Building H #64: Guess What's Coming to Dinner?

We talk a lot at Building H about the ways that modern life affects our health-related behaviors. One of the biggest casualties of the modern lifestyle is cooking dinner at home, which has been on a long slow decline. (See Amanda Mull’s excellent “How America Lost Dinner” for a rundown of the many factors involved.) It’s been replaced by going out to eat more often, ordering delivery or take-out, or picking up prepared, ready-to-serve meals from supermarkets. And while these substitutions are often more efficient, research has shown that most suffer from poorer nutritional quality than a home-cooked meal.

A lot of the innovation in food services these days doubles down on this trend – giving us delivery bots, delivery by drone, ghost kitchens, delivery apps like DoorDash and Grubhub – even Taco Bell’s weird vision of dumbwaiters and drive-thru lanes. So we asked what it would look like to go against the grain? What would it look like to create a service that made cooking healthy dinners a whole easier and more delightful? As part of our support for speculative design work, we challenged a terrific group of students – Aichen Sun, Eeshani Mondal, Elen Liu and Samrudha Malandkar – at the University of Washington’s department of Human Centered Design and Engineering to design just such a service.

We’re happy to introduce deliz: cook with ease, the design that the team produced. It takes a novice cook through all the steps: finding something great to eat, planning a dinner schedule, acquiring the ingredients, and actually cooking the meal.

Read the full newsletter.