Creating visibility: understanding the design space for food waste

Abstract

Support for ecological sustainability is of growing interest and the over-consumption, production and disposal of foods are a major concern for sustainability, ethics and the economy. However, there is a deficit in current understandings of how technologies could be used within this area. In this paper we focus on food waste and report on a qualitative study to understand daily food practices around shopping planning, gardening, storing, cooking and throwing away food, and their relations to waste. The findings point to design-relevant factors such as losing sight and reordering; spatial, temporal and social constraints; trust and valuing food source; and busyness, unpredictability and effort. The main contribution of this paper is to understand food practices and in turn to present seven dimensions of visibility to draw out implications for designing mobile and ubiquitous technologies for this new arena for design. We also present a prototype evolving from our qualitative results, the mobile food waste diary.