Catalyst Designathon | april 2023

In 2023, my friend, Winston Jeffries, and I participated in a UI/UX Designathon hosted by Boston University’s design club BU Forge! This designathon was made for college students to showcase how they can think creatively based on the prompts provided. We were given 72 hours to create a solution to the prompt in the form of an app prototype.

Our Prompt

The designathon had three tracks: culture, travel, and coexistence. My teammate and I decided on culture and the prompting question was :

Who we are is created in part by the people around us, just as how different regions are characterized in part by the people that live there. Over time the world has both changed and stayed the same in many ways, with diversity in language and traditions being the cornerstone of all our societies. With more unified communication and information across humanity than ever before, how can we use digital platforms to share and empower our own cultures as well as the cultures we meet?

We redefined this prompt into a how might we statement: how might we encourage the celebration of cultural foods from around the world with social media?

What is Ambrosia?

Our app, Ambrosia, answers the question, “how might we encourage the celebration of cultural foods from around the world with social media?”

Our team found that some people find it hard and intimidating to explore new foods outside of their own. Additionally, some find it difficult to share cuisines due to fear of judgment. However, just researching how many different cultures have toast dishes opened our eyes to a fundamental idea: there are more similarities between cultures than we think -- and when we share and learn from other cultures, food can thrive!

So, what is our app? Ambrosia is an app that allows anyone to share their culture’s food by answering the daily prompt! These would include prompts like, “share your culture’s toast,” “share what your culture puts on rice,” and “share your culture’s noodles.” Users can interact with these dishes - with recipes, comments, and an interactive map.

Our Process

Brainstorming

To create this app, we first started brainstorming on FigJam. Based on the three tracks, we tried to make at least one idea for each track and see which one we liked the best. First, we redefined each track and made the objectives more specific in order to tackle the issues at hand. We talked about issues surrounding culture, travel, and coexistence and further specified what our objective should be with each track.

Once we designated specific questions, we ideated possible solutions. To get the creativity running, we did Krazy 8’s — 8 minutes to think of as many ideas as we could. After creating many, many ideas, we decided to vote on potential apps that we would want to create. We were torn between an app under the culture track that was focused on sharing your culture’s food and an app for the coexistence track that would provide an AI bot to answer difficult questions without judgment and provide a space for open communication.

Here is the FigJam where our brainstorming lived: FigJam

Wireframes

To decide between our two ideas, we decided to make lo-fi wireframes for each app.

Pros

• sharing of cultures

• pretty accessible because lots of versions of food, person would have their own culture’s foods

• communicative

• potential for recipes

• unique - no other app just ppl sharing their recipes

• potential for home cooked underground recipes

• interactive map

Cons

• why use instead of chatgpt

• incentives!!

• is AI always right

• an AI that learns?

• would only use if you have a question

In the end, we decided to work on Ambrosia because the idea was more fun to us - both to create and to potentially use. We also thought that Ambrosia had the most potential to grow while also providing real connection and community between the users.

Creating the App

To create the app, we decided on color palette, fonts and the logo. We also created mid-fi and hi-fi wireframes.

Outcome

This is what the app looked like:

Feel free to view on Figma to see our prototype and the flows!

What Would We Do Differently

After my partner and I had some time to recuperate after this amazing and intense process, we talked about what we would change in our product. We both agreed that we would have cleaned up the UI and overall aesthetic of the app if given more time. Overall, I think we would make it look more sleek and less complicated, as it is now. Because the designathon was so tight, we weren’t really able to map out what we wanted the exact brand aesthetic to be, and I think that shows in the overall UI. I would want to establish a clear brand and voice. Also, I think given our time constraints we did the best we could, but I would have liked to do more research. If we continue building and designing this app, I would love to conduct more UX research, like interviews, usability testing and overall feedback.