Hostel Mess Experience Design at IIT Bombay

The IIT Bombay Hostels cater to nearly 8,000 students. Food is the fuel that these students need to stay focused and learn in the classroom. Students have to maintain good physical as well as mental health with daily exams, quizzes, and projects. Students can’t get the home cooked food in hostel messes. Considering the individual taste and interest in food, in almost every institute students have complaints regarding food.

It was found that, previously students had problems with the government mess facilities. Then privatization of IITB hostel messes improved the quality and the food service to some extent. But with the increase of number of students every year, the number of hostels have also increased. The newly built hostels provide common mess facility to large number of students where service providers are failing to provide satisfactory food service to the students most of the times. It was observed that in most of the hostel messes there is a lack of communication between the student’s body and the Mess catering staff. With the change in the council and the mess caterers each year, especially in newly built bigger messes, the problems are escalated catering to student’s dissatisfaction towards food service and mess caterer’s business.

The project aims to provide alternative ways to better the food service, quality and improve students experience in the IITB hostel messes. The outcome of this project is a system which helps to provide an alternate and easy way of communication between the users. It provides an easy access to information related to mess and students opinions.