CFIL | Sheydarashidi

Immersing in Vancouver's Food System

The discovery phase began with action research across Vancouver's food system. The team conducted site visits to restaurants, grocery stores, and other food organizations and businesses across the city, meeting with staff, managers, and owners to understand the day-to-day realities of their work. Rather than relying on assumptions, the team needed to get hands-on experience in the actual environments where food waste happened.

To guide these conversations and capture meaningful insights, I co-designed a workbook with colleagues that included prompts and systemic design tools to help stakeholders reflect on their practices and share their stories. The workbook structured how the team would listen, what questions to ask, and how to translate individual experiences into systemic patterns. Through these site visits and collaborative conversations, the team gathered the foundation needed to understand Vancouver's food system's challenges and identify opportunities for intervention.

On the left you can see an example of a workbook I completed and below are images of our site visits.

Mapping the Patterns Keeping the System Stuck

The site visits and stakeholder conversations revealed that individual challenges across Vancouver's food businesses were not isolated problems. They were symptoms of deeper systemic patterns that reinforced each other in a cycle. To make these patterns visible and actionable, the team translated the research findings into feedback loops, diagrams that show how behaviors, mindsets, and structures connect in a self-reinforcing cycle.

Feedback loops are critical in systemic design because they reveal why a problem persists even when people want to change. They show not just what is happening but why it keeps happening, which is the leverage point for meaningful intervention.

For the Measure What Matters prototype, the feedback loop revealed a stabilizing cycle called No Measurement, No Awareness, No Care. Businesses were not transparent about food waste because they were not measuring it. They were not measuring it because staff were already overworked and measurement was not part of their job. Because no one measured, no one understood the scale of the problem, so no resources or motivation were allocated to change it. The cycle kept reinforcing itself with no natural exit point.

Understanding this cycle made the design challenge clear: breaking into the loop required more than telling businesses to measure. It required making measurement feel worth doing.

Solving for Motivation, Not Awareness

The feedback loop identified the precise leverage point where the cycle could be broken. The problem was not that businesses lacked awareness of food waste. It was that measurement had no motivational context that made it feel worth doing. Staff were already overworked, measurement was not part of their job description, and no existing structure gave them a reason to engage with it. Changing the measurement tool would not solve this. Changing the conditions around measurement would.

I co-designed the For The Love of Food Challenge, a two-week city-led initiative that reframed measurement from a compliance task into a department-wide competition. Two design decisions were critical here. First, positioning the challenge as a city-level policy commitment rather than a voluntary effort gave it institutional legitimacy that a store-level request could never have achieved. Second, introducing friendly competition between departments created intrinsic motivation that transformed measurement from something imposed on staff into something they chose to engage with.

The reframe was the design. Everything else was in service of making that shift feel real.

From Design Decision to Real Conditions

The challenge ran for two weeks across different departments of a participating grocery store. To support it in practice, I co-designed two artifacts: a reflective journal (on the right) for managers with prompting questions to help them observe and reflect on their operations, and a measurement documentation form (below) that gave staff a simple and structured way to record their food handling practices day by day.

What emerged was significant. For the first time, the business measured food going to compost alongside food going to donation, revealing a dimension of waste that had previously been entirely invisible in their operations. The challenge did not just generate data. It changed what the business could see about itself.