🍛 Tagit
"Tagit is a simple, smart countertop timer that reminds busy, young professionals to consume their food before it spoils."
The Problem
Imagine, you are a graduate who has just landed your first job and moved out from your parents.
You spare no effort to work and barely have the respite to cook for yourself. You either prepare your food for the entire week in advance, or buy takeouts from your nearby restaurants. All the takeouts, leftovers and the food you prepared are tucked inside your fridge and you told yourself you'd eat it tomorrow night dinner.
Few days passed, you open your fridge when you're off form work. You found the gross and grotesque combobulation of spoilage that you'd better immediately toss it in the trash can. You feel bad for the food you wasted, and the money and time that was wasted buying the food.
As an millennial, 30% of your fridge is likely to spoil and waste, and so do other millennials, because they forget what they have and ultimately they're not tracking the food that they have.
The Solution
Our users need a physical product which is not just helping, but also encouraging them to organize their fridge without adding too much hassle. In return, their food will be less likely to spoil. They hate fiddling with an app to log information manually. Everything physical interaction with the product should be easy, quick and natural, that compels the user that it worths their time.
The Components
Countertop Dock
The IoT device that sits on your countertop near your fridge and connected to users' home WIFI network. Smart Tags are docked on one side, ready to be inserted into the dial to set your designated date for reminder. Status LED blinks when tag is programmed and ready to be attached.
Reusable Smart Tag
5 brightly colorcoded, sticky tags that are attached onto lunchboxes or food packaging. User can correlate one color to a specific kind of food, e.g. Yellow for curry, green for salad. Meanwhile, bright color easily catches users eye in the bridge. After wash, the sticky PU material rejuvenates its own adhesiveness, which makes the tag reusable.
Assitive App
The mobile app which is not meant to be used by the users actively. The main purpose of the app is to proactively push notifications for reminding the users. Optionally, users can edit information of the logged items, e.g. date, remarks, etc. Occationally, users will review the information of food, and their gamified food consumption statistic.
How it Works
- Grab a tag from the countertop dock, insert the tag into the timer dial, turn and set the number of days.
- Tag the food, the corresponding colored tag is checked in in the app.
- Leave the food in the fridge.
- Few days later, you will be reminded by your phone.
- Get the food and return the tag to the dock, tag checked out.
- Voila!
UX / UI Design
Gallery
iterations
colored tags
cement & matte plastic
wood & aluminium
actual prototype
tags in dial
on counter top
Team Foodbyte
Team Foodbyte is the champion of the MIT Entrepreneurship and Maker Skills Integrator Jan 2018, a 2-Week hardware startup bootcamp, where every team went through a startup building process. Each team set out to come up with a problem, plan and build a hardware business to solve the problem. Foodbyte fleshed out a full on, low cost food tracking solution that helps millennials to resolve food spoilage problem, and ultimately alleviate household food waste.
While all expertise like computer science, electronic engineering, mechanical engineering, business administration and creative design aggregate in the same team, an incredible synergy was built and turned out team Foodbyte prevailed.
My Contribution
- Design Lead
- UX Design (hardware & software)
- Industrial Design
- 3D & 2D Graphic Design
- Android App development
- Ideation & Market Research