Supporting Community Fridges

Knowledge Sharing in Mutual Aid Networks

We created a web application that would allow community fridge volunteers and organizers to share information and resources with one another in a centralized and user friendly way. Our product is an example of public interest technology because it aims to assist mutual aid organizers who promote social good in their communities.

Screenshot of customizable template from the web application
Overview

About the Project

Inspired by the growing community fridge movement, we worked with fridge organizers in New York City to provide a more consolidated system of resource sharing across the fridge network while aligning with their core values.

Team

Sharon, Pazit, Francesca, Zoe, Rousol

Tools

Figma, Flask, Bootstrap

Timeline

3 months

Background

The Problem Space

Community fridges are mutual aid projects in which community members stock and maintain publicly accessible fridges to provide food to whoever needs it. The first fridge in NYC was set up in February of 2020 and since then the movement has grown to over 70 fridges. Since this is a new and growing movement, organizers are constantly in the process of figuring out what works and what does not. Due to the autonomous and decentralized structure of community fridge networks, each fridge has its own set of practices and resources. While organizers often collaborate and learn from one another, there is no openly accessible platform for resource sharing across all fridges in a given area.

Design Opportunity

Our Solution

Our solution to this problem is to develop a web app for resource sharing amongst community organizers. The platform will allow organizers to find and share resources with one another, such as templates for business outreach and guides on how to address various obstacles.

Key Features

Product Walkthrough

Image: Screenshot of resources guides page from technical prototype

Resource Guides

A centralized location for sharing resources between organizers.

Fridge organizers are able to add and read guides that they have on navigating different obstacles and providing tips in one, centralized location that supports their platform of mutual aid.

Image: Screenshot of resources individual template page from technical prototype

Templates

Reusable templates that can be personalized for organizers’ needs.

We’ve compiled reusable templates for organizers to reach out to businesses in order to decrease the amount of repeated labor. Additionally, our template builder helps personalize these templates by automatically populating certain fields with the users’ input.

Image: Screenshot of forum page from figma prototype

Forum

Coming soon. A community forum to share tips and ask questions to the community

A forum that serves as communication between organizers to ask questions and share tips that encourage community and mutual-aid.

Resource Guides

A centralized location for sharing resources between organizers.

Fridge organizers are able to add and read guides that they have on navigating different obstacles and providing tips in one, centralized location that supports their platform of mutual aid.

Image: Screenshot of resources guides page from technical prototype

Templates

Reusable templates that can be personalized for organizers’ needs.

We’ve compiled reusable templates for organizers to reach out to businesses in order to decrease the amount of repeated labor. Additionally, our template builder helps personalize these templates by automatically populating certain fields with the users’ input.

Image: Screenshot of resources individual template page from technical prototype

Forum

Coming soon. A community forum to share tips and ask questions to the community

A forum that serves as communication between organizers to ask questions and share tips that encourage community and mutual-aid.

Image: Screenshot of forum page from figma prototype
Our Approach

Process

Five stage process chart. Five stages are 1: Research, 2: Synthesis, 3: Prototyping, 4: Testing, 5: Results
Phase I: Research

Background Research

Our research began with food insecurity, when a household has limited or uncertain access to food. We focused our background research on news articles and reports from NYC based organizations, all of which were citing similar data that revealed food insecurity has dramatically increased due to the pandemic. During the pandemic in NYC, there has also been an amazing increase in mutual aid, or community members helping and supporting one another without stigma associated with charity. A mutual aid project to combat food insecurity that grew in popularity during the pandemic are community fridges, refrigerators located in a public space that provide fresh free food to community members. The fridge is restocked by community members (also known as community fridge organizers) and is open to everyone, functioning in a policy of “Take what you need, leave what you can.”


Instagram post of Brownsville Free Fridge full of vegetables with words 'FREE FOOD' painted at the top

After identifying community fridges in NYC as an area of interest, we looked at articles to learn the details of how community fridges operate and if technology could support them. Many of the articles we found were features of community fridge organizers posted this summer when the movement first began receiving attention from websites like the New York Times.

Engagement

Since community fridges are a relatively new movement, there is a sparse amount of information available about them online and once we had gone through it all, we turned to Instagram to get in contact with fridge organizers. Instagram is the primary platform where community fridge organizers will post information and updates about their respective fridges. We began by documenting all the community fridge instagram accounts we came across and DM’ing them to request interviews to learn more about their work.


