food for thought.

an all-in-one food provider for the consumer, distributor, and donator.

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Inspiration

Every day, thousands of Americans suffer from food-related problems. They’re forced to choose between basic necessities, such as purchasing food, paying rent, or going to the doctor.

While 43.1 million Americans currently live below the poverty level due to food insecurity (of which around 549,000 are homeless every night) and 1 in 5 children in the U. S. live in poverty, the United States is ironically also one of the countries with a serious food waste issue as well.

We were inspired by the growing number of homeless people in the midst of COVID-19, and by the shocking statistics related to food waste in the United States.

(statistics from https://hhweek.org/hunger-and-homelessness/)

What it does

Food For Thought is an all-in-one food provider that aims to support the homeless community. Anyone who’s hungry—whether it be a college student, or a person with financial needs— can search for charitable non-profit organizations that provide free food. Restaurants can look up charitable food organizations and schedule pickups for organizations. Organizations can then accept incoming delivery requests for food, which are distributed to the local community at no cost. Our website is an ecosystem for users to connect and fight hunger and food waste.

How we built it

In regards to the website interface, we designed the website through low-and high-fidelity prototyping on Figma, vector illustrations on Adobe Illustrator, presentation visuals on Adobe InDesign.

The website’s frontend was built using React with a Firebase database. We parsed data about non-profit organizations from the IRS. The data was specified to organizations that accepted food; then, we inserted the data into our own database. We also scraped a demo api for a list of restaurants. Additionally, we created a scheduling feature to pick up / drop off food to organizations in our database. We used Google Maps API to show the location of any organization selected. Lastly, we included a feature to search for specific organizations by name.

Challenges we ran into

Gathering data for the app. We downloaded data from the IRS’ public nonprofit tax filings, sanitized it, and added it to the firebase. For the restaurant data, we scraped a public demo API to get enough information for the mockup website.

3-D rendering on Adobe Illustrator. Just 36 hours to brainstorm, iterate, prototype, and run user tests left almost no room for the designer to work toward aesthetic appeal. Because she challenged herself to learn 3-D rendering and isometric illustrations in just one night, producing graphics and illustrations took a little longer than expected.

Communication with team members. Needless to say, the virtual hackathon makes communication with team members very inconvenient, because of the fact that it’s contingent almost solely on social media apps, such as Discord and Zoom. With teammates living across the state of California, communication was definitely a big challenge for all of us.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Just as our brand name (food for thought.) conveys, we designed the holistic brand and its website with a people-centered mindset, with careful, intentional designs that contribute toward efforts to relieve food insecurity and homelessness issues in the United States.

We’re proud that we somehow made this project happen, even in the midst of limitations posed by COVID-19! Everyone shared the same passion for providing the community with support during such a troubling time.

What we learned

Some of the valuable knowledge we gained from this project include:

  1. Thinking in the perspective of potential different users—broadening our perspective to cater to all demographics.
  2. Ensuring a welcoming design through cross-testing of different colors to ensure that visually impaired people can access the website and its content.
  3. Giving each other objective, constructive feedback.
  4. Communication between designers & the programmer to maximize efficiency in a limited timeframe.

What's next for food for thought.

In the future, our team aims on updating styles for responsive design on all platforms, cultivating more complex & useful firebase interactions! In terms of design, we hope to augment the user flow by running various user tests across different demographics.

Through presenting this website at Hackers of the Galaxy, we hope to (one day) make our ambitious project into reality!

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