Savor

1. Prototype link

Link

2. Describe your project.

Savor is a mobile app designed to bridge generational gaps through family recipes. While food is often a shared tradition, our research showed that recipes are communicated differently across generations. Older family members tend to share recipes through verbal explanation, handwritten notes, and lived experience, while younger generations rely on written, searchable digital systems. This disconnect makes it difficult to preserve and pass down meaningful family knowledge over time.

Savor translates how recipes are naturally passed down into a shared digital experience. Using AI-powered, low-effort capture tools and a visual forest metaphor inspired by family trees, recipes can be recorded through voice or handwritten notes and organized in ways younger generations can easily access and reuse. Rather than treating recipes as static instructions, Savor preserves the relationships, memories, and continuity behind them. This allows family traditions to be preserved and shared across households and generations, growing into a shared forest.

3. Describe your research process and findings.

Our research focused on how family recipes are shared, preserved, and reused across generations, and where this process breaks down due to differences in how generations communicate and record knowledge. We conducted primary and secondary research, including four interviews with participants spanning older, mid-, and younger generations from diverse cultural backgrounds, a Google Forms survey (n = 27), and competitive analysis.

For primary research, we conducted interviews and a Google Forms survey to account for generational differences in digital comfort. While both methods included multiple age groups, we prioritized interviews with older participants and surveys with younger participants to reduce participation friction and reflect natural communication preferences. This reflects a core UX challenge of our project: digital fluency is uneven across generations.

Across interviews with parents and young adults from diverse cultural backgrounds, consistent patterns emerged. Among older generations, recipes were rarely fixed instructions and were shared informally through verbal explanation or memory. In contrast, younger generations relied on written, searchable digital systems including note apps. This mismatch caused breakdowns when younger family members attempted to recreate recipes independently, requiring repeated clarifications while cooking.

Survey responses from predominantly younger respondents reinforced these interview findings and added quantitative context. 70.4% of respondents reported receiving family recipes primarily through verbal explanation. 55.6% of respondents reported not storing family recipes in any specific place, instead relying on fragmented locations including screenshots, messages, or note apps. As a result, 59.3% of respondents reported contacting a family member again while cooking due to unclear measurements or missing steps.

Beyond usability, interviews and surveys revealed the emotional weight of family recipes. Older participants described cooking family recipes as a way to remember loved ones and continue family traditions, while younger participants described them as a source of comfort, particularly when living away from family. Several respondents noted that once a knowledge holder passed away, recipes were often lost or partially remembered. Language differences further amplified these challenges. In some families, older generations preferred to explain recipes in their native language, while younger generations stored them digitally, often in English. We interpreted this not as a niche cultural issue, but as part of a broader generational divide in how knowledge is communicated and preserved.

We conducted a competitive analysis of existing recipe platforms, including Pepper, ReciMe, and Samsung Food. Most recipe apps fall into two categories: productivity-focused tools and social discovery platforms. Samsung Food emphasizes structured recipe management, limiting informal and intergenerational sharing while overlooking older generations’ digital comfort. Pepper and ReciMe prioritize social discovery and digital recipe collection, but assume comfort with typing and app navigation, limiting low-effort contribution from older users.

These findings show that the core issue is not a lack of motivation to preserve family recipes, but a lack of systems that translate how recipes are naturally shared into formats that can endure across generations. Existing platforms either store recipes efficiently or surface them socially, but none bridge the communication gap between experiential, voice-based sharing and structured digital reuse.

4. Describe your most important design decisions.

Our design decisions were driven directly by our research insight that generational gaps exist not because families lack motivation to connect, but because they communicate and record knowledge differently. From interviews and survey responses, we observed moments where recipes failed to transfer, not emotionally but practically, due to mismatched communication styles.

One key design decision was designing the Add Recipe experience around AI-powered, low-effort capture paired with cooking-time support. Interviews showed that older family members wanted to share recipes but found typing or formatting digital content unnatural or overwhelming, often describing cooking “by feel.” Survey results revealed that younger participants frequently struggled to follow these informal instructions during independent cooking, particularly around vague measurements, timing, and heat level. Rather than forcing older contributors to formalize their recipes, we used AI to preserve handwritten and spoken input while also acting as a cooking assistant that helps younger users interpret and follow these instructions in context.

In some cases, particularly in immigrant families, language preferences widened this gap further. For example, some participants described older family members explaining recipes verbally or writing memos in their native language, while younger family members attempted to store those instructions digitally, often in English. This led to recipes being re-explained rather than preserved. By supporting spoken and handwritten input across languages, AI enables these explanations to be captured and reused without forcing older users to engage with complex digital tools.

Our second major design decision was to introduce a forest-based visual metaphor inspired by family trees. This metaphor reflects how recipes grow and connect people over time. Families are represented as trees, family members as branches, and recipes as leaves, with each family’s tree growing fuller as recipes are cooked and shared. The structure mirrors how recipes move through families in practice—passed from person to person, adapted, and reused rather than owned by a single individual.

For younger users, the forest offers motivation through visible progress without requiring rigid organization, aligning with survey findings that showed strong emotional value for family recipes but difficulty maintaining consistent engagement or organization. For older generations, the metaphor communicates legacy. By structuring recipes as leaves on family trees within a shared forest, Savor makes this continuity visible across families—using another family’s recipe grows your own tree, and repeated use allows that family’s tree to join your forest, enabling different families’ legacies to be shared and experienced through cooking rather than competition.

5. If applicable, describe how you utilized AI in your design process in detail.

AI was used as a support tool throughout our design process, not as a decision-maker. We used AI to help draft and refine interview and survey questions, checking for clarity, neutrality, and non-leading language to support more balanced participation across generations. In the design phase, AI was used to generate some placeholder images for early prototyping purposes only.

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