scott alberstein
Industrial + Interaction Designer
A service consisting of a mobile application and a cooking studio directed toward giving college students hands-on education about food and culture
Food is a powerful social and cultural medium. Food preparation is also a necessary life skill for most of the world; yet formal
education doesn’t prepare students to begin cooking and living as independents. Foodsense aims to bring basic culinary education to the college campus environment.
Skills: Research, Interaction Design, Space Design, Visual Design & Branding
There exists a gap in much of the higher education system in western culture. That gap involves and overemphasis on hard skills such as math or english, and a limited exposure to soft skills such as food preparation or health and other daily life skills.
Sometimes you just have to get all the bad ideas out. We challenged ourselves to come up with 100 ideas to get the creative juices flowing. After that we organized and filtered the ideas based on their potential for impact, and where they lie within the scope of service design. At this time we also conducted a round of interviews with several college students to discuss their relationship with food, if they could cook, where they learned, or barriers preventing them from learning.
As it turns out, many students were interested in learning how to cook but lacked the facilities to even begin. On the other hand, there were a number of students who did know how to cook and enjoyed teaching and cooking for others. We found that most students who knew cooking fundamentals learned from by watching others cook; not through recipes. Many cited either a friend, parent, or YouTube videos as sources of information.
Cooking studioes afford students the opportunity to share their culinary knowledge with the rest of the student body in a hands on and collaborative manner. A handful of public cooking studios would be installed around campus to allow students the freedom to learn and to teach with one another.
The quarter circle design affords an open and directed interior space for presenting or entertaining. Their size and modularity allow for a multitude of arrangements to fit as few or as many studios within a limited space. The two flat sides of the structure afford a sense of privacy from adjacent studios, while large front windows make the space feel open and welcoming.
The Foodsense app is the medium by which students can set up events, promote themselves or their clubs, reserve cooking studios, and watch video tutorials.
