mitigate the detectable symptoms of the problem, but shift the system altogether. This was the final outcome in our systems design journey for a self-defined brief.

Table of Our Involvement

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05

Looking Back Having built an understanding of the Problem Space, we could now act in the Solution Space by systematically developing prototypes and deploying them for impact assessment. Our proposal was to reimagine the tactile environment in the transactional scene. The next step on the path to reimagining was to probe plausibilities with our prototypes.

Timing constraints due to the semester ending, and with it our time in the Netherlands, cut off our project inconclusively. Our design journey thus far comprised of learning and deploying research methods, and developing our own approaches to systems design.

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Process Documentation What are we documenting and why?

We documented our various activities in our design journey with the aim of rooting our findings, such that when we make assertion x about the condition of the problem, it is because of research method y, which we chose to conduct because of previous finding z.

Our strategy that we laid out together with our proposal outlined a sequence of events that we believed would mitigate the given problem, but the execution of that sequence depended on our research outcomes so that we are responding to the problem in the complexity within which it exists, and not how we conceive of it in our minds. So our ideas for our intervention became better informed with each outcome of our research activity. Therefore, we describe our process as outcome aggregating and integrating.

We tried to picture what our process would look like with such a mechanism, in order to devise a documentation system that would best capture our work. For this, we considered the building blocks of our process: we had an intention (implement new interfaces) and a desired accomplishment (shift in consumer demands). We had a time frame, within which our activity would consist of developing our understanding of either the Problem Space or the Solution Space - researching or making. Some of our activities would bring us closer to the goal and some would take us in a different direction, farther from it. Our activities would take time, so they would be the legs of our design journey, and the outcome of each would be a decision juncture as to how to next proceed.

Because we were learning how to navigate the design process just as much as we were learning about the subject of our inquiry, our actual process looked or felt much more like a jumble before later in retrospect we were able to look at what we did and uncover the sequential and structured nature that binded our steps, and then present it as such.

Classifying Our Activity Recognizing our Agency The activities of researching and making have definite time durations, while our other two activities of understanding and deciding are more difficult to pinpoint in time, but as we have described, had necessary role in the process - the junctures that held together the legs. In our reflection, we wanted to better define these two activities.

Researching and making

are both forms of synthesis, of concept and product distinction.

Researching evolves the conceptualization of something and making embodies the concepts at various scales.

Understanding and deciding

are both forms of prioritization, making salient the mechanics behind something in order of influence and choosing courses of action over other options, based on what we believe will most likely lead to our goal.

In conducting research into and designing for a system, we had to ask ourselves of our own position within the system. We asked this question with the consideration of viewpoint, since we could be looking (and working) from the top down or from the bottom up. This had a direct relationship with choosing our research approaches. “Leading with the camera� and cultural probe elicitations comprised a bottom-up approach, while literature reviews and consultancy/industry reports belonged to the top-down category. This is comparable to using primary versus secondary sources, but with our distinction we are more specific about the implications of each approach. We started with anapproximate framework of our problem and subsequently supplemented and developed a nuanced model. Through our research, we aimed to weave together bottom-up and top-down investigative approaches.

As we contended with the role of storytelling in relaying our design journey as a process of knowledge gathering, management, and design decision making, it became clear that documentation required designing of its own.

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Outcomes & Research Design Theorizing In our refelction, we asked ourselves what is an outcome? The word seemed to have a different meaning as a research outcome compared with a making outcome. But, upon analyzing both, an outcome seemed to mean a change in someone’s perception or behavior. An outcome of research changed perceptions of the problem, in terms of expanding or clarifying someone’s causal structures associated with a phenomenon.

An outcome of making changed behavior in response to a change of givens pertaining to an activity that person had engaged in before. We were also interested in whether an outcome was something we created (through either a research or making method) or if it was rather a fact we merely uncovered. If it is something that we brought into existence, then what form does the outcome take? If an outcome is something we uncovered then that seems to indicate our work consists to a larger degree than expected of “shedding light” and directed people’s attention. It formed an interesting connection for us between design activity and argument or persuasion.

