Do You Eat This? Changing Behavior Through Gamification, Crowdsourcing and Civic Engagement

Abstract

The current excessive use of artificial additives by the food industry, the side effects of these potentially harmful ingredients and their impact on public health should be more widely acknowledged by consumers and further disclosed and discussed by citizens. Governments should develop stricter regulations on food additives, promote better labeling, apply taxes on miscreant food and conduct tighter industry surveillance. In parallel, broader behavior change towards nutrition habits might also be fostered through social innovation and citizen participation. In this paper, we present the design process for creating Dyet (Do you eat this?), a gamified app devised for collecting data and informing on the presence of such additives in commercially available food products. We argue that information on food ingredients and artificial additives should not only be accessible and legible, but also intelligible and personally meaningful to citizens. Through gameplay, we expect to foster the habit of reading ingredients lists, encouraging users to better inform themselves about what they eat and drink. Our overall goal is to change consumer’s potentially unsafe eating habits by bringing visibility to the excessive intake of artificial additives and on harmful food industry practices, making it possible and easier for everyone to make healthier dietary choices.