deliz:

Fast, Healthy Dinners at Home

Americans are cooking fewer and fewer dinners at home. Modern life keeps us busy and cooking a healthy meal can be daunting: it involves finding a recipe, procuring the ingredients, preparing the ingredients, cooking and, ultimately, cleaning up. And that’s if you’re comfortable cooking and have the confidence to take it on. It’s no wonder that people opt for DoorDash or to pick up a ready-to-eat meal at a supermarket. But we lose something when we don’t cook — home cooked meals tend to be healthier than the alternatives, we’re more active when we cook and cooking can be quite social as well.

But what if we could make it easier to cook? And faster, and more fun? That’s the challenge we gave to Elen Liu, Samrudha Malandkar, Eeshani Mondal and Aichen Sun, a team of graduate students from the Department of Human-Centered Design and Engineering at the University of Washington for a speculative design capstone project.

The result? Meet deliz, a service the team designed that integrates a broad set of capabilities to simplify the many tasks associated with cooking dinner and invigorate the experience. Deliz assists a novice home cook with meal planning, recipe identification, ingredient acquisition and developing cooking skills.