Project Overview:

Recipes, especially those passed down in families, are filled with valuable stories and histories. Yet, popular food media platforms appropriate, demonize, and erase recipes by Black, Indigenous, & People of Color (BIPOC) creators. Fruit Bowl is a mobile app that creates a safe space for BIPOC creators to reclaim these stories and recipes.

Created during my time as a Creative Studios UX Design Scholar with Today at Apple x Kode with Klossy, Fruit Bowl is an homage to my family's relationship with food. Food is a way for my parents to transcend the language and generational barriers that separate us. Fruit Bowl's essence is about honoring and amplifying the narratives and recipes that come from a place of love.

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Challenge:

How might we help BIPOC food creators share their stories and recipes to challenge the media's appropriation and demonization of their foods?

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Scope of Work:

Over the course of 4 weeks, I engaged in the UX product development cycle through UX research, prototyping, designing, and testing. Under the guidance of the Creative Studios mentors, I designed my prototypes in Figma and presented the project to creative professionals at Apple Fifth Avenue.

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User Research:

Cultural appropriation of BIPOC foods is a phenomenon that has been studied by a multitude of organizations, so I started this process via desk research before conducting a user survey across my network.

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Key Findings:

1. The division of "good" and "bad" foods stems from "universalism [in which] white dominant culture serves as the basis of the 'universal' ideals." White dominant culture "insinuat[es] that some foods are bad because of cultural or racial associations". 1
2. More than 65% of respondents of a user survey I conducted said they disagreed or were neutral with the statement "Food from my culture is represented accurately in the media."
3. 80% of respondents of the user survey were interested in learning more family recipes from their culture.

_{1. Conrad, Alison. “Identifying and Countering White Supremacy Culture in Food Systems.” Duke World Food Policy Center, Duke Sanford World Food Policy Center, Sept. 2020, wfpc.sanford.duke.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/15/2022/05/Whiteness-Food-Movements-Research-Brief-WFPC-October-2020.pdf.}

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Competitors / Target Audience:

Based on the user survey, there is a clear demand for recipes that are culturally significant. For this survey, I was limited to a small sample size of 40 respondents due to time constraints, but upon doing competitive analysis on existing recipe-sharing apps, I found that there is a large audience base for recipe-sharing apps. Competitor apps like Cookpad and Whisk, have a dedicated fan base with the former garnering over 10 million downloads across Apple and the Google Play Store.

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I decided to center BIPOC immigrant families and individuals as the target audience for Fruit Bowl as they are the ones most impacted by cultural appropriation in the media.

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Wireframing:

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Designs:

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Reflections:

The process of developing Fruit Bowl taught me a lot about the importance of organized design systems and iteration. One of the challenges I initially faced when working on this project was overproducing components and not being able to locate them. However, after working with the mentors from Creative Studios & Kode with Klossy, I gained a better handle on creating a simpler workflow that made designing the prototype more efficient. Their valuable feedback allowed me to iterate on my designs more effectively. For my next steps, I plan to revisit my research and create a better foundation to reiterate my designs on.

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