The following is a basic description of one of the
project options available this term.

Imagine that you have a refrigerator in your home with an Internet connection and a touchscreen tablet on the door, and will have an associated mobile app on your phone that "pairs" with it. See the hardware rules for details on the size of the tablet and target for the standard sort of smartphone. You may opt to have a video camera inside of the refrigerator, but we are not being futuristic (no AI or ML) and we are in an HCI course (so the focus cannot be on things that AI or machine learning would do, this is about direct human interactions).

You need to design the user experience for the refrigerator door at home and the smartphone app, paying careful attention to the types of shopping tasks involved in multiple-person homes (whether a family or a group of students or friend living together). You need to explore the locations where that smartphone app might be used and how, and realize that "in the kitchen" is where you would not use it (you would use the tablet on the refrigerator. While the smartphone app's purpose might not be just holding a remote, live, copy of a shopping list, that should certainly be one of its features. The refrigerator-mounted device should be the primary focus and primary means of interaction with the system when in the kitchen (don't expect a user to stand in the kitchen and pull out their smartphone). For the smartphone side, it is meant to be used outside the kitchen (at work? upstairs in the home? in the grocery store!) and it is anticipated that while this "side" would involve fewer features, they will be well-targeted ones. You cannot just have the same app reformat itself between the two devices.

Consider what interesting issues tied to this context can be explored (dietary preferences, healthy eating, avoiding waste, spoiled food, ingredients for recipes, etc).

You will need to find out how users would like to use each "side" of the system as part of your work. During Phase 1, you will want to explore and consider the many different groups of people who might share a home. For Phase 2, you might narrow your interactive prototype elements into a single such living scenario, and your low-fidelity drawings in Phase 1 might as well, but you should start by exploring broadly and then work towards an overall design and set of features that would work across those populations, even though the drawings/prototypes themselves might show a specific one. Similarly, just as you will be considering different group dynamics, you should be considering different dietary ranges as well as cooking and baking skills and desires.

Some example bare-minimum requirements