A Design Journey to Create a New Experience at the Edmonton Food Bank
By: Ravin Perera
Tags: UX Design, UX Research, Design Process, Service Design

During this time of self isolation, I decided to do some self reflection which meant taking a look at my old design projects that I had worked on. I came across this wonderful project where I had documented our work in a blog, but did not do a good job in telling a story. Therefore, I thought I would do it justice by rewriting it here on Medium today.

Without further ado let’s jump into it!

This project was done for a design class at the University of Alberta known as Integrative Media and Health Design, instructed by the wonderful Ben King.

What does it mean to be healthy?

After class introductions and the project briefing, each student in the class was asked to describe what being healthy meant to them. There were obvious answers like being free of diseases, or going to the gym, but there were also interesting answers such as not having limitations. This was eye opening as it made me realize that I was answering this question based on my experience, and perspective on being healthy.

Next, we were asked to find one umbrella topic regarding health, to work on for the next 3 weeks. Each person was asked to think of a health issue that Canadians face, and the answers were as follows:

Health prevention such as vaccinations

Physical and mental health issues related to natural disasters (based on the recent Fort McMurray forest fire)

Food sustainability

Food security and food accessibility

Air pollution

Obesity and heart diseases

Health education

Active transport

Given a range of topics, we created categories to find links between the topics. We managed to create four categories; physical activity, mental health, disaster relief, and nutrition.

The class had a majority vote and decided on physical activity as our umbrella topic.

Group Up!

The next day started off with the class having to create four groups to tackle a topic for the next two and a half weeks.

Time management

Mental health

Facility access

Nutrition

The group that I joined was the “facility access” group which consisted of Hannah Mousek, Fatme Elkadry, Zhiying Zheng, and myself Ravin Perera.

Once we had introduced ourselves to each other in the group, we started to list down our interests. We decided to do some secondary research in to these areas and reconvene the next day.

Surprisingly, all of had done some research in accessibility, and obesity. I did research on childhood obesity, and the other group members also had touched on this topic. This clearly was a important issue we felt strongly about, so we decided to concentrate our forces on childhood obesity and access.

Themes

After discussing and reviewing our research, we came across some major themes regarding childhood obesity and access:

Pregnancy and preconception

Childhood obesity in rural areas vs. urban areas

Prevalence of childhood obesity in low income families

Environmental influences on childhood obesity

Mental health related to childhood obesity

Measurement of childhood obesity

Mind Map

As a next step, we decided to create a mind map around childhood obesity, and find the links between these themes.

We highlighted some major themes, which we defined by the number of links they contained.

And then we did individual mind maps for each of those themes.

The main takeaway from this mind map was that we found out that childhood obesity was prevalent in low income families, because they have limited accessibility (physical, mental, and social) to resources compared to a family above the upper income scale.

Next, we presented our findings to our instructor, and received some useful feedback.

Think of alternatives.

Define what you mean by low income families.

Question concepts such as BMI, and see if that is still a valid standard of measuring obesity.

Who are we designing for?

Talk to a family.

Reflecting on the feedback, we decided to come up with some possible solutions related to childhood obesity in low income families.

Design Sprint

We started with the the same design sprint as we did last week. We folded a paper into 8 sections and drew/wrote 8 possible solutions in 4 minutes. Then we took a similar paper, and built on those ideas for 3 minutes.

After this session, we began a brainstorming session where we spent 2 minutes to come up with quick solutions.

After pasting the stickies on the board, we began to categorize solutions under general themes.

The popular themes were Physical Activity, Nutrition, Education, & Transportation.

Keeping these solutions in mind, we decided to come back with two storyboards each.

Another Planning Session

We started off the day by laying out each group members story boards.

The storyboards dealt with issues like food accessibility and awareness of public parks for physical activity.

Collaboration

The class task for the day was to team up with a group and explain to each others design challenge. Our group went first, and we used the board to visualize our problem. The other group gave advice on possible solutions and stakeholders that we should consider.

The major themes that came out of this session was food insecurity, nutrition and food deserts.

