YouBuy

Background

Youbuy is the outcome of a long and surprising design thinking process. While searching for a solution to problems created by centralized agriculture (diminishing biodiversity, depletion of fields, quality loss, loss of cultural techniques ect.) we examined the concept of urban farming, which aims at solving said problems by means of decentralization.
Through consumer interviews and expert opinions we realized that these problems (namely the trade-off between economic efficiency and externalized cost factors) are too complex and dependent on too many local variables to be addressed with a uniform solution. We assumed that this problem arises from a lack of knowledge on the level of the individual. We began calling this lack of knowledge "alienation" and began to examine it further.
Soon we understood that consumers are not alienated per se, they usually do possess the knowledge to make conscious use of their purchasing power, but they are trapped in daily routines that make it hard to make objective decisions which reflect their importance. We clustered these issues into the problem-areas "abstraction" and "self-image".

We assumed, that the solution could be found in the overlap of these two circles. We started searching for measures that allowed the customer to understand the products as the consequence of a long and resource-intensive production chain.

Mission Statement

Our conclusions from user research and expert interviews lead us to setting a guideline for creating an environment that incentivises a mindful and conscious shopping experience. This decision lead to a number of design choices for our shopping environment.

These measures shared some common conceptual traits, which we distilled into a mission statement. Thus, the underlying principles can be applied in each and every business decision.

Measures

After creating the mission statement, our measures were concretized to ensure greater consistency with our guiding principles. One example of such measures is the expansion of the information found on price tags to satisfy the guiding principles of openness and respect. This measure allows the customer to comprehend where the product was produced, and how resource-intensive the production was.

Since this resource-intensity can be understood as an externalized cost factor, we created visual equality between these implicit costs and the purchasing price. this is meant to increase conscious reflection in the customer, and to inspire awareness for the consequences of their buying decision.

Furthermore we decided to rearrange the store's assortment to ensure the comparability of products, and to increase clarity, to consciously place causes for thought to increase mindfullness and to implement a simple and clear design language to reduce the confusion of the customer.

Process