01 · Research plan
The study was designed to understand how meal decisions are made across a week—and where current tools fail to support the messy reality.
OBJECTIVE
Explore how people decide, coordinate and adapt meals, with particular attention to the moments where effort becomes frustration or food becomes waste.
METHOD MIX
Participant frame
Profiles intentionally varied by household, confidence, dietary need and responsibility for planning.
Plans loosely; often changes course after work.
Balances children’s preferences with time and cost.
Coordinates meals through group messages.
Plans around ingredients rather than recipes.
Uses a repeated weekly template.
Needs substitutions without extra searching.
Plans around offers and ingredient reuse.
Needs reassurance and simple next steps.
Responsible assistance
Automation supported organisation and retrieval; it did not replace participant consent, researcher interpretation or validation.
Only task-relevant, de-identified notes entered the synthesis workflow.
Every generated label retained a route back to the original observation.
Candidate clusters were accepted, changed or rejected by the researcher.
Outliers and conflicting evidence remained visible rather than averaged away.