Wenwen Fan

With rapidly shrinking land resources, nowadays scientists have looked into the ocean and found the new green gold—seaweed. It has been identified as a sustainable, nutritional superfood for future generations. Although seaweed is commonly seen in Asian diets such as sushi rolls and miso soup, many people in Western societies are still unfamiliar with how to cook with seaweed, some are also held back by its green and slimy food texture.
 
Seaweed U aims to promote a more convenient, playful and pleasurable seaweed diet solution as a way of food education in Western societies and help boost global market acceptance for seaweed. This project has created innovative food materials from seaweed—vegan seaweed wrappers, and an online platform offering customization for its nutritions and flavors. 
 
These seaweed wrappers can be used as edible packaging for snacks and dissolvable pouches, providing extra nutritional value including vitamins, minerals as well as polysaccharides from seaweed that may help support your gut health.

There are three suggested scenarios in using these seaweed wrappers: Trick or Treat, The Lazy Pouch and Super Chef.

- Trick or Treat: It is a healthy snack made from fruity-taste seaweed skins. Through combining a more familiar food palate like nuts and berries with the nutritional skins, it enables people to enjoy seaweed through daily snacking without being held back by the green and slimy texture.

- The Lazy Pouch: It is a single serve, dissolvable pouch with different types of seaweed like wakame, dulse and kelp etc. to choose from on the Seaweed U online website. It offers a convenient, tasty and quality meal supplement for young professionals living a fast-pace lifestyle.

- Super Chef: It offers a creative DIY food experiences in the kitchen. People can play with this versatile material in combination with ordinary ingredients to make creative dishes such as transparent onigiris, ice cream raviolis and even colorful spring rolls.

In fact, eating seaweed can help combat climate change. According to scientists, building seaweed farming network on just 9% of the world’s ocean could offset carbon emission entirely. This project looks into redesigning the food experience for eating seaweed and help people better incorporate this sustainable future superfood into their daily diet.

In today’s fast-growing aging society, Alzheimer disease has become the most common age-related disease all over the world. Caregivers, who usually are patients’ family members, fail to empathize and communicate with their loved ones due to the lack of knowledge of this irreversible disease.

The Unmentioned aims to help educate the caregivers and the general public for the unmentioned details of the Alzheimer’s disease through an immersive AR simulation experience.

Participants can explore all the hallucinations and delusions from a first-person view with the embodiment of an old man living with Alzheimer’s disease. People can physically walk through an AR portal and enter two daily scenarios (living room and bedroom), and experience difficulties and anxieties of an Alzheimer’s patient in everyday life. For example, people might see weird blocks in the room, illegible newspapers and a creepy cat crying like a baby etc….

This AR simulation tool has been tested in New York Memory Center, a non-profit innovative wellness center for Alzheimer’s disease. Professional caregivers have given positive feedback on gaining much deeper understanding of their patients after trying the AR experience.

According to scientific research, the information being stored, or encoded into memory is 70% higher for AR experiences. Therefore, this AR simulation of Alzheimer’s disease would have great potentials in the future promoted as a meaningful educational tool on a larger scale.

For the public, a better knowledge of these brain diseases can help build up a better social environment for the fast-growing aging population. For designers, empathizing with the target users is the core of designing inclusive products for the elderly. For the Alzheimer’s patients themselves, a clear understanding of what they might face in the future would help them be more mentally prepared for later stages of the disease, as well as better cooperation with treatment exercises in maintaining current phases.