食物遇见你（Meal Meet Mate）

Meal Meet Mate is one of the service design professional projects of the London University of the Arts (UAL-LCC). This project is a non-profit organization cooperation (AgeUK) in the Autonomous District of Lambeth, London. Through 5 months of research and design evolution, it solves the life problems of the elderly after retirement, such as loneliness, lack of financial resources, sense of crisis, and difficulty adapting High-tech life, etc. This social innovation service experience design project aims to use people-oriented design ideas to discover that food is the main medium and cooperate with local public welfare restaurants to provide a series of activities for the elderly and young people to communicate together. It is divided into online and offline platforms. At the same time, it greatly improves the resilience and adaptability of the elderly to retirement life.

Content overview

Service Design & Web Design & Space Design

Participants

AgeUK

Date

2019/09-2020/01

How can we encourage people to share culture and experience across generations in their lives?

In mid-2014, the median age of the British population exceeded 40 for the first time, which was higher than 33.9 in 1974. It is predicted that the elderly population will continue to increase in the next 20 years, but the young population will not change much.

The elderly should be underdeveloped renewable human resources. In London, a developed international city, many elderly people are facing retirement or already retired. Some of them are happy to have free time, and some are worried about the imminent change in the focus of their lives or the cut-off of their financial resources.

There are also some elderly people who have entered the retirement life with their own small circle of life but are eager to further enrich their retirement life or have more communication with young people.

In order to better discover problems and propose solutions, our 4-person design team (service designers with different backgrounds) tried to find a way to improve the elderly’s adaptability to the elderly’s life and help them achieve more society. value.

Methodology

As part of a multidisciplinary team, we work with multiple stakeholder teams to ensure that design and business needs are met. We mainly use the Double Diamond method. It consists of four parts: Discover, Define, Develop and Deliver (Design Council, 2015) throughout the entire design process.

In the first three months, I constantly discover and define pain points and opportunities by immersing in the environment. I have in-depth product design and user research, weekly meetings with team members, and usability testing of prototypes to ensure that the suggestions we provide are ideal for existing users and potential users, financially and technically The feasibility. I led the interactive content of the 2 workshops, and its portal website covers interactive design and brand visual orientation. I work with team members on research activities to determine user portraits and storyboards. Finally, discuss the discovered problems together, put forward ideas and reach an agreement on the solution for the next iteration.

Workshop

Insight: Melting into different age groups can make older people more flexible throughout their lives, and can help young people and older people redefine themselves.

In order to find out which skills/knowledge of the younger generation and the older generation are ready to exchange, we created and conducted 4 workshops. We think this will help us find "lines" (matching conditions) that can bring people of different ages together. In the workshop, we divided into two small teams, interacting with the young and the elderly respectively, and after obtaining the results, we exchanged the objects of interaction.

After completing the content of the first workshop, we noticed that 90% think cooking is a skill that the elders want to share with the young, and most young people want to get this skill from the elders.

Therefore, we chose food as the core topic among many topics, and proceeded from this.

Our research interviewed many types of personas, including old and young people. Looking back at our interviews, research and insights, we reorganized it into three types of user portraits, namely Kate, Anna and Ross. By analyzing and summarizing the interview content and user journey maps of our three different roles in different activities, we summarized some of their pain points and some unique insights worthy of research.

Outputs

Meal Meet Mate organizes food-related events. Here, we believe that through food, old people and young people can spend a good time together. Older users can apply online to become a chef and work for a local charity restaurant based on the weekly and new menus. Cooking the ingredients used for the second time to reduce food waste, so that every guest can enjoy food at a low price, while sharing life stories and exploring the culture of others through food. Our team put forward the idea of placing an informational placemat under each participant's plate, including the story of restaurant chefs, and examples of how young people and older people establish contact, so that the waiting time for food becomes interesting.

In order to better understand the layout of the event space, our team created a virtual model of the charity restaurant (the layout is based on the Be Enriched Castle shared kitchen).

"Stir fry in wok is a great way for people to cook and share food together. It is very convenient and people can add ingredients according to their preferences."

—— Pam 67

“I’d like to hear others talking about some ingredients I never heard of or seen. Like how to cook them and where they came from. Besides that, there are loads of cooking tips we can learn .”

—— Katherine 26

“Good idea to rip this bit off and give it to us (organisers) if you are interested. If you want to hear more. Sign up to our newsletter. It is a good idea.”

—— Kemi 45