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After carrying out our observations in the cafeteria, having received responses on the survey, and having had the interview with Appél we came up with several ideas to tackle our challenge which aims to reduce food waste in the UT cafeteria’s. After reading the responses of the survey it showed that most people that threw away their food they did so because the portion was too big or they did not like the food. In addition, the observations confirmed this outcome since people that chose their own portion mostly did not throw anything away. Instead, people who bought a pre-made portion often threw some of this in the bin. This for us was a big reason to consider the solution of being able to choose your own portion for all option. Thus, during the interview, we decided to opt this solution to Appél. Contrarily to our expectations they did not like the solution as it would be too difficult to implement. Therefore, we considered other options. This brought us to educating the students about the consequences of food waste. This idea was also shown to be an important factor in reducing food waste mentioned in literature. Considering this finding we were looking for a fun way to implement this in the real world. We found that just having a poster with the information would most likely not be appealing to the students and would thus not help to reduce the problem. Instead, we decided on creating a short quiz with questions about the impact of food waste and food production. After the person has submitted their answer, they will immediately be provided with the right answer and a short explanation and fun fact. The quiz is intended for students and teachers at the University of Twente since they are the one who will buy food at the cafeteria. A possible dilemma for this intervention is that not everyone will take the time to take the quiz. Therefore, the intervention will not have the intended impact on them. Moreover, by only providing them with the consequences of wasting food we do not provide them with a way on how to (easily) reduce their food waste. Therefore, it might be that their perceived behavioural control about not wasting food is low. When this is low they are also less likely to reduce food waste.

During the design process of the solution we faced a lot of problems when finding a realistic solution which we could carry-out ourselves. During our interview we found out that most of the solutions that we had for the problem were not realistic for us to accomplish since they would require a total change in how the food system at the university works. What we did find however is that informing people about the effects of food waste is a reliable method to reduce the amount of waste. This also coincides with the literature that we have read on the subject which states that being uninformed is one of the lead causes of food waste among students. With this in mind we decided that it would be a good idea to design a poster which we could use in order to inform students about the effects of their wasteful behaviour. This poster would grab the attention, inform, and provide alternatives to the problem. We decided on this 3-step plan in order to reach our goal. Designing the poster layout was pretty simple. We started with an eye-catching sentence to grab the attention of the audience. Next we provided the reader with information about what the effects of food waste are, then we provided the reader with alternative behaviour which might cause them to reconsider wasting food. Finally we added a QR code which will lead to our quiz which serves to entertain and inform at the same time to bring the message home. This way we hope to grab and keep the attention of anyone reading the poster. We were lucky that we had no disagreements about the lay-out and we quickly decided on the design of the poster. The only hinder that I can mention is that we hoped to do a lot more to reduce food waste but this was sadly not possible. We hope that we can reach a lot of people with this poster and quiz and that we can reduce food waste even if just by a little bit to preserve our planet.

We do not have the final design of our poster yet, but we showed the main idea of the educational poster to some of our fellow students. The students whom we showed the poster thought it was a good approach to tackle our challenge and indicated that if the poster would hang around the UT cafeterias that they would be curious and would go look at the poster. The QR-code with the quiz is also still not working, but the students liked the idea of an online quiz about food waste even better than the poster on its own. The students did indicate that in order for them to grab their attention the poster must stand out and speak to them. I must not have too much information on them since the students do not want to spend too much time and effort on the poster. These are things to keep in mind for further developing our provotype.

As we are soon nearing the end of this module, now is a good time to make a balance of where we are and what we still need to do, especially regarding the last pop-up. As said before, our provotype that we will show is a poster and an informative quiz in order to educate university students and staff and to create awareness regarding this problem as well. At the time of writing is our provotype not yet finalized so that is one of the things we need to do before the next and also last pop-up session. However we do already have sketches of how we want the provotype to look, work and what messages it needs to convey. As described, we already do some testing, this gave us valuable information on how we are going to tweak the provotype. In more detail for the poster, we know which information we want on the poster but we are still looking at how we can make our poster stand out from all the other posters. Regarding the informational quiz, do we already have a set of questions prepared and what we still need to do is figure out the sequences that would make the most sense and what additional information we want to provide regarding the topic of the question.
Apart from the provotype are we now also working on the final report we need to hand in a few days after the pop-up session. Both things still require a lot of our attention but with the team morale being at her alltime high are we confident that the prototype and the report will be done on time and to the satisfaction of all the team members.