Momma Chow
Helping students plan when and what to eat in the fridge

For graduate students, the planning required around grocery consumption is a chore and often neglected, which leads to a poor diet, wasted food and wasted time. Now, with Momma Chow, students can plan meals based on real-time inventory in the fridge, which is linked to a a smartphone application so the information is always available. Momma helps to answer, what do I have in my fridge? What can I do with it? When should I eat it? What do I need to get?

 

Exploratory research and identifying opportunities
After interviews and tours of kitchens, jam-packed fridges and shadowing grocery outings, my team identified a graduate student's eating habits were fragmented and lead to wasted food. Their main problem areas were planning and lack of time emphasized with inability to improvise with what is in the fridge and accounting for excess quantity.

 

Service Concept
The goals of the service concept is to help students predict short-term needs, become smarter shoppers, and practice efficient food consumption. However, it cannot force the student to eat or purchase certain things, it can only suggest. So we took a rhetorical approach, looking for archetypes to embody the service in a way that will be persuasive and adaptive.

Considering the types of personalities a student would be willing to interact with in attempting behavior change. Studentswon't always be able or willing to comply so our service must be adaptable.

 

After choosing Momma Chow we identified a spectrum of mother-child relationships in considering Momma's presence and tone projected on the fridge and smartphone components.

 

Environments and Platforms
Momma Chow will have two compontents: a touch screen on the face of the fridge and a smartphone app to "peek" in the fridge when not at home.

Syncing information between the fridge touch screen and the smartphone helps to maintain a weekly meal planning schedule and Momma's commercial partners can provide timely and in-context coupons.

 

We envision the fridge touch screen to incorporate drag/drop interactions to using metaphors for the fridge to "pull" items out and put them in the menu lists. Based on freshness and quantity, Momma Chow will recommend substitutes to ensure groceries are not being wasted.

 

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Individual Contribution Exploratory research & Synthesis Service concept personas Models/diagrams Interaction design concepts Presentation development All members of the team were involved in the research, concept development and presentation

Project Details Collaborators Designed at Carnegie Mellon with Aliya Baptista / IxD Brian Yee / IT 2013 Class Service Design Project Duration 4 weeks / fall 2010

 

 

 

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