Barrett Martin
Design Strategist x Artist
Americans eat half of all their meals alone, more likely to be accompanied by their phone or car than a person.
In the fall of 2015, my team explored why this was and how can we create a space for people to have those meals together. Our process combined desk research, observations, interviews, and surveys to better understand how Americans, particularly urban, working millennials, consume dinner.
Through our research, we found that work and eating are incredibly intertwined. We can trace this from the national ethos, the American Dream, that often provides a societal incentive to prioritize work over personal life. Our personal lives also changed to focus more on work than family. More women entered the workforce with less time to cook a family meal or delaying marriage or children altogether. Additionally, unmarried individuals and one-person households, have increased through the years from 17% in 1970 to 27% in 2012. This explains the decrease of family meals, with 37% of families reporting to eat together 7 days a week in 1997 to 26% in 2003. With these numbers, it should not surprise you that America ranks 33 out of 35 in eating together.
Our solution, Forks, is an app that allows cooks and eaters to connect and sit down together for a home-cooked meal for less than the price of going out to dinner. It allows the eater to have healthier meals with others and the cook the flex their skills while making money. Our business model is rendered after the sharing and gig economy. With our target audience as single urban, working millennials, we aim to get more people at the table.
We found that there are huge benefits to eating together including healthier meals, lower rates of depression, and more authentic relationships that tech, savvy millennials were not getting.
In our survey, 93% of respondents liked the idea of someone else cooking for them and of the 31% of respondents that got home between 7:00-11:00 pm, 100% liked the idea.
User Flow, Wireframes, Business Model - Iteration 1.
Prototype - Iteration 2.