Field Research

As the deadline was getting closer, we decided to begin our primary research. As a group, we listed the places to visit that dealt with physical activity, food insecurity, nutrition and food deserts. We decided to visit John Janzen, H&W Produce, Edmonton Food Bank, and a Public Recreational Center.

John Janzen

This is a recreational facility for kids, and it works as an educational experience to educate kids about nature and the importance of it. We decided to check it out, as it was related to children and physical activity. We also wanted to observe if it was accessible for children in low income families, and get an idea of the demographic.

What we observed was that it isn’t a very big facility, but he has many great programs for kids. We found out that it was a popular field trip choice for many schools. The location is quite accessible with a public transit stop right inside the park. The one issue that we found out with accessibility for low income families, was the entrance fee. John Janzen costs $7/adult, and $7 for a child. That is quite a price to pay for a low income family, with addition to public transportation costs.

The Kinsmen

Next stop was the Kinsmen sports center. This was a very popular place for athletes and schools.

In our exploration, we found out that the City of Edmonton provides free access to people of low income. How this low income was considered was through a tax bracket. The application form required to register for this free service was overwhelming, with many questions to fill in.

Edmonton Food Bank

This was the most eye opening part of our field trip. At first, this place was very intimidating, as I had never had to deal with the food bank. I did not know what to expect, and I felt like I was not the only one with this perception.

When we entered the food bank, we were greeted at the reception, and we were immediately set up with a tour from a kind man named Walter Dong. Regardless of the chaotic and busy nature of the food bank, Walter was excited to hear about our project, and with a smile, we were given a personal tour of the warehouse.

The box in the picture above is the standard box (hamper) that is given to a client. Each box weighs over 35lbs, and the boxes increase based on family size. We realized that this was an issue in terms of transportation for a user group that can’t afford vehicles.

During the time of this project, the city of Fort McMurry was being evacuated due to a devastating wildfire. Walter explained to us about the increase in the number of food bank users due to the fires. This increase in volume was putting extra pressure and demand on the place which was receiving no government funding.

H&W Produce

This was our final stop. H&W Produce is a grocery store that only sells produce and other nutritious items. They sell local goods that may be perceived as “going bad” at a significantly cheaper rate. This was an interesting place for us, as it deals directly with food security and food accessibility.

Reviewing our Findings

Upon reviewing our findings from the field trip, we realized that the Edmonton Food Bank, was the area that had the most opportunity for design intervention, and directly dealt with the user group that we were interested in.

Therefore we started to list the possible problems that we observed, and two main themes were accessibility of transport, and education of clients.

Issues related to education were as follows:

How do you know when the food goes bad?

How do you know what food is good for you?

Do visitors know how to prepare the food?

Do visitors know how to budget?

How do you know the appropriate portion size?

Transportation related issues were:

How do visitors get to the food bank?

How do visitors transport their food boxes?

Back to the Food Bank

With these questions in mind, we decided that we needed to go back to the food bank and get the clients perspective on some of the questions. We prepared some questions and a card sorting method to find out different depths of information.

Went back to the food bank and ask some of the questions from Walter. He cleared up many of the assumptions such as transportation, and preparation of food. Many clients have a carpool system that they share to transport their food. The food bank adds in quick recipes in the boxes for users to prepare at home.

We asked Walter if it was possible to interview some of the clients at the food bank. Due to privacy reasons and invasive nature of the questions, Walter advised us not to. Although, he did provided us with another alternative which was the opportunity to shadow the employees at the call center, and to shadow an employee who conducts the required interview for new food bank users.

We gathered some great observations.

We observed that many of the people who use the food bank also unpacked the big boxes into donated shopping bags. These shopping bags were their tool of carrying their groceries home.

were their tool of carrying their groceries home. One of the people interviewed was a evacuee from Fort McMurray, and after the interview was done, she was asked to take a seat in the waiting area until her food box was ready. She said she felt very uncomfortable in the waiting room, and asked if she could drive somewhere and come back later. she was advised not to do that as they have no way of reaching her, so she took her seat in the waiting area with disappointment.

We discussed our findings, and with the help of our instructor Ben, brainstormed quick possible solution and an area of focus.

This helped narrow our area down to the waiting room of the food bank. The decision was largely influenced by the experience of the Fort McMurray evacuee we witnessed.