Competitive Awareness

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  Dashboard

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  Foodprint Cola with suggested alternatives

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  Foodprint water as an alternative for Cola

All of us here know about the risks for our planet that comes along with eating food with a bad ecological footprint. But if we think about it… That is actually the point, isn’t it? Nice visualizations and smart suggestions could help us, no questions. No disrespect to those who worked on this, we actually have done it as well, but we think we have to go beyond. The actual problem is: Some people already care, but the vast majority does not. So how can we raise awareness amongst those? The key is to use the caring minority as multiplicators. With gamification and gamified competition, we spread the idea to them, their family and friends and from there to the world. Let’s find out how!

The application has a dashboard showing your current progress. Gaining XP and leveling up has been proven efficient for long term engagement as well as comparison not only with your friends, but with people around the world. This helps us stay motivated, but we want to go beyond. We want to motivate our not-so-much-caring friends to become part of the movement. A great way of doing it is to challenge them. One of the open challenges is called the Fridge Competition. You can imagine tons of different challenge to engage with. In this particular one, the goal is to scan the items in your fridge, check them for the actual food costs, and improve the average hidden costs of what you have bought.

I could challenge friends or strangers, but as we mentioned: We want to get those involved who usually just close their eyes. Therefore, we can invite a friend to join us for the challenge. I know he can’t resist a bet, so I put a restaurant visit on the line and hope he accepts. If he does, we have to actually do the challenge and scan the items in our fridge. Therefore, we enable our webcam, but obviously this would work as well on your smartphone. We can scan an item and voila - see it appear on the screen. For demoing purposes, we can skip the next ones and just assume we have scanned them. Now, we can query a dataset to find the actual costs of the food. This gets combined into a clever visualization about what our fridge costs the environment. We see, that we don’t do as well as we hoped. We can investigate in detail what caused this bad score. For example this cola has costed a lot of CO2 to produce and also electricity in the manufacturing process. We go beyond just telling him what is bad, we also suggest some alternatives. Water obviously has a great footprint, but it’s also quite boring, so we show how the alternatives would perform. This way, we can buy some better alternatives next time.

Let’s assume the challenge is over. Our friend wasn’t caring that much, but he is competitive, so he actually beat me. I owe him a restaurant visit, but that was wort it. Again, we want to point out that in our opinion, the crucial point is to engage those who would look away otherwise. The gamified competition approach helped us in our understanding fo the actual food costs, but much more importantly: It engaged others and helped us move one step in the right direction. One more step towards the world realizing about the actual food costs.

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