Reducing food waste at the neighborhood level.
Project Overview
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This project was sponsored by Fjord with the aim of finding opportunities in local neighborhoods to generate sustainable behavior changes among Chicago residents. Inspired by the general excitement that people naturally tend to have towards food, and after a better understanding of the waste behind existing food systems, our team created a service focused on reducing food waste. While recognizing that there are a lot of sustainable food efforts that already exist, we wanted to create a service concept that felt more easily accessible and welcoming to the diverse communities that exist within Chicago.
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Duration
February – May 2022
Sponsor
Accenture - Fjord
My Role
Service Designer, Prototyper
Methods
Desk research, user interviews, user journey mapping, ideation sessions, experiment design,
rapid prototyping, user testing
Team
Claire Xu
Anahita Dasgupta
Kota Fujikawa
Brayan Pabon​
Cities produce thousands and thousands of waste every hour.
Resources that instead of being used are wasted.
Food takes up more space in US landfills than anything else. 30% of all food produced in the US is wasted each year, that's nearly 40 million tons of food.
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Americans want to make sustainable living choices, but their desire doesn't always translate into action
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People want to save energy at home, reduce food waste, and eat organic food. However, only half of the people who say want to incorporate sustainable habits in their life have actually made any significant changes in the last year.
Incorporating sustainable habits into life is perceived as costly and inconvenient, difficult to measure and a lifestyle few are likely to adopt.
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We started by doing extensive desktop research to understand the financial services industry and have a deep dive into Northwestern Mutual's history, customer profiles, and products and services. Based on that research, we were able to understand the beliefs and laws that govern the financial services industry and especially NW.
With a greater understanding of the context and the client, we use the Terrains & Territories method to define the initial opportunity area we wanted to explore.
People want sustainable experiences that are easy to incorporate into
their daily routines, where they can visualize their impact and feel part
of something bigger
We began a second phase of research and analysis, this time focusing on further understanding the relationship between NW and its financial representatives. We spoke with Northwestern employees to understand what their operation was like and identify their biggest challenges in staying in business.
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After conducting several interviews, we developed a journey map of the experience of financial representatives from when they begin the relationship with NW until they become established sellers of NM products.
Urban Treasure is a pop-up restaurant that collects unsold food from supermarkets and transforms it into creative and unusual dishes
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Through the research, we found out the following
The service platform connects stakeholders and provides a
management tool for before restaurant night
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The Fresh Tables service platform connects local chefs, partnering grocery stores, and owners or
renters of unused spaces (such as empty lots, existing restaurant spaces, or even individuals who
want to host an event) to come together and reliably put together a restaurant experience centered
around reducing food waste. Unused spaces would become revived by hosting a Fresh Tables kitchen & restaurant in the space. Different local chefs would then sign up, either wanting to participate in a sustainable food challenge that aligns with their values or wanting to reach a larger customer audience for their restaurant. The platform would then also inform our chefs about the partnering grocery stores’ unsold produce of the week that would be delivered to the Fresh Tables kitchen night.
The kitchen & restaurant concept is what builds community and invites people to participate
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The kitchen concept then challenges two different chefs of different cuisines to curate respective menus from the same set of unsold grocery produce. It invites them to cook for customers in the kitchen & restaurant space and invites community members to come together and share diverse foods and learn about how they can use their unused produce in their individual homes to create exciting dishes, inspired by the meals they ate for the night. Customers can come curious to learn, excited by the local chef that will be featured for the event, or just looking for a good restaurant experience while out and about. They are welcome to leave questions on a community board on how to reuse their own leftover ingredients at home, and anyone is welcome to answer or respond back, including the chefs from the night, creating a space for shared knowledge and open collaboration.
Final Concepts
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Finally, we created prototypes of 4 solutions to improve client-FR relations with artificial intelligence (AI). The concepts are articulated to support financial representatives in different parts of their client acquisition process, providing them with tools to facilitate interaction with clients and reduce operational labor time while maximizing value for clients.
Automating the underwriting process with AI
With AI-enabled mobile and tablet applications, the underwriting process of life-insurance policies are 50% more efficient as the AI automatically calculates premiums that are tailored to every customer based on their current lifestyle and health conditions. To speed up authorizations, customers can authorize documents and verify thier identities via Face ID on their smartphones.
AI-enabled Client Engagement through partnership with relevant services
By partnering with lifestyle services such as gyms, or yoga studios, customers are encouraged to keep a healthy lifestyle. For each action taken to improve their health, Northwestern Mutual customers will earn points which can be exchanged for lower premiums.
AI-enabled Real-time Assistance in client conversations
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For Financial Representatives who are working remotely, an AI assistant will appear on the video call platform. The AI will analyze the potential or current customer’s emotions based on their voice and facial expressions and recommend prompts to the FR to keep the customer engaged.
AI-enabled on-the-job Training for FRs
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AI will be used to replicate real past conversations between FRs and customers to help FRs improve and attract new customers more efficiently.
Start of relationship with client
Sale
What the client said
"Your work is comparable to the ones we received from top consulting firms."
"There are departments within the company that would find this very useful."
"This was Very Well Done!"
What I’d do differently next time…
🧠Deeply understand users. Although during the research phase we used multiple methods to find insights and inspiration from different sides, I feel a little more user research would have been very helpful. This was not achieved because the client did not give us access to more than a couple of financial representatives, but if this project happened again, I would go a little deeper, talk to more FRs in order to better understand their needs and design a better solution.
📢 Communicate the value of innovation work. The final presentation of this project to NM employees was made a month after we completed it, so not all team members were able to participate. I consider that the presentation and communication of the project is a key contact point to transmit the efforts, the methods and the value of the innovation work, I would have liked to be able to participate in that process as well.
🤔 Reflection and synthesis are crucial to move forward. Since we were learning some of the methods at the same time that we used them, we made mistakes in interpretation and application, since many times we did not understand how one method informed the next step. Getting specific insights or takeaways after each discussion or use of the methods would have helped us not to feel so lost during the process. For this, I consider it essential to reflect on what and why we did each thing we did in a regular basis.
Thanks for reading this far!
- Brayan