Through interviews, we quickly learned that community fridges are autonomous and decentralized, so each fridge operates and organizes itself differently. Despite differences in how fridges operate, there are common tasks that each fridge undertakes in order to provide food to community members and we designed a diagram of the Community Fridge Process to visualize these core commonalities.


In addition, we created four Personas and User Journey Maps in order to capture high and low points organizers expressed in interviews.

Research: Guiding PIT Question

Is focusing on organizers and volunteers the right approach? If not, what perspectives are missing from our research?


The direction our project took was limited to who we were able to interview. All of the information we gathered and interviews we conducted focused on community fridge organizers and their experience with maintaining a community fridge. We were not able to identify and interview other stakeholders of a community fridge, such as food insecure populations and/or people who utilize community fridges. While organizers are easily contactable online via instagram, there is no way to know who is using fridges. Since that is a perspective we were missing, it heavily influenced the direction we continued in.


Phase II: Synthesis

Tracing How Might We's

Three How Might We Questions:
              First How Might We: How might we create a more efficient and standardized scheduling process to connect community fridges with volunteers? 
              Second How Might We: How might we create a more seamless process of ensuring that food is distributed evenly across community fridge networks?
              Third How Might We: How might we help community fridges form more consistent, long-term relationships with its food sources?

After interviewing ten community fridge organizers and creating four user journey maps, we came up with a list of 14 themes that captured common pain points in the community fridge process. In order to narrow these themes to the most relevant few, we designed an affinity map that grouped insightful quotes from all ten interviews based on the theme they expressed. With the help of the affinity map, we were able to identify eight themes that had been brought up the most in interviews and from there we ideated on one way we could potentially target or address this theme. We also looked at previous solutions to these themes and identified the pros and cons of each. Once we had a more comprehensive picture of the needs and obstacles of community organizers, as well as potential solutions, we developed three How Might We statements that captured overarching themes we felt we could meaningfully address this semester. For each How Might We, we brainstormed 30 ideas and used a mindmap to visualize where they branch off from one another. We then narrowed them down to five coherent and varied ideas per How Might We and identified the risks of each.

Synthesis: Guiding PIT Question

Are there any unintended consequences in our how might we’s?


When deciding which themes and directions to pursue, we were critical of potential negative impacts. For example, if we focused on increasing outreach and community awareness of fridges, could the over-promotion lead to too many community members depending on or taking food from the fridge, to the point where it might be unable to sustain itself? Additionally, we were hesitant to go in a direction that could lead to the over-standardization and organization of fridges because if there is too much organization, fridges may need to register government entities or non-profits, which can be difficult or lead to taxation struggles.


Phase III: Prototyping

Research impact

Based on the main pain points expressed to us by community fridge organizers, we narrowed down our potential product to four ideas: a scheduling app, a physical sensor to track fridge emptiness, a collaboration with an existing application, and a living resource document. We created low-fidelity wireframes for each of these designs. The scheduling app would have created a single location for volunteers and organizers to coordinate restocking shifts with one another; the sensors would have been physically attached to each fridge to track how long the fridge was opened for, in order to judge emptiness intervals; the collaboration with an existing application would have focused on connecting local businesses with community fridges; and the living resource document would allow community fridges to share various resources, templates, and information with one another to help the community fridge network flourish.
Eventually, we settled on moving forward with the resource document, based on subsequent user tests in which we asked our target users about how effective and how helpful they anticipated each design being for them. While our interviewees were split on the resource document versus an app, we realized that a place for community fridges to share resources with one another upheld the core tenets of the mutual aid structure, despite being somewhat less flashy than an app. It had also become clear that organizers would be hesitant to download another app, since the organization process is already spread out across several platforms. Once we settled on a single design, we decided based on user interviews that email templates, resource guides, and a community forum would be the most useful sections to include.

Prototyping: Guiding PIT Question

Is our design familiar, accessible, and conducive to knowledge-sharing?

Visual Language and Design

Our prototype utilizes a blue and green color palette, as well as a rounded, cartoonish theme throughout. Originally, we considered using a more minimalist, “cleaner” design, but decided that the colors and fun icons were more appealing based on initial user tests. In terms of the layout, we looked to familiar websites that served similar purposes to our own for inspiration, such as Dribbble, Ladder, and others.



User Testing

For the user testing phase we wanted to ensure that the target audience remained in focus as we were testing. We tested six community fridge organizers, three different times, each time with a further developed prototype that reflected their input and ideas.


