Overview
Global Kitchen
Building cultural bridges through taste.
Uplifting underrepresented heritage foods through early visibility and appreciation.
ROLE
Product Designer
Researcher
TIMEFRAME
January – March 2021
11 weeks
TEAM
Irina Nelepcu
Jennifer Han
Katrina Ngor
Elisha Jeon
INSTRUCTED BY
Audrey Desjardins
OVERVIEW
Global Kitchen is our design solution to heritage disconnection that college students and many others undergo as they live their lives. It tackles the need for accessible, hands-on experiences that connect young learners with their cultural roots through food, fostering an early sense of belonging and cultural appreciation.
Throughout this case study, it relays the holistic design process behind Global Kitchen. It details our ideation process, from divergent research to showcasing how we generated creative solutions and incorporated feedback from key stakeholders.
Product Design
User Research
Prototyping
Context
The Struggle For a Taste of Home
In the bustling, diverse environment of a university campus, international and first-generation students often find themselves navigating not just academic challenges, but also cultural disconnection.
For many, food serves as a crucial link to their heritage, offering comfort, familiarity, and a sense of belonging in a new and sometimes overwhelming setting. However, these students frequently face obstacles in accessing the authentic ingredients and culinary experiences that are so integral to maintaining their cultural identity.
Challenge
Underrepresentation Leads to Food Inaccessibility
After speaking to University of Washington students through a series of research, despite the importance of food in bridging cultural gaps, communities are often overlooked, both within the university and in the surrounding areas.
This lack of visibility has led to minimal representation in local restaurants, grocery products, and community spaces, leaving students struggling to maintain a meaningful connection to their heritage through food.
How might we improve visibility of underrepresented cultural foods to increase access to them?
Solution
Global Kitchen
A Cooking Kit for Early Exposure to Heritage Foods
Global Kitchen is a cooking kit designed for educators to introduce diverse heritage foods into their classrooms. For students ages 9-15, it offers a hands-on cooking experience that sparks curiosity and appreciation for both their own and their peers' cultural foods.
What's Inside
01 Ingredients
Teachers plan their curriculum and ingredients shipment online using our website. For each new lesson and heritage food topic, a package with ingredients is shipped to the school.
02 Recipe Postcards
Students can be kept engaged by having them draw characters based on the cultural food and write a letter to their future selves describing it.
These postal-themed cards imply that your students are traveling all around the world, exploring new cultures and foods. In a sense, the postcards will be “mailed” to their future selves.
03 Stickers
These stickers give students a way to customize their characters without needing prior drawing experience. Hand these out to help them accessorize and finalize their characters!
A stamp of the culture’s flag is given to students as a reward for completing each card.
04 Album
After cooking and making their cards, students will store their cards in a cooking album. This way, their memories of cooking will be safely-kept throughout the years to share with others and to access the same recipes.
05 Recipe
On the back of each cooking card, there’ll be a QR code for the students, and their close ones, to scan and access the recipe.
By introducing heritage foods at a young age, it lays the foundation for a lifelong appreciation of cultural diversity.
This early exposure is crucial, as it fosters curiosity and open-mindedness that can help prevent the cultural disconnection often experienced by international and first-generation college students.
Demo Video
Recipe Prototype
On the back of each cooking card they finish, students can reaccess the recipe and create them with their friends and close ones.
R
to restart
Research
Contextual Inquiry
Understanding the Space
MIND MAP
Our team's first action item was to define "heritage food" and what it consisted of. After doing secondary research online — taking in articles, videos, and online accounts — we identified five core questions as pillars and organized the rest of the information into a mind map.
Each pillar highlights critical aspects of the space, guiding our focus and helping us pinpoint what to prioritize in our research.
Here's a breakdown of each one:
Pillar One
Globalization of Heritage Foods
This pillar explores the tension between globalized foods and family tradition. Commercialization often dilutes cultural significance, simplifying recipes for mass appeal and disconnecting people from the personal meaning behind the food as profit-driven recreations strip away its unique nuances.
Pillar Two
Existing Tools for Connection
Community plays a big part in connection, such as in Native American communal gardens in which they not only preserve traditional crops but foster a sense of collective identity. Similarly, food trucks, family cookbooks, and cultural markets serve not just as access points but as cultural hubs.
Pillar Three
What Does Deepening Our Connection Through Food Look Like?
