RATIONRIGHT

Summary

RationRight was an idea that came to me in the search for my fourth year thesis project. I noticed a susceptibility among fellow students (and even some professors) to either skip meals or buy unhealthy snacks as a substitute. After doing some research into the topic I was  not surprised to find that this is an increasingly common trend across North America, and that based on several recent studies by Instantly, over 53% of Americans will skip a meal once a day and 12% will not even consider eating breakfast. This has led to malnutrition in some cases and increased food waste in others.

I decided that this problem could be solved through the use of a digital pantry with a budgeting and reminder system.

 
 

The Solution

To attempt to solve this problem, I was actually inspired by a few of the participants’ comments about combining the food that they already had. I realized quickly that I wanted to pursue something along the lines of a mobile digital pantry, that would draw from a pool of recipes to recommend ingredients and avoid over-purchasing. Later I decided to add a budgeting aspect to the application that would advise users based on their past data. The resulting application became RationRight. 


After my secondary research into these initial trends, I wanted to explore why this was becoming more of an issue. After a personal survey of 100 people, the prevalent factor where meal skipping was concerned was planning. Planning in this case was a culmination of other factors such as budget and organization. Many of these  participants noted that if they had a better way to keep track of what they already owned, that they would be more effective at food management and thus more likely to avoid skipping meals

rationright+process.png
 

What I Used

  • After Effects

  • Adobe XD

  • Photoshop

  • Illustrator

  • Sketch

  • Premiere

  • HTML

  • CSS

  • Javascript

  • PHP

  • Canon 5D MKIII

  • MongoDB

What I Learned

I had to educate myself a bit more in databases in order to finish this application. The original idea had the ability to search nearby stores, however I have since learned that there are all sorts of prerequisites that would be needed in order to link each store’s inventory to the application itself. 

Luckily as this was only an exercise, I wouldn’t need to negotiate access to their databases, but I strengthened my prototyping skills along the way.