STRATEGY
The strategy behind COMMN is all about making food resources feel more visible, approachable, and normal to use. The project explores how design and language can help reduce stigma, and shift the conversation from charity to community support. The result is a flexible system designed to help colleges communicate their existing resources in a more student centered way.
COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS
One of the challenges in researching this space is that there doesn’t seem to be a resource quite like COMMN—both a stigma reducing brand system, and plug-and-play toolkit that schools can use with their existing resources. Because of that, I looked at three categories of partial comparables:
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Anti Stigma Campaigns
Awareness and anti-stigma campaigns offer strong messaging strategies, especially around normalizing help seeking. What they don’t generally offer is an actionable or customizable system campuses can adopt.
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Student Facing Toolkits
These toolkits are designed to be implemented easily on any campus, or downloaded by individual students. Active Minds is an excellent example of this approach, however their focus is in the mental health space.
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Campus Food Programs
I looked at existing campus food programs—pantries, fridges, mutual aid efforts. They do an incredible job providing food, but usually lack cohesive communication, visibility, or design systems that make the resources feel normalized or inviting. Many students list awareness and visibility as one of the reasons they don’t utilize resources.
TO SUMMARIZE
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Most existing systems focus on access, not stigma reduction
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Many programs rely on institutional or administrative language
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Few campaigns use student-centered branding or social communication strategies
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Plug-and-play communication systems for colleges are limited
TARGET AUDIENCE
COMMN is designed for college students navigating food insecurity, with a focus on undergraduate and graduate students ages 18–30.
Research shows that food insecurity disproportionately affects first generation, international, and many students of color. This highlights the need for accessible, inclusive, and stigma-free resource communication.
PERSONAS
Personas are research-based representations of real users that help guide design decisions by highlighting different needs, experiences, and barriers. For this thesis, personas were used to better understand how students from different backgrounds experience food insecurity, stigma, and access to support resources.
