The Food Front Delayed Satisfaction Know What You Grow Three projects by second year students on BA (Hons) Graphic Product Innovation at London College of Communication in response to a live brief set by Food Up Front. The project was run by Jonas Piet from Engine Service Design.
For more information go to: www.bagpi.co.uk/index.php/studentwork/food-up-front-project
the brief The brief was set by Seb Mayfield from Food Up Front who was aiming to find new ways to encourage 16 – 24 year olds to grow some food at home. Below you can see some of the results that came from our second year students working in groups under the direction of Jonas Piet from Engine Service Design. The final client presentations were extremely successful, with Seb confessing that at first he didn’t understand what designers could do for Food Up Front but agreed to set a brief because he never says no to anything, and coming out of the presentation extremely enthusiastic and wanting to carry forward all three ideas.
Your brief is to design something that Food Up Front can use to motivate and encourage 16 to 24 year olds to grow some of their own food. Food Up Front has identified an audience that they see as hard to reach. There may be different reasons for this, as outlined in the introduction above. Your task is to tackle some of these reasons and to create something that would motivate young people to change their behaviour and attitude towards growing their own food. The final outcome should be something that uses design to tackle the problem. This could be (but is not limited to): •A new campaign (with relevant promotional material) •A new product (with an indication of how it would be marketed) •A new service proposition (with relevant ‘service evidence’ material) •You could also think of redesigning something that already exists to refocus it to your target market. Your designs should be developed far enough to be able to test them with a sample of your target audience and they should be clear enough to “speak for themselves”.
the process Jonas Piet guided the students through the process of the project, with a strong service design approach. The first thing to do was to interview people in the right age bracket and come together as a class with a collection of user profiles. The user profiles were then analysed and organised into groups, out of which the students developed two personas to represent the age range which is quite broad and covers 16 year old school students living at home with their parents to 24 year old young professionals living on their own. The students then brainstormed ideas that would be suitable for these two personas, and assembled all the ideas together, looking at whether there was
any overlap or connections between different ideas. Groups were formed around the preferred ideas, which were then developed into the three concepts you see below. Interestingly the three concepts cover the three possible areas that were outlined, with one focusing on designing a service, one focusing on a product and one focusing on a campaign. Because of how the project was run and developed all three concepts had a strong focus towards the context and the user, looking beyond the simple product or advertising by looking at the whole system that the concept would fit into.
the food front The Food Front is an entrepreneurial scheme for young people. As a representative of the Food Front they will grow and sell their own fruit and vegetables, become an active part of their local community and gain business experience. From speaking to young people it was evident that there would be interest in growing vegetables if there was a reason to do so. So we tried to think of a good incentive. We decided that earning money would be a good way of encouraging them to grow food. There will be a voluntary Rep who will work alongside schools to either try
to place the campaign in to the schools curriculum or introduce it as an after school activity. The reps main role will be to encourage the Food Front members to consider taking the campaign to their local street as well as provide support and guidance to Food Front workers. We feel that the Food Front would be successful as a campaign to get young people to grow and eat their own fruit and vegetables but also encourage others to eat more food that is organic too. The members will learn to manage and run a small business.
delayed satisfaction Delayed Satisfaction plays with what can be a long journey of growing your own food and it intends to make the process seem shorter.
blueberry muffins from your fully grown blueberries), a window sticker and a surprise present in each pack for your gathering.
The packs are based on four different social experiences - going for a picnic, home cinema, going for some drinks or just having tea - where the customer is encouraged to invite a friend to join them on the experience of growing food with them or just invite them to the social event once the plants are fully grown. Hence the brand, Delayed Satisfaction.
The idea is that people get excited about growing, that they share the idea with friends and pass it on. Our packaging was designed to be a desirable product, simple but elegant enough to get someone’s attention on markets like Brick Lane, Camden, Old Spitafields, Organic food markets and others. The challenge is to capture a younger audience grow and this product offers involvement, interaction, understanding of growing without a need of much hard work, a balcony or a garden.
