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Heart Brain Farm
Heart Brain Farm is a circular and regenerative food system that has been designed to transform the current food retail store (commodity-based) to operate on a circular pattern (community/service-based). With Heart Brain Farm, the consumer is directly involved in the production of food, and receives credits and discounts for her or his contributions to the system.
In this system users collaborate with local farmers by supplying them with organic, healthy, and free resources. This eliminates the need for costly fertilizers and other products that currently render organic produce impossibly expensive for many people.
Organic fertilizers have a higher cost per unit of nutrient than synthetic fertilizer sources which, in turn, make the yielded crops’ prices higher. Although seemingly-cheaper, synthetic fertilizers have long term negative effects. They kill beneficial microorganisms in soil and “Nitrogen- and phosphate-based synthetic fertilizers leach into groundwater and increase its toxicity, causing water pollution.”
Furthermore, most farms add hormones to animal feed, which can also create health risks for people who eat the resulting meat products. The cost of organic food for these animals makes organic protein very expensive in retail stores.
The main objective with Circular Food System is the creation of a zero-waste community.
There are two main centers in the system: black flies center and red worm one. Based on your diet, the customer can decide on the journey of their kitchen waste with the application in their smart phone and their membership to the system:
Black flies emerge, mate and die. Each time they go through this life cycle, they create 200-500 eggs in one bucket. These eggs then turn to larvae, which eat the kitchen waste and become mature. These larvae are wonderful protein sources for pigs, fish, and chickens. In the end of this circle, users are awarded credit or discounts for eggs, chickens, fish, or pork products.
Red worms break down kitchen waste, transforming it to fertilizer. The fertilizer can then be transferred to local farms. In the end of this circle, users are awarded credit or discounts for vegetables, fruits, roots, or grains.
These 2 circles create resources for farmers while reducing prices on healthy food in the community. Using natural methods of transforming kitchen waste to food resources is slower than the technological methods applied by today’s commercial farmers, but red worms and black flies duplicate easily and can, therefore, be conceptualized as a sustainable resource. These two living species are also highly sensitive to chemical materials. They react and die if there is chemical contamination in the bucket. This helps to ensure that the farming materials that they produce are safe and will support the growth of healthy plants.
This system supports the maintenance of a healthy community while reducing the price of organic food. This, in turn, helps to reduce the costs of healthcare. Moreover, everyone in the community would know where their food came from and because they are involved in the processes of production, the amount of wasted food would decrease.
In this system users collaborate with local farmers by supplying them with organic, healthy, and free resources. This eliminates the need for costly fertilizers and other products that currently render organic produce impossibly expensive for many people.
Organic fertilizers have a higher cost per unit of nutrient than synthetic fertilizer sources which, in turn, make the yielded crops’ prices higher. Although seemingly-cheaper, synthetic fertilizers have long term negative effects. They kill beneficial microorganisms in soil and “Nitrogen- and phosphate-based synthetic fertilizers leach into groundwater and increase its toxicity, causing water pollution.”
Furthermore, most farms add hormones to animal feed, which can also create health risks for people who eat the resulting meat products. The cost of organic food for these animals makes organic protein very expensive in retail stores.
The main objective with Circular Food System is the creation of a zero-waste community.
There are two main centers in the system: black flies center and red worm one. Based on your diet, the customer can decide on the journey of their kitchen waste with the application in their smart phone and their membership to the system:
Black flies emerge, mate and die. Each time they go through this life cycle, they create 200-500 eggs in one bucket. These eggs then turn to larvae, which eat the kitchen waste and become mature. These larvae are wonderful protein sources for pigs, fish, and chickens. In the end of this circle, users are awarded credit or discounts for eggs, chickens, fish, or pork products.
Red worms break down kitchen waste, transforming it to fertilizer. The fertilizer can then be transferred to local farms. In the end of this circle, users are awarded credit or discounts for vegetables, fruits, roots, or grains.
These 2 circles create resources for farmers while reducing prices on healthy food in the community. Using natural methods of transforming kitchen waste to food resources is slower than the technological methods applied by today’s commercial farmers, but red worms and black flies duplicate easily and can, therefore, be conceptualized as a sustainable resource. These two living species are also highly sensitive to chemical materials. They react and die if there is chemical contamination in the bucket. This helps to ensure that the farming materials that they produce are safe and will support the growth of healthy plants.
