Food + Future CoLab

During my time at IDEO's Food + Future CoLab—a partnership with Target and MIT Media Lab that produced notable innovations like Target's Good + Gather organic food brand—I developed multiple food science and technology concepts, with my primary focus on Illuminate, a spectroscopy-based system using light data readings to authenticate fresh foods, track microbiome impacts, and study seasonal food degradation.

Illuminate made its public debut at the White House's South by South Lawn innovation event, where I created visuals for a HoloLens demo implemented by Danny DeRuntz and designed food authentication fact posters. The Illuminate system was designed to empower various stakeholders across the food supply chain—from farmers to distributors to consumers—by providing comprehensive nutritional data verification at distribution centers while serving as a transparent data layer throughout the process. My complementary projects included Landshare, which explored soil sampling and analysis to create equitable relationships between producers and distributors through predictive yield outcomes and farmland value assessment; a web experience documenting an Illuminate-tracked calf's journey through the food system alongside our research findings from Target's Lakeland distribution center; Soundbites, an interactive audio installation using MakeyMakey technology that allowed visitors to touch commonly counterfeited foods to hear related fraud news stories and interviews (a prototype of that can be played with here, use your a, b,and c keys.); and American Fish by Illuminate, which enabled consumers to view authentication data on their phones at the point of sale through tags initially applied on fishermen's boats at the moment of catch.