This is Not My First Rodeo

This weekend I attended the Food Hackathon + Forum that was presented in partnership with the Food Business School, the graduate education center at the Culinary Institute of America. This is the second hackathon I've attended in the last six months. The format of the event was similar to  other hackathons with one exception - the food, provided by Rebecca Jean Catering. It was an amazing feast. The first night included presentations from Rebecca Chesney, Institute of the Future; Allison Hagey, PolicyLink; Matt Smith, Food for Good PepsiCo; and saw an audience littered with culinary notables like Charlie Palmer and Michael Mina.

Matt Smith, Food for Good PepsiCo

Saturday morning started off with an early yoga session (which I skipped) then jumped right into pitches. There were many, many ideas presented from people with fully formed concepts to others with questions they wanted to explore.

Saturday Morning Pitches

I was drawn to #TeamInstaHeart, an Android app and text messaging service (for non smart phone users) that enables people who qualify for food stamps to order a standardized healthy discounted food basket and pick them up weekly at participating locations. We were a large group. We were also a fun group with specialized experiences including backgrounds in celebrity chef management, medicine, communications, MBA/MPH and web development. We spent the day whiteboarding and brainstorming. My skills really shone this weekend: ability to consider all the touch points, parse out functional flow for each type of user and quickly generate a mock up.

We decided to mockup one user flow for the basic job of the smart phone app and show how a person would reserve, locate and pick up their weekly basket:

• The user gets a notification on their phone
• They select one of three diet options (regular, vegetarian and gluten free)
• Users then have the opportunity to see the weekly items in the basket before reserving (EBT users are not yet allowed to make purchases online)
• Once reserved, they are prompted to select a nearby location and time for basket collection

InstaHeart - Food Hackathon + Forum @Galvanize

See details of the project here.

Human Centered Design {Food Systems}

A few weeks ago, I enrolled in Design Kit: The Course for Human-Centered Design, a seven-week online course offered by IDEO.org and Acumen. The course provides an opportunity for people who are interested in learning about human-centered design and how it can offer new perspectives on social sector challenges across the world. One of the reasons I decided to take this course is that it allows me to put into practice processes that I had previously done piecemeal or only read about.

I joined an amazing team of women (our first assignment) with backgrounds in international development, branding and mechanical engineering. For our second assignment, we met for the first time face-to-face in Jack London Square at the home of one of the participants. We went through the coursework and selected our Challenge for the duration of the course - How Might We Provide Healthier Food Options for  People in Need?

What Do We Know? - +acumen IDEO Food Challenge

What We Don't Know? - +acumen IDEO Food Challenge

We started by brainstorming what we knew; what were our assumptions around healthy food and access; and what we didn't know. Then we planned out the fieldwork by making a list of people who we'd like to reach out to for research. My teammate Radha and I decided to visit two organizations in West Oakland, People's Grocery and Mandela Food Cooperative; then follow up with phone calls to more policy-oriented ones. We crafted a list of interview questions based on the people and organizations we decided to reach out to. Our next step involves conducting interviews (next blog post).

What is Healthy? +acumen IDEO Challenge

Design x Entrepreneurship

Last night I attended UNITE, a panel series that brings together people from diverse design fields to share their experiences. The topic of this event was Design x Entrepreneurship. It was held at General Assembly's new Bush Street campus and put on by the yet to be launched Design Museum San Francisco, a pop-up network of physical and virtual exhibits. This UNITE panel featured three amazing speakers: two former IDEO designers and a Canadian architect.

"[being] a generalist is something you add on top of a discipline." -- Mimi O Chun, designer and artist

Andrew Dunbar, Mimi O Chun, Angie Kim and Drew Beam | Design X Entrepreneurship Panel, Design Museum San Francisco

Mimi O Chun is an amazing designer and artist. Check out her Kickstarter, Pete Peanut and the Trouble with Birthdays a book for which she has created and photographed all the miniatures (you'll see). Formerly of IDEO (I've already mentioned), General Assembly and AirBnB, Mimi talked about how she started as an artist, the benefits of mastering your discipline then branching out to gain experience in a variety of fields and disruption at either ends of the market spectrum.

"there is disruption to be had as both ends of the spectrum, innovating with a market leader like Walmart or creating a startup like Good Egg." -- Mimi O Chun, designer and artist

Angie Kim quit her job as an industrial designer at IDEO and launched her own line of leather goods called AYK. She talked about how a seven month stint in India for work inspired her to start a fashion line. Every day she walked past people making handcrafted goods on the street and while she was familiar with the process of designing products for clients, she was never able to derive pleasure from having ownership over and seeing someone enjoy that product she made. So, she returned to the Bay Area, quit her job (quite a bit of thought went into that) and enrolled in a Pattern Making course at Academy Arts in Oakland. The rest, as they say, is history.

Andrew Dunbar is the founding architect with INTERSTICE Architects, a Bay Area firm that does a range of work from residential projects to civic spaces and streetscapes. Armed with a graduate degree in architecture from my alma mater, he launched his design business in the late nineties and apparently never looked back.

"Woody Allan was right, 95% is just showing up." -- Andrew Dunbar, architect

A great storyteller, Dunbar shared the experience of attending a life altering career fair (which he was studying at the time) where the majority of the engineers complained of being miserable in their jobs and the lone architect who enjoyed what he did and spoke about the pleasures of working in the field. He acknowledged that luck played an important factor in his career successes; but as my mother repeatedly said - luck happens when opportunity meets preparedness.