Save the Kiwi

Save the Kiwi is conceptualized targeting at food waste management.

It provides food safety information as well as notification for the expire date of the user’s food products at home. The goal is to help reduce food waste and ‘improve environmental and economic sustainability’. Specifically, this app is designed combining elements and theories of behavior change and persuasive design. Positive/Negative Reinforcement as well as Punishment are used in this app to motivate and regulate user behavior.

An exploratory study is performed afterwards based on the prototype of this app, aiming to study whether users would be convinced that the app is effective in behavior change, and whether different motivating approaches would have different effects. User feedback is gathered through interviews and surveys, and the findings indicate the effectiveness of this app, and that Negative Reinforcement and Punishment have better motivational effect.

Aydin, A., Micallef, A., Lovelace, S., Li, X., Cheung, V., & Girouard, A. (2017, May). Save the Kiwi: encouraging better food management through behaviour change and persuasive design theories in a mobile app. In Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 2366-2372).

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