Abstract
A community partnership between a regional food bank and a four-year, public undergraduate university gave rise to a practical design solution that helps define and track the nutritional quality of everyday food items. Initiated by organizational need to support procedures and policies with technology, nourish highlights a stop-light approach for recognizing foods to encourage with use of a visual aid to help make decisions at a glance, while maintaining an empirically validated analysis of nutrient density. Nourish (http://nourish.us.org), an integrated web application released in April 2019, represents a four-year progression of academic research and integrative learning. The overall impact of this community-based project aims to inform decisions about food purchasing in a food bank environment and provide opportunities to educate the public. The design process for nourish is highly collaborative. Collaborators include students, faculty, researchers, alumni, and community partners with expertise within a variety of professional disciplines, including dietetics, health sciences, media art and design, and computer information systems. Iterations of this award-winning, grant-funded research have been presented to key stakeholders, including Feeding America, the largest hunger-relief organization in the United States, as part of ongoing efforts to increase access to nutritious foods through the use of technology. Our partnership maintains an open dialogue with public audiences as a tenet of this valuable community-based project. This poster demonstrates how collaboration and problem solving can be applied to areas of informatics and design for society.
Presenters
David WangAssistant Professor, School of Media Arts & Design, James Madison University, Virginia, United States
Details
Presentation Type
Theme
KEYWORDS
Design, Integrative Learning, Community-based Projects, Informatics, Nutrition, Food Bank
