Diversifying Recipes App

With this design project, I was tasked with identifying a design problem in society that instead of just inhibiting inclusion, also inhibits diversity. The ideas that immediately came to mind were all from past experiences where I have been unable to make certain dishes because the recipe was not meant to reach a diverse audience. With this in mind, I created an app that acts as a database where users can upload and search for different recipes. The recipes will be translated into any language and offer substitution suggestions. This way recipes can become more diverse in terms of language and resource availability.
The design problem this solution is supposed to help is how many recipes inhibit diversity because they are only meant for one particular audience in both language and resources. Many recipes are only written in one language, and barely ever have a read-aloud function, which excludes anyone who does not understand that language from making the food. This, in turn, can lead to users creating prejudice and negative cultural stereotypes because they are unable to diversify their knowledge of the culture. As well as, recipes from certain areas of the world or culture also tend to only use ingredients found there and offer no substitutions for users in other parts of the world.
The design process for this design intervention went quicker than the one for the first project, mainly because there were more elements that mirrored one another across the pages. For the process I created wireframes using Adobe illustrator, starting with the main page. I began with the header and sub-headers, that would connect all the other pages together. This is because these elements would be constant across all pages designed. From there I created the main page buttons to link the user to the other actions they would take, starting with uploading their own recipes. For this page, I took elements from other websites that have unloadable content and modified it to have the diversifying elements. Next, I did the recipe finder, which again is based on similar websites and databases, and ended with the recipe reader that is basically the same as the uploader without the capability to edit. The main challenge that this design process took was fitting in all the required information because I did not want everything to be too cramped on the pages. At first, I had more information about the recipes that I felt would be useful from personal experience. I responded to the challenge though by taking these elements out because they were the main concern for information overload for the user.
Looking back on this experience I actually found it harder than I originally thought. While there were elements of the design process that worked, like the wireframing, because of previous experience. What I really struggled with and what didn’t work at first was coming up with the idea of how to diversify the idea of the recipe. This is because I originally wanted to design another physical prototype idea but was struggling to come up with an idea that I liked. This experience is what lead me to change my idea to an app with a database which I knew would be useful and able to diversify knowledge. What I learned from this experience are some different method of brainstorming I looked up to help me when I was stuck and how-to wireframe in Adobe Illustrator instead of Adobe XD. These lessons have helped me evolve as an inclusive designer because it made me look at different elements of physical and digital prototypes to see how they relate to different types of users and the ability to share new knowledge with other designers when they are struggling.