Deepening our connection through food goes beyond enjoying a meal — it’s about understanding the roots of the dishes, their cultural significance, and the history behind them. Recognizing how they’ve evolved and the challenges they face today preserves traditions while nurturing cultural pride and identity.
Pillar Four
Challenges To Connection
Finding authentic ingredients can be a struggle, especially in areas where underrepresented cultures lack visibility in grocery stores and restaurants. Additionally, busy lifestyles often leave little time for the preparation and sharing of traditional meals, causing a disconnect from cultural roots.
Pillar Five
How Can Design Enhance Things?
Design can create thoughtful and accessible tools that bridge cultural gaps, making it easier for people to engage with and understand their heritage foods. Focusing on usability, inclusivity, and authenticity can strengthen the bond and make cultural experiences more accessible and impactful for everyone.
Seeking Personal Perspectives
INTERVIEW
Understanding now the nuances that exist in the space, we sought for more personal insights. We decided to interview college students, a group whose eating habits have likely altered in their new environment, and gain insights about their relationship with their heritage food.
Here were our four participants:
Cheese
Korean
Low affiliation with heritage food
Does not cook Korean food at home. Consumes more of its pop culture.
Fish
Cambodian
Restaurant owner focused on their heritage food
Strong affiliation with heritage food
Believes food connects him to his heritage and strives to share it to others.
Bread
Cambodian
Strong affiliation with heritage food
Struggles with inaccessibility, time, and effort gathering ingredients.
Tangerine
Taiwanese
Strong affiliation with heritage food
Unable to cook heritage food due to lack of essential ingredients.
…the accessibility of not having a lot of Cambodian markets and stores, in general, changed my life a lot.
I feel a lot more isolated because I don’t have anyone else to connect to in my community. I struggled a lot because I felt a lot lonelier culturally.
– Bread
“
”
Most interviewees expressed their struggle in accessing their heritage foods through restaurants or shopping for ingredients at nearby grocery stores. The closest store for retrieving them would be as far as 30 minutes away by bus.
It became clear to the team that creating more accessible and convenient solutions was crucial to bridging this gap and making foods of all cultural heritages more readily available.
SHADOWING & PERSONAL BELONGINGS
At the same time, we observed people's dining choice at residential dining halls, and asked them what drove them to get what they got to see if there was a connection to their heritage. We also went to H-Mart and Trader Joes to meet more students and capture their shopping carts to assess how involved they are with food from their heritage, along with to talk about any struggles of accessing ingredients for it.
Hmart
Trader Joes
Synthesizing Our Findings
Based on our research, we identified four emerging insights to use as guiding stars in our design solution:
INSIGHTS
01 Environment
For some students, there is an environmental disadvantage as the Seattle campus area does not serve or sell their heritage food.
03 Convenience
People often sacrificed cultural foods for convenience due to cost of distance and time in retrieving them.
02 Visibility
There seemed to be a correlation with having higher access to a culture’s food due to their global presence in pop culture and media.
04 Authenticity
People seek recipes and ingredients similar to the ones from their home-town or ones they were introduced to before.
We knew we wanted to create a solution that not only addresses the accessibility challenges but also celebrates cultural diversity and enhances engagement with heritage foods.
And so we developed our solution statement that reflected these findings, along with design principles we wanted to follow and embrace in our design.
HOW MIGHT WE
How might we increase the visibility of underrepresented cultural foods in order to increase access to them?
DESIGN PRINCIPLES
Authentic
Establish a connection beyond the scope of food itself, providing a deeply-rooted experience.
Supportive
Enabling people within any stage of connection to their culture to be involved in furthering connection.
Versatile
Provide resources to encompass multiple stories and create a safe space for all identities.
Ideation
Finding the Right Concept
BRAINSTORMING
After setting up the bones of our direction with our solution statement and principles, we were now in the brainstorming stage.
We explored various concept solutions, using idea generation methods like the 2x2 and 8x8 prioritization matrix to sketch sixty total ideas that addressed our HMW statement.
DOWN-SELECTION
After sharing and discussing our ideas, we eliminated our ideas using the six thinking hats (creative, optimism, pessimism, etc.), down selecting our pile to these three final concepts:
BREAKING DOWN EACH CONCEPT
A Walk Around the World is an annual culture awareness event held at colleges to give exposure to local multicultural restaurants and heritage foods that aren't as widely represented. Like a night market, there are stands that students can explore and indulge in each culture's food at. A map of the market would be provided to guide them through the event, track their exploration, and help discover new or familiar tastes.
