Jamie?s #WeirdWeek is a concept for an annual campaign by Jamie Oliver aimed at making young adults more comfortable with food experimentation, by encouraging them to cook from a recipe generator app or handout, and then posting their results to Instagram under the hashtag #WeirdWeek.

Through watching Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat (a show about cooking fundamentals) and reading about food science on Wikipedia, I put together a complex spreadsheet to categorise and simplify the science of flavour. Food quantities, cutting size and cooking times are shown as symbols that helps you to intuitively understand the recipe.

Through speaking with the manager of a food bank in Newcastle, as well as a food charity that works with Jamie Oliver, I began to understand the lack of food education present in modern education, and how easy it is to fall into bad habits that can affect your health, mood, leading to a vicious cycle that becomes difficult to break free from.

Through following the UK?s Guideline Daily Amount and talking with an NHS GP, I managed to give a rough estimate for quantities on each food type for the recipe maker to create nutritious meals every time. The base foods were chosen as sustainable options based on data from How Bad Are Bananas and The Water We Eat, so that users could naturally get used to using these foods without having to do extensive research each time.

I iterated and validated the user experience of the product through focus groups where the participants tried some recipe combinations. Through user feedback in focus groups, I was able to evolve the design to be intuitive and delightful to use.