What is the Problem?

Many newcomers from around the world come to a company like trivago to start a new job. They also arrive to an unknown city where they would have to adapt, start a new life and get settled in.  Its is not easy to know what to do, where to go and in how to start. Being new in a city and to a new culture requires a lot of effort, time, focus and motivation in order to get settled in the city.

When I started at trivago I went through an introduction week program in order to inform new employees about the companys structure, departments and values. There were newcomers from all over the world who came to work in the company and start a life in the city of Düsseldorf.  

As a newcommer I realised right away there was a lack of material and information for helping newcommers getting settled in the city. The introduction week was more focused on the company itself. 

I have heard a lot of complaints from employees due to the fact that they experienced back and forth process in bureaucratic circumstances. For example in Germany you must get a bank account before you buy a phone, or register in the city before you find an apartment. All of these problems could be avoided if only the required steps, order and the recommended contacts and addresses were informed at the beginning. Many newcomers have no idea how to deal with these situations, in which order they should do them, where to go and how to handle everything despise also the foreign language barrier. The lack of information causes the newcomer to feel stressed, overwhelmed and frustrated.

I think it is very important for a company to welcome newcomers from abroad by facilitating their arrival process into getting settled in the city. My proposal was to solve this problem by providing a "Get Settled in Düsseldorf Guide".

The important aspects that need to be addressed in order to provide a solution (Onboarding Guide) for the newcomers were:

. Inform what should be done in order for newcomers to settle in Düsseldorf.

. Order of procedures (to avoid back and forth visits and bureaucracy problems).

. Addresses: Provide a Map Guide with the most important offices and places to go for getting your papers ready.

. Recommended places to go.

. Importants contacts like translators, VISA advisor and officials in order to help you on your moving and getting settled.

. Avoid pin-pong back and forth asking. Many employees had to visit HR and asked employees to solve their problems and get informed. This wastes a lot of time from their productiveness at their own desks.

I came up with the idea to develop and design an Onboarding Kit/Guide for the newcomers. This guide includes all the necessary steps and information for getting settled in the city of Dusseldorf.

The Kit includes a portable map guide containing all the information, contacts, city map and necessary steps all in oder of procedure. 

The Map Guide was designed using trivago style guidelines in order for it to be a first welcoming and branded product delivered to the new employees.

Newsletter and Display Banner Designs created on my previous jobs at Trivago and Lumenup.

Social Media Branding, Advertising and Content Strategie.

Some tasks include: highlights iconography and illustrations, feed post & story designs and content strategy.

Clients: Eyes + More, Kosmetik Atelier, Pets Ahoi, Pretty Beautiful Events, Gazelle, Mentos, Chupa Chups and Schleich.

All creative projects and graphics are adapted to the brand styleguide and tailored to specific campaign goals and audiences.

Newsletter Design, Styleguide Development, User Experience and Interface Design for Einfach Lecker App and Unilever White Label Templates.

MEET YOUR FOOD: Empowering the User by Re-Designing Nutritional Standards and Guidelines

Problem Background

According to the World Health Organisation more than one billion adults are now obese or overweight (WHO. 2012) this is largely due to the consumption of more energy-dense, nutrient-poor food with high levels of sugar and saturated fats.

Nutritional facts on product labels are the main information interface between customers and their food. These information guidelines are misleading and produce a dizzy analysis of energy, nutrients and average daily dietary intake. Customers now confused with the overload of nutritional information of their food and drinks are led to poor product choices, resulting in devastating side-effects to their health.

Opportunities

- Existing measure system (100g) isn’t clear.

- Using weight as a standard makes it difficult to comprehend the volume of a product.

- Too many options of measure mislead the consumer.              

- The system is open to manipulation of nutrition facts.             

- GDA speculates on the food intake of the general population.

Why are consumers struggling to make the right food choices?

Currently, food brands are increasing the usage of aggressive front-of-package labels that confuse, mislead and compromise the healthy consumption of food. 

The existing nutritional standards are far too open to providing misleading information to the consumer.
The measurement method is neither precise enough nor comprehensive enough for the consumers around the world and it produces an inaccurate amount of energy and fat intake per portion. 

Using methods of Design-Thinking for collecting and analysing information data, this project achieves deep insights into customer’s experiences and behaviours during shopping. Based on in depth research analysis this project provides a proposal for a user centred intuitive design solution the “Meet your Food System”.