This system supports the maintenance of a healthy community while reducing the price of organic food. This, in turn, helps to reduce the costs of healthcare. Moreover, everyone in the community would know where their food came from and because they are involved in the processes of production, the amount of wasted food would decrease.
Blue Apron
Hosting family and friends is something many people avoid doing these days because of the behind-the-scenes labor of prepping and cooking a meal.
At Blue Apron, the customer experience and design team developed the dinner party box with small kitchen owners in mind. Our goal was to ease the stress of home chefs and to create an intuitive, accessible, and user-friendly process. This is the first time that Blue Apron pursued a multicourse product, which had many layers of problems that needed to be solved.
1. Communication between internal teams
This project had different systems and the first thing needed was a concise way for the product to be understood by internal teams. As a systems thinker and human-centric designer, I came up with a visual map to help the different teams to recognize at what points they would be joining the process.
The map divided the project into Blue Apron before, digital experience, fulfilment, physical experience, customer experience, eating, and after. While the details of most of these pieces remain confidential, here I am able to share the digital and physical user experience parts of this process which are available to the public.
2. The unboxing moment
Our goal was to design a delightful dinner party experience for our customers. After making an online purchase, the period spent waiting for delivery can be stressful for some customers. The unboxing moment is therefore very crucial in terms of the overall experience. At Blue Apron, the core products inside the box are packaged with the separate recipe cards on top of the liner that protects the food. Sometimes these recipe cards fall behind the liner during transport and users have complained about the difficulty of finding the recipes after unboxing. As the dinner party box is more of a luxury item, it needed a new approach to enhance the unboxing moment. I collaborated with a graphic designer from the creative team at Blue Apron to address this issue. We developed a tray which holds the recipe card, which helps keep the box appearing perfectly organized at the moment of unboxing.
3. Game Plan
There is a four-course meal in the box. As this was the first time Blue Apron created a multicourse product, it was of utmost importance to develop a user experience that would be joyful rather than stressful. My team and I worked with our test kitchen chefs and recipe writers to create one recipe card for four dishes and we called it the Game Plan. The game plan designed based on the map I created for the internal conversation. The game plan was not only about chef tips and cooking steps but it also helped the home chefs see the whole journey at once. We wanted users to understand when they might take breaks during the (longer than normal Blue Apron) cooking process, how many dishes there would be at the end of the journey, and when they should start to cook and how to prepare their table.
4. Connections between operation, sustainability, physical products, and user experience
We realized that there would be many ingredients needed for each box and that they would all be loose inside the box. This situation created many problems ranging from the damage of some vegetables due to over-chilling to the loss of some ingredients during the operations at the fulfilment center.
We needed to design a new system that would help the associates at the fulfilment center know where to place the ingredients inside the box and create fewer steps for them to make boxing more efficient. Any changes in the packaging of the ingredients inside the box would affect the user experience during preparations and cooking. We developed a coding and kitting system idea. We created 4 kits for this: 1) Aromatics and Lemons 2) Chef's Pantry Picks 3) Herbs and Scallions 4) Loose in the Box.
We used geometry codes on the physical packages, on the game plan, and also on the ingredient list. This helps home chefs find the ingredients easier during the prepping and cooking.
At Blue Apron, the customer experience and design team developed the dinner party box with small kitchen owners in mind. Our goal was to ease the stress of home chefs and to create an intuitive, accessible, and user-friendly process. This is the first time that Blue Apron pursued a multicourse product, which had many layers of problems that needed to be solved.
1. Communication between internal teams
This project had different systems and the first thing needed was a concise way for the product to be understood by internal teams. As a systems thinker and human-centric designer, I came up with a visual map to help the different teams to recognize at what points they would be joining the process.
The map divided the project into Blue Apron before, digital experience, fulfilment, physical experience, customer experience, eating, and after. While the details of most of these pieces remain confidential, here I am able to share the digital and physical user experience parts of this process which are available to the public.
