SWITCH – Digital Hub Experience

How can we encourage citizens across Europe to adopt eating habits that are good for both their health and the environment?

That question lies at the heart of SWITCH, a research project funded by Horizon Europe that brings together 21 partners from 8 countries over 4 years. It gathers experts in social and environmental sciences, nutrition, design and computer science to shed light on the path from farm to fork: farmers, chefs, consumers and policymakers.

After Resoli (Quartiers solidaires), EPFL+ECAL Lab invited us to join them in this new collaboration. EPFL+ECAL Lab, in partnership with the CMCC Foundation, led the research and design of the Digital Hub Experience; we ensured its technical feasibility, built it, and maintain it.

SWITCH relies on six regional hubs across Europe. Each hub covers one or more urban centres, their peri-urban areas and their rural hinterland, through which people, food and resources circulate. Researchers, farmers, chefs, educators and policymakers work together there.

SWITCH produces valuable scientific knowledge, but there is a wide gap between these complex findings and how the public understands them. The Digital Hub Experience is designed to bridge that gap: citizens can discover recipes and events, food professionals can connect within their community, and the platform serves as an experimental framework for AI tools that foster food literacy.

To serve such varied audiences and contexts, we chose a decoupled architecture:

This separation lets each hub manage its own content independently, while giving users a fast, consistent experience whichever hub they belong to.

In a European project, multilingual support is about more than translating an interface. Content is cultural too: a recipe, an event or a local stakeholder only makes sense in its own context.

On the platform, users pick a hub and a language. Since not every combination has dedicated content, we had to design specific fallback mechanisms so that everyone always finds relevant content, in a language they understand, without losing the local roots of the chosen hub.

Data protection was a core concern. To measure how the platform is used, we relied on Plausible, a privacy-friendly, cookie-free analytics tool, rather than conventional tracking.

Launched in January 2023, SWITCH is organised into 9 work packages. Following the research and design phase led by EPFL+ECAL Lab, the Digital Hub Experience is now available in all six project hubs.

The Digital Hub Experience turns academic data into a resource for real-world change. The project extends our collaboration with EPFL+ECAL Lab and reflects how we like to work: putting a solid, multilingual, privacy-conscious technical architecture at the service of a design shaped by and for research.

Discover the platform: switchdiet.app Learn more about the SWITCH project: switchdiet.eu