From Systems For Individuals to…

This is part 2 in a series on the potential for society-computer interaction.

Open your favorite food ordering app. Go ahead, I’ll wait. Whether it’s GubHub, Uber Eats, Caviar, or even less Western-focused ones like Chow Bus or Panda, you’ll be presented with a search bar some promotions and possibly some categories of food.

This system can work fine when you’re just ordering food for yourself and you don’t mind the fees and (if not a bike based delivery) the environmental impacts of a single meal. But let’s imagine that you live in a relatively dense area (suburban or urban area). In those cases, we can leverage emerging technologies built into bluetooth and wifi protocols that allow us to find individuals nearby. Knowing those individuals are nearby and using information the food ordering app may already have about the other individuals in the area (dinner is ordered 90% of the time between 6-7 PM for example and this order is being placed at 6:10 PM). We can push a notification to those other individuals that a neighbor is placing an order and they are able to join the order so that all individuals part of it can save on the delivery fee (one drop off for all) while also reducing the environmental impact.

Taking this beyond food ordering and into helping build community relationships, we can leverage data that’s stored either locally on the phone or through other information known about the individual through their online or app behaviors to suggest conversations between neighbors. Instead of just ordering a meal together and reducing the associated costs of a meal (even more so if it reduces the minimum order) and the environmental consequences of said order, we begin to reknit local communities. These are interactions that may start on a device but then quickly lead to reconnecting to the world around us.

In the next update, I’ll talk more about how this same concept can be applied to people in your home to improve the experience of group ordering. It should be noted that some of story details some concepts in a patent myself and my colleague have had pending since 2019.

Interested in joining the conversation? Reach out to me on LinkedIn.