2. The unboxing moment
Our goal was to design a delightful dinner party experience for our customers. After making an online purchase, the period spent waiting for delivery can be stressful for some customers. The unboxing moment is therefore very crucial in terms of the overall experience. At Blue Apron, the core products inside the box are packaged with the separate recipe cards on top of the liner that protects the food. Sometimes these recipe cards fall behind the liner during transport and users have complained about the difficulty of finding the recipes after unboxing. As the dinner party box is more of a luxury item, it needed a new approach to enhance the unboxing moment. I collaborated with a graphic designer from the creative team at Blue Apron to address this issue. We developed a tray which holds the recipe card, which helps keep the box appearing perfectly organized at the moment of unboxing.
3. Game Plan
There is a four-course meal in the box. As this was the first time Blue Apron created a multicourse product, it was of utmost importance to develop a user experience that would be joyful rather than stressful. My team and I worked with our test kitchen chefs and recipe writers to create one recipe card for four dishes and we called it the Game Plan. The game plan designed based on the map I created for the internal conversation. The game plan was not only about chef tips and cooking steps but it also helped the home chefs see the whole journey at once. We wanted users to understand when they might take breaks during the (longer than normal Blue Apron) cooking process, how many dishes there would be at the end of the journey, and when they should start to cook and how to prepare their table.
4. Connections between operation, sustainability, physical products, and user experience
We realized that there would be many ingredients needed for each box and that they would all be loose inside the box. This situation created many problems ranging from the damage of some vegetables due to over-chilling to the loss of some ingredients during the operations at the fulfilment center.
We needed to design a new system that would help the associates at the fulfilment center know where to place the ingredients inside the box and create fewer steps for them to make boxing more efficient. Any changes in the packaging of the ingredients inside the box would affect the user experience during preparations and cooking. We developed a coding and kitting system idea. We created 4 kits for this: 1) Aromatics and Lemons 2) Chef's Pantry Picks 3) Herbs and Scallions 4) Loose in the Box.
We used geometry codes on the physical packages, on the game plan, and also on the ingredient list. This helps home chefs find the ingredients easier during the prepping and cooking.
Meet Your Brain
The human brain is the most complex system in the universe. This three-pound organ is responsible for interpreting the world around us and for guiding our movements, behaviors, and emotions.
Learning about our brains and understanding the power of our cognitive sides will help us to understand our biases, stereotypes, and prejudices which affect our daily decisions about ourselves and the world around us.
Learning about the brain and its working process will help kids to reprogram their brains and change their perspectives so that they can better solve complex problems.
WORKSHOPS
The "Meet Your Brain" Design-Science workshops are part of our Heart Brain Kid program. The goal of these workshops is to introduce the human body's complex systems and to show kids how the nervous system is interconnected with other systems. The workshops have been developed along with the "Meet Your Brain" book, which uses playful 3D tools to allow kids to examine the brain.
The workshop structure has been designed with two themes:
1) Hardware: the different parts of the human brain and their functions.
2) Process: the emotional and cognitive work of the brain, intelligence, and decision-making.
The workshop is divided into four activities. Each activity is at a different scale, but similar logic helps to foster interactions between kids. Group activities and individual explorations can all be initiated concurrently. Heart Brain System Studio's pop-up space is created using recycled cardboard discarded by retailers based in the Rochester, NY area.
Teaching children to adopt systems thinking and to embrace empathy is an investment that has lifelong benefits. It helps kids to understand social networks, the connectivity of the world, the interconnectivity and complexity of problems, and how we can pursue solutions on a wide scale. This approach also helps kids to understand the reasons behind changes and prepares them to be ready for changes.
We all live in a very complex system but (for the past several hundred years) the human-made linear system has grown to dominate our daily lives, including everything from our educational institutions to our grocery shopping and media. This linearity is limiting. Instead of seeing and understanding the whole and its interconnections, we just see the parts which are highlighted by the linear system.
Adopting system thinking in education systems and daily life helps children to develop holistic and creative mindsets for examining and solving complex problems.
System thinking encourages children to see problems from many different perspectives, to understand the meaning of their experiences in relation to the world around them, and pushes them to take risks and work to create positive change.
Learning about our brains and understanding the power of our cognitive sides will help us to understand our biases, stereotypes, and prejudices which affect our daily decisions about ourselves and the world around us.
Learning about the brain and its working process will help kids to reprogram their brains and change their perspectives so that they can better solve complex problems.