The Meet your Food Integrated Information System provides a comprehensive solution to the overload of information found in supermarkets. Reliable and tailored information is easily accessible for customers before, during, and after their shopping experience. They monitor and track their health and the effects of their product choices through a sophisticated combination of technologies, interfaces and touch points both inside the supermarket and in the comfort and privacy of their own home.

Through the analysis of the research outcomes the team was able to observe some clear design opportunities. The research led to the redesigning of the current nutritional labelling system in order to provide a comprehensive solution to the overload of information found in supermarkets. One of the purposes of changing the label system was to provide an easier way of understanding the portion sizes and guidelines that were used to measure the nutritional values of a product. It was necessary to provide people with a system of measurement that they were more familiar and comfortable with unlike the current systems, which use 100g portions as well as percentages further confusing the user.  

Labeling Solution: Volume measurement system

The proposed solution to this problem was to use the cup and spoon measures which are currently used in cooking and baking recipes. The group then expanded on this by also using other volume measurements that might be easily recognizable to the user such as by glass and also per unit and package. 

Information hierarchy

The second problem that needed to be addressed was the levels of information offered on the packages. The proposed solution to this was to first divide the levels of information according to importance from front of package information to back of packaging information. 

To make the calorie intake information even more transparent the group proposed using a physical activity comparison. Every label was designed with different sports or physical activities in order to fit into a calorie amount = calorie burn activity.

The labels describe the time, distance and activity required to burn the calorie amount that a product contains. 

Integrated System

The Meet your Food Integrated Information System provides a comprehensive solution to the overload of information found in supermarkets. Reliable and tailored information is easily accessible for customers before, during, and after their shopping experience.

They monitor and track their health and the effects of their product choices through a sophisticated combination of technologies, interfaces and touch points both inside the supermarket and in the comfort and privacy of their own home.

A system was developed in order to provide a fully equipped service to empower the customer with transparency and honest information in order to chose their products wisely.

Meet your food – nutrition guideline system is a reference guide for nutrition information present on food and beverage packaging. The guidelines shows how much energy and nutrients are present inside product’s packages in supermarket. It also provides percentage information about the daily amount needs of a person’s daily dietary intake. It also offers a system based on scanning products to compare them and help users make the right choices according to their needs and health.

The Integrated System involves: 

1. Trolley display with interface for scanning products

2. Receipt system

3. Information hub

4. Help Desk

5. Website and Mobile App

6. Label System

All of the touch points together help contribute to shape a solid integrated system for empowering consumers to choose their products wisely and to help them achieve better health as a long term goal through the Meet your Food service. 

Human Benefits

Meet your Food is the beginning of a much-needed shift in the nutritional information design paradigm.
Immensely relevant for people with overweight, heart problem and diabetes.

Through solving the problems of nutritional standard information and portion guidelines within the scope of one integrated system, Meet your Food enables social and economic sustainability by facilitating the empowerment of user groups to live healthier happier and more conscious lives. 

Market Benefits

The market has the opportunity to get costumer’s loyalty. It is a brand strategy to get more costumers as a reliable and secure information about nutrition facts. 

Meet your Food is the beginning of a much-needed shift in the nutritional information design paradigm to improve people’s experiences and empower them to live healthier and happier lives. 

Project Published in GLIDE: Global Interaction in Design Conference

 GLIDE PUBLICATION.

Meet your Food is a collective project conceived and developed in MAID (Masters of Integrated Design International) at the Bauhaus city of Dessau in Hochschule Anhalt University, Germany.

Little Melting Pots (Improving Coexistence in Berlin through Early Childhood Multicultural Learning)

ABSTRACT

One in five people living in Germany today has an immigrant background. Berlin is a popular city in Germany for migration. Integration problems have always been an issue as well as discriminatory actions.

The gap between immigrants and Germans has grown in many sectors of the city due to numerous reasons such as the lack of education based on a cross-cultural & multicultural learning framework. As a consequence Berlin faces problematic integration issues causing society to divide into segregated and isolated groups.

The current early childhood multicultural learning in Berlin is mostly being used in advantaged areas.

The biggest integration issues are encountered in Berlin’s disadvantaged sectors, therefore these areas are more in need of multicultural education.

