Meet the Food You Eat
Meet the Food You Eat
Meet the Food You Eat uses the metaphor of a mechanical kitchen scale to measure a food product’s environmental impact. It looks at the carbon emitted as a result of transporting the food and displays this in terms of how many trees would be required to offset that carbon over one year. The working physical prototype (built with Arduino, RFID and a hacked digital scale) also addresses the future of grocery shopping and product sustainability in a world of networked objects.
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How it works
The scale works by looking at the carbon emitted by transporting a particular product from it’s country of origin to Denmark. Place an RFID tagged food product on the appropriate arm and try to balance the scale with the tree shaped weights. The amount of trees used to balance the scale represents the number of actual trees it would take to offset that product’s carbon emissions over one year. Compare different countries or methods of transportation by swapping food items on the scale.
Background
Meet the Food You Eat was created during the four week Tangible User Interface course taught by Heather Martin at CIID. Given the theme, networking the everyday, my teammates and I were interested in how people could make more informed decisions in their daily routines when everyday objects were networked to the internet.
Drawing on various resources and inspirations related to TUI, networked objects and personal informatics, we chose to use weight as a metaphor for interacting with data around the context of product sustainability.
Just-enough-prototyping was the key learning from this project. Using the scale as a metaphor proved to be tricky as people’s mental models differed more than we anticipated. We also needed a strong visual symbol that would communicate a product’s environmental impact. Placing various cardboard prototypes in front of our classmates helped us solve many problems before we started building the final prototype.
Team members
Eilidh Dickson
Siddharth Muthyala
Personal contribution
Conceptual development, research on carbon emissions, electronic prototyping, programming
Honors
Invited to exhibit at NEXT Exhibition/Conference in Arhus, Denmark
Invited to participate in the Pervasive Shopping Workshop at Pervasive 2009 in Nara, Japan
Demo of working prototype
Prototyping montage edited by Eilidh Dickson