Food For Thought, Design For Change

Abstract

The issue of unhealthy eating habits developing in Young Female Adults (YFA) within New Zealand, provides an opportunity for design approaches and interventions to produce meaningful solutions, enabling healthy eating behaviours. This thesis explores how a combination of participatory design approaches and behavioural design principles, inspired by experts in the field, can be reinterpreted to establish a foundation for authentic, engaging and enriching design processes and interventions. Taking a human-centered design approach, a four-step process was established to provide a parallel exchange of insight from both the designer and participant perspective. Providing a process that facilitates the reciprocation of participant insight and designer’s intuition encourages empathetic and imaginative solutions to arise that would often go ignored within this context.

By promoting participant engagement through design methods and processes that reflect YFA values, this design thesis broadens the perspectives of what meaningful design interventions are. Strategically visualising participant insights allows for new actionable areas for participant exploration and contexts that help create thoughtful design interventions.

Actively involving participants in the ideation process encourages concepts to develop that engage and focus on individual behaviour rather then providing an immediate solution. Using physical, digital and sensorial elements as tools, design interventions are established that encourage healthy eating behaviour through considered design details and strategic object placement. Combining elements and methods from participatory and behavioural design, this thesis provides an example of how design can be used as a tool to engage with health related issues, specifically in this context, to enable better eating habits in YFA in New Zealand.