GoShare - Community groceries sharing machine

In response to the design brief (“Living well together with data”), we decided to design a grocery-sharing application along with a vending machine. The challenge was related to the cost-of-living crisis and how people can share excess groceries with other people and at the same time earn some money. We thought that this can be done by having a person that buys, for example, 1kg of potatoes and only needs 5 potatoes, to use our application and the vending machine to put the extra potatoes, so that someone else can buy them and the first person could earn some money from the sale.

Process of developing the prototype

The process we followed to complete our project is first Discover, Define Problem, Develop and then Deliver. First, we conducted a state-of-the-art review, for our application. We knew that we wanted to develop something under the sharing economies umbrella that targeted specifically international students. Thus, we researched what applications exist that help the cost-of-living crisis. We continued with ideation and brainstorming using the ideation card technique where we decided our final idea. We created personas and scenarios to further understand what our solution could be. My team created both a physical prototype of the vending machine and an application prototype. Lastly, we conducted some user testing using the cooperative evaluation with the think aloud protocol.