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# System prepended metadata

title: First Team Meeting Worksheet

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# First Team Meeting Worksheet

## Team Members Present

* Stephen Crowe
* Madison Hazard
* Max Lata
* Raphael Preston
* Mike Zhu

## I. Identify a Common Vision
*You’ve all voted on a common idea and themes. Now is the time to work through your commonalities and find a unifying vision between all of you. Answer the following for each of you.  This is the time to speak your mind.  Be honest with each other.*

### Commonalities
*Who makes up your team?  What are some common things you are interested in? Tell each other about the things you put down on the survey and expand on some of your passions.*

We're all interested in building something out of nothing while using some hot technologies that we think would be cool to mess with, namely Digital Assistants, NLP, and Machine Learning. 

### Inspiration
We draw our inspiration from each other and from our mutual excitement to create novel and interesting stuff. In addition, we draw inspiration from our inevitable inability to create our own things once we sell our souls to the corporate machine.

### Problems of Interest
*What problems are you looking to address? Why?*

1. We're interested in **reducing food waste**. We all have been in the situation where we buy groceries, stick them in the fridge, and discover rotten zucchini in the back of the fridge three months later. This is especially distressing for college students, who might not be financially stable. Reducing food waste has both environmental and financial effects.
 
2. We're interested in **minimizing user interaction** needed to use our product. People are inherently lazy, so finding a way to reduce the amount of work on the part of the user is a big area of focus for us.

### Identify
*Which of the above is most interesting to all of you?*

**Minimizing user interaction** is the most technologically challenging, while **reducing food waste** makes the product actually useful.

## II. Narrow In
*Now let's try narrowing in on a problem that interests all of you. Make sure to go around the table and listen to everybody on your team without interruption.*

### Problem Statement
People waste too much food because they don't realize they're wasting it. 

### Rephrase
How might we decrease the burden of entry for users such that they can use our product easily?

### Reframe
*Reframe the question in at least 5 different ways to change the question fundamentally or imply a different solution set.  Try changing scope, or audience, or technology.*

1. How might we point attention to people's food waste?
1. How might we make paying attention to food waste easier than not paying any attention at all?
1. How can we convince people that food waste is a problem they should pay attention to? 
1. How can we integrate food waste reduction into household kitchens?
1. How might we change that people shop?

### Choose
The coolest reframe to us would be:
`How can we integrate food waste reduction into household kitchens?`

#### Coolness
It would be cool to use new technologies to tackle a problem that has been thought about by many people in the past. 

#### Challenges
It will be unfun to make the process so easy that even lazy people would do it. Never underestimate how lazy people can be.

#### Success
Success for this product looks a reduction in food/money waste for users.

## III. Survey the State of the Art
*Do some research — this will be fleshed out further in a full milestone but do some now quickly all together to get started. Try to find what else is out there that is similar, either products, or technical papers that are related.*

### Similar Goals
*Are there others working to achieve similar goals?*
Yes! In fact, Tim worked on this in a hackathon years ago. There are some other apps currently on the market that attempt to do the same thing, but we are trying to iterate on these simple functionalities. 

[List of apps](https://learn.compactappliance.com/apps-for-your-fridge/)

### Differences
*How is your approach different/better than the state of the art?*
* None of the apps have receipt scanning. 
* Some of these apps are bloated in terms of the user experience (e.g. recognizing different brands of canned beans as completely discrete pantry items instead of grouping them together).
* The barcode scanners simply don't work for some users (e.g. Australian barcodes)

### Inspiration
*Are there any existing products/techniques/research, that we could, by analogy, draw inspiration from?*
Many companies maintain complex and exact inventory systems which allow them to optimize their available resources (i.e. Amazon). We would like to bring some of these strategies and efficiencies to the consumer market.
