Role
Service Designer
UX Designer
Category
Service Design | UX/UI Design | User Research
Duration / Year
4 months / 2025
Service Platform for Community Food Support
Feedie reimagines how people access community food support in the UK, developed through iterative, real-world testing with 8+ stakeholders across food redistribution organisations, local charities, and food banks.

This project addresses the systemic gap between surplus food redistribution and everyday access, supporting under-resourced community hubs managing rising demand and operational complexity to provide a more accessible community service for people in need.

My Role: Led the end-to-end research-to-delivery process, driving field interviews, journey mapping, workshop facilitation, and rapid prototyping to uncover and bridge systemic gaps.

Team: Hsing Ju Huang, Szu Yu Chen, Yi Hsuan (Winnie) Wu
London design award 2025
Project timeline: we start from desk research, interview, site investigation, validation workshop, mappping, concept ideation, lo-fi&hi-fi prototyping
(Iterative design process)
The process of this project moved through cycles of opportunity mapping, concept ideation, and low-fidelity evaluation, using early prototypes as tools for dialogue and sense-making with real stakeholders. Feedback from charities, volunteers, and recipients informed successive refinements, allowing the intervention to evolve in response to operational constraints and lived realities.
The Challenge
In the UK, 1 in 4 families are struggling to feed their kids. Surprisingly, food bank users are not who we might expect; with 3 of 5 food bank users actually have a job (Trussell Trust, 2024), but still hard to afford daily meals.

As living costs rise, more “Working Households” are turning to seek community food support. While they earn enough to cover utility bills, there is simply not enough left for food after paying the essentials.

11.3 M

People are facing food insecurity

3 of 5

Food bank users are employed

75%

Food banks see increasing demand
“Even with a full-time job, I can't afford enough food for my child, which is humiliating to admit that. I had to visit 5 food banks before I finally got food because there’s hardly any useful information online. Trying to coordinate that with my work schedule was a real challenge.”
— Research Participant, Working Full-time
What we heard from the underserved emerging group  — “Working households”
Guided by an ethical framework, we first ran workshops and interviews with experts and frontline volunteers—who witness these struggles daily—to uncover gaps in current food bank experiences. We then reached service users directly through volunteer referrals, ensuring our solutions are grounded in real lived needs.
Key barrier 1 – unpredictable access
Hard to find open hours and egibility in advance makes access unpredictable and hard to plan around working hours.
Key barrier 2 – social stigma & Isolation
Being asked to explain their situation makes seeking help feel exposing. This social stigma often becomes a silent barrier to asking for help but feel isolated.
Key barrier 3 – unfamiliar food received
Receiving unfamiliar food without guidance at food support often leads to frustration and waste.
Challenge 1 – Maunal Queue Management
Scattered and outdated service information forces volunteers to manage queues and explain rules and eligibility to visitors manually.
challenge 2  – Improvised daily Operations
Food handling and distribution become reactive; volunteers juggle queues, food, and questions simultaneously, increasing stress and operational errors.
challenge 3 – Fragmented coordination
Unclear roles and lack of shared task coordination lead to duplicated effort and gaps in responsibility.
The Hidden Challenge at the Community Food Support
Local community groups and small charities are where food actually meets people. Access barriers for working households led us to a deeper question: Why is the system so hard for them to access support?

Through site visits and interviews, we uncovered that the inconsistencies in service for recipients are a direct symptom of a systemic gap at the community level.
“The real challenge at community food support is that the entire system relies on volunteers' ‘goodwill’, which makes it a restricted service.”
— CEO from food redistribution NGO
Problem statement
Food support system has a “narrow entry” for people to step in , stemming from double pressure on recipients' barriers & community challenges, making access to support unpredictable and unsustainable.
How might we...
make community food support easier to find, use, and engage with while supporting volunteers with smoother coordination?
The Big Idea — Reimagining a New Touchpoint for Accessing
Feedie transforms food aid from a one-way transaction into a shared community experience. By making support easier to navigate and manage, Feedie enables people to engage with food support with greater dignity and stronger community trust.
Empowering the "Working Households": From Surviving to Thriving
Recognizing that food insecurity often signals deeper needs, Feedie focuses first on access,
then builds capacity, and finally supports social confidence and agency to foster long-term stability and well-being for recipients.
stage 01

access
food support

Make food support easier to find, book, and access with confidence

‍→ Make help feel reachable
stage 02

Engage with community

Encourage learning from others and exchanging experiences.

→ Build trust and reduce isolation
stage 03

grow with confidence

Support food usage, foster idea sharing with peers.

‍→ Feel ready to move on
stage 01

access food support

Food support is often hard to plan and emotionally exposing for working households.


Feedie centralizes service information and booking access, allowing people to plan visits around their daily lives while helping food banks better manage access and needs.
stage 02

Engage with community

Beyond accessing food, many people feel isolated and disconnected from others in similar situations.

Feedie encourages peer exchange and community participation, helping people learn from each other and rebuild trust through shared experiences.
stage 03

grow with confidence

As people become more familiar with food support, Feedie helps them build confidence in using food and recognising their own contribution.

This makes support shifts from simply receiving help to supporting and engaging with others.

Support communities on daily operation

Food support is often hard to plan and emotionally exposing for working households.


Feedie centralizes service information and booking access, allowing people to plan visits around their daily lives while helping food banks better manage access and needs.
“We would try our best to understand each household so we can give food that actually works for them. But we never know who’s coming or what food we’ll have each week, so we just try our best to serve them.”
— Volunteer at local food bank
The Vision: Enhancing Community Networking
Feedie acts as a bridge, strengthening the flow of information, preparation, and care across the system.

By improving shared visibility, supporting volunteer coordination, and surfacing recipient voices, it shifts food support toward a more responsive, relational network.

This enables stronger feedback loops between redistribution NGOs and local hubs, fostering a more dignified, predictable, and community-centred support experience.
review
This project began as an investigation into the pain points of working households and evolved into a holistic systemic intervention for food support as we recognized that user friction was a symptom of under-supported community operations.

Given the constraints of working with ethically vulnerable recipients, traditional academic research methods proved impractical. We therefore adopted an iterative validation approach — forming hypotheses through observations, then rapidly testing them through targeted interviews with real stakeholders.

This allowed us to maintain research rigor within a strict 5-month timeline while staying grounded in frontline realities. And this project doesn’t stop at academic exhibition; we are currently exploring pilot opportunities with NGOs and planning further user validation to strengthen and refine the system.

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