DALI Application Challenges 2022
Designer Challenges 🎨
Below you’ll find this term’s design challenge. Show your notes, thoughts, sketches, and research that you created along the way.
- Your work should reflect your creativity, craft, and critical thinking.
- Think about unique ways to bring personality to your work.
- These experiences must have a digital component to the solution — but don’t necessarily have to be only digital in nature.
Eating at college is hard. Already busy students also have a range of dietary and nutrition needs, from those that are fulfilled by college dining services to those that are not. Design an experience that encourages students to consistently eat in a healthy and satisfying way.
Part 1: UX | Suggested 4 hours
Choose whatever medium you prefer.
Since I have never been to Hanover, New Hampshire before and I didn’t really conduct surveys for investigation, most of the information comes from the Internet and some answers are just the assumptions, but here are the sources of the information:
- Wikipedia
- Websites of Dartmouth dining
- Youtube
1. Define. What is the problem? Who are the users?
Before tackling this design challenge, we need to define the following questions and problems:
Who are the users?
For this challenge, I presume that the users are the students at Dartmouth who eat mainly at the dining facilities every day on campus.
What is a healthy diet?
According to World Health Organization, the following five recommendations with respect to both populations and individuals:
- Maintain a healthy weight by eating roughly the same number of calories that your body is using.
- Here’s the proportion of a balanced diet
- According to the suggestions from WHO, people should:
a) Limit intake of fats. No more than 30% of the total calories should come from fats. Prefer unsaturated fats to saturated fats. Avoid trans fats.
b) Eat at least 400 grams of fruits and vegetables per day (potatoes, sweet potatoes, cassava, and other starchy roots do not count). A healthy diet also contains legumes (e.g. lentils, beans), whole grains and nuts.
c) Limit the intake of simple sugars to less than 10% of calories.
d) Limit salt/sodium from all sources and ensure that salt is iodized. Less than 5 grams of salt per day can reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease.
Why is healthy eating at college hard?
According to information online and my speculation, I think the followings are the main reasons:
- It’s difficult to measure the daily nutrition in real life. They might know the dietary theory and what to eat in textbooks, but they don’t track their intakes in reality.
- Students have little idea about the composition of the food they eat. A lot of food they consume is “empty calories,” e.g. cakes, biscuits, donuts, muffins, and more.
- The lack of time in students’ lives causes difficulty in healthy eating. Students don’t have the time and patience to prepare healthy food. They prefer a certain style of food when they are busy.
- Also, students eat snacks when they are mentally stressed.
In addition, I found this interesting video which talks about the price and both the quantity and the quality of food will affect students’ dietary decision. In the other words, the management team of Dartmouth dining and the menu play a critical role in student’s health.
How do you make people have a satisfying eating experience?
- plentiful food combinations
- tasty food
- affordable price
- accessible
Options people have at Dartmouth on campus
- THE CLASS OF 1953 COMMONS
- COLLIS CAFE
- COLLIS MARKET
- COURTYARD CAFÉ
- THE FERN COFFEE & TEA BAR
- CAFÉ AT BAKER
- NOVACK CAFÉ
- RAMEKIN
- BRACE COMMONS SNACKBAR
- GOLDSTEIN SNACKBAR
- HOUSE CENTER B SNACKBAR
2. Discover. What do they need? What are the constraints?
Needs:
- A system to suggest to students what they need to eat
- A system to provide healthy food plans with plentiful combinations
- Students need to know where can they get the healthy food
- A system to track what the students eat
- The system needs to be portable and accessible
Constraints:
- People have different lifestyles and eating habits
- People can’t stand one boring but healthy diet plan for a long time
- People don’t have the same budget for meals
- It’s difficult to ask students to stick to the food plan rigorously
3. Brainstorm. Generate features that you think would solve the problem, list them out in a prioritized order, and state why.
Here I would like to try reverse brainstorming for this challenge.
In short, I think there are several approaches to solve the challenge in this two perspectives:
A) Dining service and menu
- serve cheaper healthy food (by rewarding dining dollars back)
- make empty calories and snacks more expensive
- provide more food combinations
- make healthy food more appealing
- reduce the serving size
- super clear nutritional labeling
In terms of business strategy, I think rewarding dining dollars is a good way to benefit both the dinner provider and students. First, restaurants don’t really have to cut the price to abstract more customers. Instead, they can use points as rewards just like coupons. More coupon means that there could be more chances for students to eat at the restaurants. Second, the students can have lower prices to access healthy food if they follow a recommended diet.
B) A dietary solution for better dietary tracking and rewarding of healthy eating
- integrates the dining payment with a rewarding system. If students eat healthy food or order a nutrient-dense food combo, the system will reward the user with some dining points (or DBA) back to have some food discount in the future. With dining points, students can get an even lower price on healthy food, which encourages them to eat healthily.
- the solution can also calculate how many calories the users take, what nutrition they still need, and even provide some food planning suggestions.
- provide a dietary analysis with a summary report of the user’s intakes to help them improve their eating habits.
- 1–3 mins read, videos, or tips for nutrition education. Everyone needs to know the fundamental knowledge of nutrition.
- this solution should be a mobile app
For this challenge, improving dining service and the serving menu is out of the scope. Thus, I will only focus on designing the dietary solution.
4. Sketch. Draw (by hand, on paper) 3–4 screens to demonstrate the solution, showing your revisions.
Below are some of the wireframes that I came up with according to the analysis above.
5. Annotate. Explain the rationale behind your design choices, features, and overall flow.
Here I made a user flow of this dietary solution. In short, this app integrates users’ eating habits and food planning from payment data. With payment details, the system can analyze users’ eating habits and recommend food planning and knowledge. Also, the system will reward the user with dining points, which can be used for payment, back if they choose healthy food. These can provide positive feedback and encourage people to eat healthily.
DartEat— overview (home)
Food planning — browse & pick
Nutrition 101 — nutrition knowledge
Diary — An analysis of user’s diet
Part 2: UI | Suggested 4 hours
To be completed digitally, in Figma (http://figma.com, it’s free). Follow a few online tutorials to get familiar with it, if it’s new to you.
Hi-Fi. Complete a high-fidelity mockup of your solution.
- Recreate your sketches in Figma, while considering ways to purposefully depart from your hand sketches and strengthen your solution.
- Select appropriate colors, fonts, spacing and layout, and photos/icons such that your work looks like a final product.
- Though the prompt is Dartmouth related, do not feel like you must stick with a green color scheme. Choose whichever color palette you feel is best!
For UI design please check the Figma link below👇
https://www.figma.com/file/8Q5rgIaWG7B0J82ukfE1EP/DALI-design-challenge?node-id=9%3A31
Part 3: Design Samples
Please submit an additional 2–4 design samples from any of your previous work.
- These samples can be anything creative (e.g. website/app design, logo design, poster/print design, 3d modeling, animation, drawing/painting, wood, sculpture).
- Title each with a date, medium, and short description of your process and involvement in creation.
- If the work you’re submitting was done collaboratively, please highlight which parts you were personally responsible for.
Dribbble
Behance
Generative Art
Research and Sources：