WORKSHOPS
The "Meet Your Brain" Design-Science workshops are part of our Heart Brain Kid program. The goal of these workshops is to introduce the human body's complex systems and to show kids how the nervous system is interconnected with other systems. The workshops have been developed along with the "Meet Your Brain" book, which uses playful 3D tools to allow kids to examine the brain.
The workshop structure has been designed with two themes:
1) Hardware: the different parts of the human brain and their functions.
2) Process: the emotional and cognitive work of the brain, intelligence, and decision-making.
The workshop is divided into four activities. Each activity is at a different scale, but similar logic helps to foster interactions between kids. Group activities and individual explorations can all be initiated concurrently. Heart Brain System Studio's pop-up space is created using recycled cardboard discarded by retailers based in the Rochester, NY area.
Teaching children to adopt systems thinking and to embrace empathy is an investment that has lifelong benefits. It helps kids to understand social networks, the connectivity of the world, the interconnectivity and complexity of problems, and how we can pursue solutions on a wide scale. This approach also helps kids to understand the reasons behind changes and prepares them to be ready for changes.
We all live in a very complex system but (for the past several hundred years) the human-made linear system has grown to dominate our daily lives, including everything from our educational institutions to our grocery shopping and media. This linearity is limiting. Instead of seeing and understanding the whole and its interconnections, we just see the parts which are highlighted by the linear system.
Adopting system thinking in education systems and daily life helps children to develop holistic and creative mindsets for examining and solving complex problems.
System thinking encourages children to see problems from many different perspectives, to understand the meaning of their experiences in relation to the world around them, and pushes them to take risks and work to create positive change.
wheely
Wheely is a sanitized version of a client project. Identifying details have been changed for confidentiality.
OVERVIEW
An AI-powered mobile car care platform that connects drivers with trusted, on-demand mechanics through a guided digital experience.
THE PROBLEM
Drivers need a faster, more transparent way to identify vehicle issues, understand service costs, and book trusted mechanics with confidence.
THE SOLUTION
A mobile app that uses computer vision to assess vehicle issues through the phone camera, provides transparent pricing, and dispatches the right mechanic with the right tools directly to the user.
EXPERIENCE GOAL
Create an end-to-end experience that reduces uncertainty, builds trust, and makes car care simple for every driver.
DESIGN PRINCIPLES
Design for transparent process and pricing.
Design personalized services based on vehicle type and model.
Design intuitive guidance at every step.
Design for every level of automotive knowledge.
RETENTION AND LOYALTY STRATEGY
Extend the experience beyond one-time repairs by delivering ongoing value.
Smart reminders for routine and seasonal maintenance.
Vehicle health checks through quick AI-powered scans.
Wheely+ membership with priority service and exclusive benefits.
Partner rewards for everyday driving needs, such as car washes, fuel, and mobility services.
OVERVIEW
An AI-powered mobile car care platform that connects drivers with trusted, on-demand mechanics through a guided digital experience.
THE PROBLEM
Drivers need a faster, more transparent way to identify vehicle issues, understand service costs, and book trusted mechanics with confidence.
THE SOLUTION
A mobile app that uses computer vision to assess vehicle issues through the phone camera, provides transparent pricing, and dispatches the right mechanic with the right tools directly to the user.
EXPERIENCE GOAL
Create an end-to-end experience that reduces uncertainty, builds trust, and makes car care simple for every driver.
DESIGN PRINCIPLES
Design for transparent process and pricing.
Design personalized services based on vehicle type and model.
Design intuitive guidance at every step.
Design for every level of automotive knowledge.
RETENTION AND LOYALTY STRATEGY
Extend the experience beyond one-time repairs by delivering ongoing value.
Smart reminders for routine and seasonal maintenance.
Vehicle health checks through quick AI-powered scans.
Wheely+ membership with priority service and exclusive benefits.
Partner rewards for everyday driving needs, such as car washes, fuel, and mobility services.
CHEF iQ
In 2018, CHEF iQ required a fundamental change. Simply connecting traditional products to the internet was insufficient; it only altered perception, not intelligence. The company needed to shift from a product-centric focus to a holistic approach that integrated systems, services, and products, prioritizing the entire ecosystem rather than just the product. My role involved revising the brand, its positioning, and the value proposition, as well as rethinking the products and the overall experience. As a design director, I created a set of products based on design research to understand user needs during cooking. I also built and led a design and creative team that worked in Agile to bring this holistic experience to life.
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