As the world’s population increases, food waste is becoming an increasing problem.
Kerbside aims to reduce food wastage by empowering users to think local and communial.
On Kerbside, users can start a new community garden or participate in an existing one. With it’s task tracking capabilities, it
makes sharing the responsibility of community gardens streamlined and organised.
Users can use the map to discover registered local community gardens.
Users can join or create community groups based around a public garden. Group leaders can also push tasks organise group members and gardens.
Moreover, Kerbside has tracking capabilities that pairs with external devices to monitor compost levels.
Kerbside utilises gamification tactics to educate its users in an engaging way.
It offers playful challenges to promote new sustainable habits in users, as well as AR capabilities to further educate on planet properties.
Early on in our research, we noticed that products/services who utilised the shared economy to minimise food wastage were particularly successful at decreasing food wastage.
As such, we began investigating ways we could institute sharing food within local communities.
Across NSW, many local gardens and community groups already exist. However, these require government permission to establish. Moreover these groups require you to be an existing member to participate.
We performed a focus study on Chippendale’s local group ‘Sustainable Chippendale’. Unlike other community groups, Sustainable Chippendale focuses on repurposing public sidewalks so that every home can have access to composting services, locally grown produce and reduce heating in urban living areas.
The survey indicated that people weren’t sure how to join the community but most were eager to do so. The survey also indicated that people who grew their food were more likely to be food waste conscious.
In my role, I gathered information on some of the most successful products that tackled food-waste within the home. Here we discovered a significant gap in the focus of community gardens.
Through our research, we were able to identify 7 user needs. From here, we further refined using card sorting methodologies to idenitfy three pillars of success address all the needs.
By looking at the data, we determined that users generally fell under three different types of categories. These categories were defined by a users level of resistance to incorporating and adopting sustainable practices. We created three personas that represented each level of resistance.
Our design team came up with six designs in response to our research. We created paper-prototypes to use in informal interviews. After examining the data, we selected two concepts to further develop as low-fidelity prototypes.
We tested each design with over 8 participants. The data determined that users were most interested in the product Kerbside. After iterating and refining the design further, we proceeded to make high-fidelity prototypes that were further tested by another 10 participants.
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