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Taipei Tech wins iF Best of the Year featuring food loss reduction

Barcodiscount, a design concept aiming to reduce food loss and improve time-consuming work for staff
Barcodiscount, a design concept aiming to reduce food loss and improve time-consuming work for staff
Taipei Tech wins big at iF Design Talent Award 2020
Taipei Tech wins big at iF Design Talent Award 2020
Dr. Meng-Cong Zheng, adviser of the prize-winning student designers
Dr. Meng-Cong Zheng, adviser of the prize-winning student designers

 

It might be common at supermarkets to find out the daily expiring groceries tagged with discounts, but posting a new price tag can be a time-consuming work for the staff and still causes mistakes. Recognizing the inconvenient situation, three Taipei Tech students – Xin-An Huang, Yan-Yu Zhang, and Jing-Yi Chen from the Master Program of Innovation and Design thus came up with an idea, called Barcodiscount, designing to ease the workload of supermarket workers and to reduce the costs. This design concept wins big at the iF Design Talent Award with a Best of the Year and EUR 3,000.

Barcodiscount includes the design concept that turns the original price into a discounted one by automatic changes on the color of the price and the bar code as the expiry time approaches. The design not just saves labor work posting the discount stickers and manually entering the percent taken off from the original price, but also simplifies the processing of data and logistics. Overall, it facilitates better inventory management and customer services 

“Barcodiscount is an interesting proposal with great application potential,” indicated in the jury statement. “It solves two key problems of the food retail; it reduces waste by encouraging consumers to buy products that will soon perish, and streamlines logistics and data management.”

iF Design Talent Award is known as “the Oscar of Design” for young designers worldwide, and it features the 15 SDGs of the Unite National for the first time. This year, Taipei Tech has a great showing in the competition with 3 Excellences, 2 Winners, and 1 Best of the Year. These prize-winning designs aim to fulfill the world's sustainable goals and provide solutions to medical and environmental issues. For instance, Colorwrap, the food wrap signals with a change in color as a reminder of the expiration of food to reduce food waste. Medical-related designs such as Beat Massage, Triage Bracelet, and Tetra-Pak-HIV are also the eye-catching works that are likely to iron out the hurdles in the current medical or first-aid scenarios.

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