We also extended a line of inquiry into how research leads to understanding of a problem. We cited several research methods that we claimed helped us better understand our Problem Space. Was improved understanding the result of an accumulation of research outcomes, which brings us back to our previous question? Is there even such a distinction between the activity of “carrying out” a research method and its outcome(s), or perhaps is there already something gained in the doing? We weren’t able to find an answer to this question either, but we did find that research informed us of hidden causal relationships, encapsulated in “insights”. This would allow us to more accurately anticipate the impacts of our intervention and plan our course of activity accordingly. Research is building a conceptual model of actions and interactions, both causal and instigative, at a scale of the world within which we can measure our actions.

Systems Design Understanding the Problem Space In previous sections of this book we’ve already discussed systems design to some degree: every problem can be described by its super-problem and sub-problems and is therefore a systems problem. Mapping systems and incorporating time frames in which the problem exists and evolves helped in orienting ourselves in the problem space to navigate our design process. The point has been that systems design is essentially about how we conceptualize and approach a given problem. Understanding the space of the problem therefore helps to develop a better understanding of systems design itself.

At the very beginning of our design journey we inferred a problem from some initial realization of friction. This is where overlapping systems interact in a suboptimal way to some desired benefit of some individual.

realization of friction

immediate context

systems understanding

All the systems perspectives converge on the tangibles and the realization of friction takes place while acting in a problem space that exists physically in the world. Therefore, our conceptualization of the problem needs to be shaped by informedness, which comes from research. The work of the systems designer in some ways seems like an act of rewiring rearranging the threads of interconnectedness. The need for framing in design in this case means choosing which sets of interconnections we look at and act upon. Because every problem is an opportunity, there is symmetry between the Problem and Solution Spaces.

Or maybe no such spaces exist and it is more productive to look at how systems converge during certain interactions and register as a problem in someone’s mind.

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MetaMethods Developing our own Approach Meta Methods is a proposal for the system design approach we developed based on the two main recurring themes from our process of iteration and tackling complexity in different hierarchies of context and interdependancy. It also brings together and unifies two distinct, complementary modes of thinking and making.

The approach primarily consists of process management in a way that ensures being thorough, rigorous, sufficient, and potent. Rigor is intended to open our process and outcomes to pointed scrutiny and engagement with the system through the product, rather than presenting just a stand alone product that conceals the process behind it. As an analogy, if presenting a product alone is like a webpage as it appears on a screen, superficial in the core sense of the word, then we propose to present the code/encoding so it is clear what sequence of inputs (steps from the design process) result in what appears in the final deliverable, this way opening up our deliverable to further iteration, improvement, and continuation in a way that uses our research and work process as an immediate launching point. The goal is to structure and document the design process like open-sourcing, so that other designers don’t have to “reinvent the wheel” each time they approach a similar design problem. We hope to pave a way to more global and bigger team collaboration, much like our design journey, to prioritize effecting meaningful change in the world over individual claims to design excellence.

In some cases we anticipate that sequential or serial innovation is inferior to integrated innovation. When the the trajectory set up by some preceding design process is suboptimal, then building on top of a weak foundation, so to describe, can only lead to so much improvement, whereas integrated innovation dismantles the sum of the preceding steps and leads into an altogether different trajectory based on a new, reoriented set of assumptions. To make an analogy, why work on Version 10.2.1 to make it 10.2.2, if you could go directly back to Version 10.0.5 because there was something someone overlooked, or if the conditions of the present world are such that make the old innovation retarding now. Maybe the supermarket was a good idea when it came out and it addressed and solved people’s needs in that historic context, and so we’ve continued in that direction, but maybe it’s better to start over altogether, differently. Our system of innovation should allow us to be able to do so.

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