Abstract
The STS research paper was written because of something my team noticed while developing our capstone project. A lot of college students and other young adults tend to rely heavily on food delivery apps and ordering out instead of actually cooking for themselves. And when they do have to cook, whether it is because they ran out of money or just needed to eat something quick at home, they really struggle with even the basics. Simple things like boiling pasta or knowing how long to cook chicken. That pattern is what pushed us to build SousChef in the first place, but it also made us want to understand why it was happening. Why are so many people our age just not cooking? The STS paper is our attempt to dig into that question and figure out what is actually driving it.
The STS paper argues that DoorDash did not just become popular because it was useful. It became the default because a specific set of social groups, mostly designers and investors, built a platform that made ordering feel like the obvious choice and made cooking feel like extra work. Using the Social Construction of Technology framework, the paper shows that this shift was not natural or inevitable. It was the result of deliberate design decisions, like showing you food photos before you have even decided to order, or making it hard to cancel a DashPass subscription. Over time, those decisions added up into something cultural. Ordering became normal. Cooking became the thing you do when you have extra time, which for most college students means never.
SousChef is a direct response to that problem. The technical paper describes a cooking education app built for young adults, one that tries to meet people where they actually are rather than assuming they already know how to cook. Instead of presenting a list of techniques to memorize, SousChef teaches skills through real recipes, starting simple and getting harder over time. It borrows from the same gamification strategies that delivery apps use to keep people engaged, except it points those strategies toward building a skill rather than reinforcing a habit of outsourcing.
The connection between the two projects is not just thematic. The STS paper helped clarify why a tool like SousChef needs to be designed carefully. One of the key arguments in the SCOT analysis is that DoorDash succeeded partly by lowering the psychological cost of ordering while quietly raising the perceived cost of cooking. Any app trying to push back against that has to take the design question seriously. If SousChef feels like homework, it will not work. The gamification elements, the step-by-step structure, the AI assistant for substitutions, these are not just features. They are an attempt to make cooking feel as low-friction as opening DoorDash.
The STS paper also names something that the technical paper does not fully address, which is the structural conditions that push students toward delivery in the first place. Low cooking confidence, time pressure, tight budgets, and limited kitchen access all show up in the research as reasons students order instead of cook. SousChef can help with confidence, and to some extent with the time investment, since guided recipes reduce the cognitive load of figuring out what to do. But it cannot fix a dorm with no kitchen or a schedule with no breathing room. The STS analysis is a reminder that a technical solution is only ever part of the answer.
Still, the SCOT framework also suggests that the current situation is not locked in. DoorDash became dominant through a social process, which means a different outcome is possible through a different social process. SousChef is a small attempt at exactly that. It will not outcompete DoorDash on convenience, but it is trying to offer something DoorDash cannot, which is the actual skill of knowing how to feed yourself. If enough people use it, and if it is designed well enough that they keep using it, it could contribute to a small shift in what cooking means for college students. That is the argument the STS paper ends on, and it is the argument SousChef is built to test.
Together, these two papers reflect a pretty simple idea. The way people relate to food is shaped by the tools available to them, and tools are shaped by the people who build them. The STS project is an attempt to understand how that process worked in one direction. The technical project is an attempt to push it into another.