Early learners are the voice of the future and the hope for change. It is in this period when children develop their social skills, personality traits and start to form their own prejudices and biases.

Multicultural education provides students with educational experiences that enable them to feel responsible and commited to their community, as well as acquire the appropriate knowledge and skills in order to contribute to a better coexistence.

I am proposing a platform to promote multicultural education for kindergartens in disadvantaged areas of Berlin. The idea behind it is to increase the access of this learning framework by bringing children from all backgrounds together to interact and learn from each other. The program will be introduced as a multicultural event where families can come and bring their children to enjoy a day full of sharing, playing, learning, workshops, creating and story-telling. It is also meant to empower parents to be first teachers of multicultural education.

The concept is based on bringing cultures together to a common ground for celebrating diversity. 

The program works in collaboration with KITA teachers, parents and organizations.

An instruction manual video and Educational Kits were developed to provide material for planning, advertising and developing the multicultural event. The program should be hosted every month by a different KITA. They must use the educational kits for developing Little Melting Pots program.

The program uses participatory cultures to function by bringing communities together to improve coexistence in Berlin.

This project was conceived and developed for my thesis project in Hochschule Anhalt University for my masters program in Integrated Design International. 

BEE GREEN: The Sustainable Food Movement

I had the opportunity to lead an international team for this project during my Master Program and used rapid prototyping to find quick solutions to our chosen topic "Food Waste".

Identifying Problems

We brainstormed a number of problems that are critical now and are affecting the world and our environment. We narrowed it down at the end to "Food Waste" as our final chosen topic. We developed a solution for this topic by using "Rapid Prototyping Method" and delivered a solution with a limited amount of time. This project helped us exercise rapid prototyping and most importantly finding a solution on a tight schedule.

Field Research + Observation

The world has too many local and foreign supermarkets where massive production overtakes and critical amounts of products are thrown away. The amount of food waste in particular grows every year and has been an ongoing problem for decades.

In 2011 a study estimated the total of global food loss and waste to around one third of the edible parts of food produced for human consumption, amounting to about 1.3 billion tons per year.

Farmers, restaurants and supermarkets throw away millions of tons of edible food each year. 

User Story & Solution Proposal

We developed and used a specific user story in order to deliver a tailored solution.

Our User Story Motto: "I am a Biology student on a low weekly budget. I shop food based on price, the lower the better".

We developed a Sustainable Food Movement Project with an entire integrated farming system. It provides a personalised service for every person to be able to grow their own food at a smaller scale. The whole service is explained on our video here showed below. 

The video was a rapid prototype showing how the service works by using our User Story.

Opportunities

There are no personalised greenhouse services where you can have your own farm and grow your own food but also the option for someone else taking care of it for you if desired.

Advantages

. Cheap

. Easy to maintain

Personalized

. Opportunity to get free plants as rewards.

. See plant growth status on your mobile devices.

. Avoid plants that are too ripe to rotten and be thrown away.

. Control the amount of food you buy versus the food you eat.

. Eat locally, eat seasonally.

Greenhouse Project Product Results

. Educational

. Changes Behaviours : buy less quantity in order to produce less food waste. Control your intake, reap the plant at its best when you need it, eat locally, seasonally. People can start caring more about wasting less.

How can you contribute and help the Environment by using this service?

. You will decrease food waste

. Help local farmers

. Recycle Earth: by bringing your own bio food waste material from home, you can help us make fertiliser out of it. The fertiliser can be used to nurture the plants in your own farm and keep the cycle going.

From Earth to Earth.

BEE GREEN is a collective project conceived and developed in MAID (Masters of Integrated Design International) at the Bauhaus city of Dessau in Hochschule Anhalt University, Germany.

Project 1

Client: Simply V

Illustrations for Social Media Campaign Video

I illustrated the city backgrounds (Paris and Amsterdam) for Simply V social media video campaign. The same visuals were used for Display Ads.

The background illustration was adapted to fit Simply V branding. 

Project 2

Client: Appointer GmbH

Illustrations and Color Concept for Video Animation

Illustrations, Character Design and Color Concept for Promotion Video Animation and Landing Page for Appointer App

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5jDVqmYBcHo&feature=youtu.be

I am fascinated about traveling, I need it in my life.

One souvenir I always take with me: I take a picture / snapshot of a breathtaking / interesting scenery.