AR Chef took a more individual direction, providing augmented reality experience to guide people in cooking food from their heritage. From our research, we found that students living away from their home country or loved ones tend to interact less with food from their heritage. This is oftentimes due to the responsibilities related to being a student, living alone, access to certain foods, or simply because cultural foods are no longer important to them.
With AR Chef, students can reconnect with food from their heritage by overcoming the inaccessibility of obtaining ingredients and the stress of learning new recipes.
Finally, we have Gotta Cook 'Em All, which (spoiler alert) is the concept we went with. It started out with taking on a similar look to Pokemon cards in order to intrigue young children and encourage them to treasure their cards. The idea remained relatively the same: the teacher will guide the classroom in cooking each food and explain the food’s cultural significance. After each lesson, students receive a Cookin’ Companions Card — a token of remembrance of the food and culture with a recipe to cook it again.
OUR FINAL SELECTION
We moved forward with Gotta Cook 'Em All Gotta Cook 'Em All because it offered a well-rounded and engaging solution that tackled both cultural visibility and personal connection to heritage foods.
Unlike the other concepts, which were either focused on a one-time event or a more individual approach, Gotta Cook 'Em All fosters ongoing curiosity and appreciation for cultural foods from an early age. By integrating food education into classrooms, this concept not only helps children build empathy and open-mindedness toward different cultures but also equips them with the knowledge to reconnect with their own heritage. Its playful, collectible nature encourages sustained engagement, making it a powerful tool for both cultural appreciation and education.
Participatory Design
Co-designing with stakeholders
USER FEEDBACK
We had the opportunity to present our idea to stakeholders through a Participatory Design session. We interviewed a middle school teacher with experience in teaching Home-Ec which involved cooking and a seventh-grade student from Cambodia who regularly eats food from his heritage.
Through activities focused on making, enacting, and sharing, we gathered valuable insights from both the teacher and the student. You can read more about each activity in detail from the posters below.
Key takeaways included the importance of using simpler, safer recipes for easier classroom planning and student participation. We also learned that while younger children appreciated the collectible cards, middle schoolers tended to prefer digital tools over physical items.
STORYBOARD
To communicate our product, we later created a storyboard of the user experience, where we go in-depth about its step-by-step process and long-term benefits, illustrating how it can be integrated into classrooms and continue fostering cultural appreciation over time.
Incorporating Our Feedback
REVISION
After undergoing participatory design and outlining a storyboard, we had grown more knowledgeable and confident in where we wanted to take our concept, and therefore decided to revise our HMW statement: “How might we make cultural cooking classes engaging and memorable for younger generations?”.
Guided by this new framing based on our feedback, we began transforming our product. Instead of Pokemon-esque cards, we changed them to postcards, centering it around the theme of exploring the heritage foods around the world. On it, students could write about their culinary experiences and store them into their cooking albums for future reference.
We continued fleshing out the product, adding features like stickers, a map-themed cooking album cover, and postage stamps of the heritage food’s country’s flag.
Here's how we imagined students would store and carry their album and cards:
FEEDBACK PT.2
After preparing our newly defined product, we brought it and our storyboard into another session of User Feedback with our previous participants to get specific feedback on our product, such as the function, design, and usability of the product.
Together, they helped us understand what color schemes would be compatible for both children and adults, to make parental involvement optional for students, and to give curriculum freedom to teachers since each school district’s scheduling is different.
Participatory Design
Final Poster!
SHOWCASE
At the end of our project, our class had a showcase. We created a concept poster of our product explaining its features and components, along with a physical prototype. This includes our cooking kit, cooking album, recipe postcards, and stickers, which will aid teachers with the necessary materials to facilitate the class.
Looking Back
Reflecting on My Experience
To conclude, the Global Kitchen project was a challenging but rewarding experience for our team. Through our research and ideation process, we learned how to organize and synthesize research data, generate ideas according to our problem statement, and incorporate feedback into building a co-designed product.
We are proud of the final product and can only hope that a culture-centered cooking class will be implemented, as it has the potential to promote cultural sensitivity, improve access to heritage foods, and transform the way we view and appreciate different cultures forever.
Looking for more?
A slower, more meaningful way to watch video content.
Elisha Jeon © 2024
9.14.24
Back