The feedback we received about the prototype highlighted its need within the community. This feedback was critical in our development process.

Image with quotes from users about pain points and summaries. 
              First quote: people are always DM’ing us and we get the same questions over and over, this would be great to direct them to.
              First Summary: Need for a centralized place for shared questions.
              Second quote: how can we get more organized? I already used slack but it’s so unorganized.
              Second Summary: Need for more organization in sharing information. 
              Third quote: How do i get someone from my crew to link up with other fridges.
              Third Summary: Need more communication between fridges.
Results

Final Design

Designing a centralized and accessible living document to share resources between community fridges organizers

We created a technical protoype of our final solution using Flask and Bootstrap, and have illustrated some of the key features below.

Landing

Our landing page shows the key features of our website resources, and allows for easy access to our getting started page that gives an introduction to our goal and team.

Images of landing pages for overall site, as well as guides, templates, and forum pages

Resource Guides

Organizers have the ability to add guides and search guides.

Image of resource guides with key features labeled: filter and search guides, button to add guides, click into guides
Image of full guides page next to image of the add guide pop-up for users to enter information about they guide they want to add

Templates

Organizers have the ability to look at reusable templates we have compiled, and use our template builder to customize it for their own needs.

Image of sample reusable template that allows for instant customization (from technical prototype)
Three small images showing the template landing page where all templates are displayed, a customizable template before customization and after customization

Forum: Coming Soon

We are still iterating over creating a community forum, which our organizers expressed great interest in. This is currently prototyped in our Figma, and allows users to ask questions to the community, answer questions, and share tips.

Image of forum feature with place for users to ask questions at the top and view and answer questions below

Reflecting

PIT Design Process Reflection

Since different community organizers had different needs, it was difficult to make decisions that wouldn’t meet every organizer’s needs. We ultimately decided to choose a solution that would be most inclusive and accessible for our users.

As we went through the design process, different community organizers were drawn to different solutions. We realized that our prototype was not going to be able to accommodate everyone’s needs equally or solve every need that we found. Instead, we had to decide which subset of the user group we wanted to have an impact on in order to focus our solution on their needs. Even though some organizers preferred other solutions, almost all expressed worry about the ‘buy-in’ of downloading another app. As such, we decided to focus on the living resource guide over the scheduling app, as this seemed to be the most open and inclusive solution. Furthermore, we wanted to consistently keep in mind what technology our users would use, since public interest technology should first and foremost be accessible to our users.


Our ultimate goal of public interest technology was promoting social good by supporting community fridges, so we wanted to always make sure our interests were aligned with their needs. In particular, we consistently considered how to balance the organizers’ desires for a decentralized system and creating a more standardized system for resource sharing.

Taking a user-centered approach to our design allowed for us to engage with the target audience early on and throughout the process. This led us to have a more impactful design process and a better understanding of the pain points within the community fridge networks. There were also unique considerations our organizers brought up in our interviews with them that we had not previously considered. For example, our design needed to align with the mutual-aid framework of community fridges and work within their decentralized system. Rather than designing based on our limited knowledge, user centered design allowed us to ensure our final product was aligned with our communities goals.


While it was challenging at times, we learned the value in sitting with our problem space rather than jumping to solutions by following the design process.double diamond.

The Double diamond design process created a structure that allowed us to anticipate what was coming next, yet at some points we found it challenging to not move ahead. When the team was trying to conduct interviews to identify problems, we were also thinking ahead and taking suggestions for solutions when we should have remained focused on the “define” stage, rather than ideation. In order to remain within the structure, we had to be intentional to not jump ahead before we fully explored and defined the problem.


A question that came up throughout the process and we advise technologists in public interest technology to consider is around commitment and longevity of involvement with the product and the community.

  • In what ways are you considering reciprocation in terms of your user's time and efforts?
  • How do we ensure it stays relevant to the community?
  • How do we maintain the product after the initial handoff?
  • What will your commitment be to the community and the technology you design?


Giving Thanks

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the numerous community fridge organizers who were willing to speak to us multiple times in order to bring this design together. Thank you to Daniel from Mott Haven Community Fridge, Genesis from Jamaica Community Fridge, SG from the Uptown Fridge, Ernest from Freedge, Thadeaus from In Our Hearts, Lea from the Chelsea Fridge, Atlantis from 120MMM, and other organizers and volunteer restockers who helped us during the research stage. We would also like to thank Celeste Layne for mentoring us throughout this semester.