Coplant  (To be updated)

A sharing-economy service that leverages network effects of student community to nudge community members into plant-rich dieters with the aim to reach carbon net zero by 2050.

team

5 Designers
(Christina Ip, Chen-Yu Chiu, Greg Chen, Juwon Lee, Zhuoneng Wang)

timeframe

14 Weeks, Spring 2022

My role

Design Research, Service Design, Workshop Design, Wireframing, Mobile UI Design, Mobile Prototyping

tool

After Effect, Figma, Premiere

01  
Background

We are tasked to reach world carbon net zero by 2050. Our team focuses on nudging people's diets into plant-based as we learn from the Project Drawdown that it's the 4th largest potential sector to cut down carbon emissions. Also, we believe designers play a crucial role when it comes to behavior nudging. To set our success matrix, we aim to increase plant-based populations from 22% to 75% (Goal of Project Drawdown) over the next 30 years.

https://drawdown.org/solutions/plant-rich-diets

To identify the best entry point, we conduct a series of research, including diary study, co-design workshop, interviews, case study, and storyboard, helping us narrow down the scope:

  1. Key Insight : Food is Social
    Friends are large influence in diet choices. People tend to eat more vegetables when eating out with plant rich dieters.
  2. Target Location : CMU Campus
    More and more colleges introduce plant rich diets at the campus and aim for carbon neutrality (e.g. Upitt), but CMU hasn't been part of it. We'd like CoPlant to serve early adopters at CMU and facilitate the change at CMU.
  3. Target User : International Students
    The research suggests that people going through bigger changes are more likely to change habits. Among CMU, international student are going thought the biggest change, moving one country to anther. The opportunity we see is to help them maintain the plant rich diets (if they already are) and gradually impact others.
Changing Circumstances, Disrupting Habits (Wendy Wood)
How might we help international students sustain and promote plant-based lifestyles that impact people around them?

02  
outcome

We design a plant-rich diet community facilitated by CMU dining service. Students (student buyers) can buy and enjoy plant-based lunch box made by other students (student chef). Student buyers can also choose to become student chef after training with Coplant Lounge. The incentive to become chef is to earn money through selling bentos. As a student chef, they can cook dishes from their home countries using locally-sourced vegetables provided by CMU dinning service. CMU dinging is also in charge of distributing bentos to vending machines, providing the best convenient food choices for busy CMU students. With more and more people joining community, the network effect will grow stronger, accelerating the trend of plant-rich diets.

03  
research

Identify Patterns

We first group the raw data and try to find similarities and connections in the cluster of massive data sets. The factor that jumps out is time. Insurance rates are increased over time regardless of social status, demographics, etc.

Source : Census

Health Insurance Policy

In secondary research, many scholars suggest ACA and Medicaid (also known as Obamacare) are the reason for the increase. We are intrigued by the view and decide to verify the statement with data.

Guiding Questions and data cleanup

Q: What changes did the enactment of ACA in 2010 bring to the percentage of insured people?
% of insured people in the USA from 2010 to 2019 YoY

Q: Is the drop of uninsured rate in 2014 the result of Medicaid expansion?

Source : KFF

Q: What changes did the Medicaid expansion in 2014 bring to the percentage of insured people?

  1. Year that Medicaid expansion was adopted by states
  2. % of insured people in 50 states and cities from 2010 to 2019 YoY
Source : KFF