Healthy snacks get a bad wrap

I will be presenting this research performed by the Design Information Research Group (DIRG) this evening at the Origins of Obesity symposium organized by the Nutrition and Wellness Research Center in Ames, Iowa.

Here is the original press release about the research from Fall 2010:

A study titled Tailoring snack package designs to children as a health communication strategy is currently underway at Iowa State University. The study is a collaborative research effort being conducted by the Design Information Research Group (DIRG) and the Nutrition and Wellness Research Center (NWRC). The NWRC recently awarded DIRG a $5,000 grant incentive for the collaborative proposal.

“Childhood obesity is a growing problem in this country. Helping children choose a healthier snack is something that they need to learn at an early age. What they learn now about food will carry with them through adulthood,” says Debra Satterfield, Director of Graphic Design at Iowa State University. Satterfield, along with Sunghyun Kang, Associate Professor of Graphic Design at ISU, co-founded DIRG in 2003.

The team will research the verbal messages on snack food packaging in terms of typography, color, visual style and impact of brand and health messaging. Satterfield says, “There are many programs targeted to children about health and healthy eating, but there is little research about how the package design can effect a child’s choice of snack food. This research will determine what visual factors on the package will aid a child’s decision for choosing a healthy snack and hopefully instigate a system-wide change. The ultimate benefit of doing this research is giving policy makers quantitative and qualitative data to combat childhood obesity.”

There is much potential for further research into this category and room for further funding to increase the number of participants, researchers and other topics in regards to children’s snack food choices. Satterfield says the incentive grant will help them conduct a pilot study while they submit a grant proposal to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, for additional funding.

The designers and researchers at DIRG are nationally and internationally recognized as experts in the field of design. In 2007, Satterfield’s team received a three-year research grant through the Bailey Research Career Development Award to collaborate with the Mayo Clinic. The study involves researching how design variables influence the decision-making process of patients using the decision aids. A paper on teaching Kansei engineering, which Satterfield presented at a 2003 design research conference in Japan, caught the attention of Frito-Lay. Interested in finding a non-engineer who could apply Kansei engineering to product design, the company asked Satterfield and her team to research user experience of Tostitos chips.

DIRG is able to provide design research, human subject testing, ethnographic research, design prototyping, and information design solutions. Their association with the College of Design and Iowa State University offers easy access to resources and expertise in a wide variety of additional fields such as education, engineering, virtual reality, computer science, business, psychology, communication, and the arts.