All of the four packs contain two types of seeds which relate to the nature of the final intended event (e.g. camomile and blueberry seeds for the ‘Tea at 5’ experience), two pots and two bags of soil (we want people to get their hands dirty), recipes (e.g. to make
Delay Your Satisfaction by getting a richer experience nurtured by you.
know what you grow Our service takes almost the form of a game. Part of it is the starter pack: this is sold at the most popular retailers among youth to make sure they will know about it. It is very affordable and contains all the necessary stuff for them to start growing. To give people motivation to grow we’ve created slick design and came up with the following system. In the starter pack is a bag of unknown seeds. Three types of seeds divided in three sections. Every section has a serial number to identify the seeds later on. Plant seeds in to the soil, stick the serial
number there. Take care of your seed; give it enough light, water it and wait for it to sprout. When your plant has grown up and is identifiable go to your online account which you created when bought your starter pack. Choose what you’ve grown from the list of available plants (in pictures), enter its serial number and press submit button; if your serial number matches the plant type you get points. Points accumulate every time you grow something and then convert to vouchers, which you can spend in your favourite retail shop.
the course BE (Hons) Graphic Product Innovation at London College of Communication is an interdisciplinary course which allows students to focus on ideas and design principles that can be applied across and outside of traditional design disciplines. The aim is to understand how design thinking can be used to analyse existing situations, communicate with a user and solve problems. The course focuses on why we design and who we design for, how our designs are going to be seen and how they’re going to be used. We look at using design as a tool to see and to influence the bigger picture. Most briefs focus on design methods and processes and are not prescriptive in terms of the medium or discipline for the final outcome. ‘Innovation’ is defined in the Cox Review of Creativity in Business as “the successful exploitation of new ideas” and “the process that carries them through to new products, new services”– this course will give students the tools necessary to
become an innovator that understands the changes that have taken place within the design industry. Students are not constrained as a designer to any one medium or philosophy but may design a service or re-evaluate existing objects and situations in order to add value or change their audience or produce environmental design (for instance typography in the landscape or systems to improve communication or architecture, combining interaction, digital or sculptural components). Students are user centred and engage with sustainability. Students are offered experience of a broad range of media in both two and three dimensions and seek to challenge preconceptions of what constitutes ‘graphic’, and ‘product’ and in doing so are encouraged to adopt an innovative approach to the development of ideas and concepts.
the client Food Up Front has been supporting individuals to grow food in their unused outdoor space since 2007. Whether it’s front gardens, balconies, windowsills or back gardens we continue to encourage people to grow and share healthy, natural food. This helps to reduce food miles and dependency on supermarkets, whilst increasing self-reliance and community empowerment. As the brainchild of Food Up Front, we are very excited that One Pot PledgeŽ has been launched by Garden Organic, as their 2010/11 national campaign. As partners in the campaign we will be working with Garden Organic to make sure that lots of people throughout the UK get to experience growing food for the first time.
More here: www.foodupfront.org And here: www.onepotpledge.org
jonas’ comments Getting it real What I like about this course, ‘Graphic Product innovation’, is that it’s taking graphic design from the paper into the real world. Students have applied their graphic design skills to find out about older people’s needs to develop better products. They have also made designs for educational products for kids in a bird watching centre. For this new project, I wanted to make it as real as we possibly could in the 5 weeks. This meant involving Food up Front in the role of a ‘real’ client, interviewing ‘real’ 16-24 year olds as potential users, and finally testing the project with ‘real’ people. It is from these kind of interactions that I learn the most myself, and I like to promote a ‘go out and find out’ attitude. Different levels Sustainability was the theme of the project. And if you want to make a sustainable difference, you’ll have to make a changes on different levels. It is, for example, of little use if your product is recyclable but people are not motivated to do that, or the collection or recycling systems aren’t there. We have taken an
approach that looks at different aspects of the product - the user experience, different roles people would play, and the systems that have to be in place. The ‘product’ in Graphic Product Innovation could be a physical product, but it could equally be a campaign or a service. In fact, we have seen one of each in in this project. Process support On four Monday afternoons I met up with the students. On these meetings, students would first show their work and get feedback. We’d then try to make sense of all the work as a group, to see where we were at. We would also set the students up for the week to come. For example, with advise for doing user research or prototyping. We used structured creative exercise to make the most of the limited time. Some were similar to the ones we use with clients in the public and private sector. But where normally I do all the work myself, this time it was sufficient to provide students with a challenging brief, to start up a long stream of good ideas. It has been a pleasure to come back weekly to meet an enthusiastic group with great work.
the teams The Food Front Nikki Scott, Joel Longbone, Tom Maxwell
Course team Jonas Piet, Silvia Grimaldi
Delayed Satisfaction Francisca Veloso, Jesus Selma, Argir Ziovsky
Thank you to Seb Mayfare from Food Up Front.
Know What You Grow Dmitry Uljanovs, Jelena Vorosilova, Karen Fok, Simone Marrett, Bex Hoy-Priest, Ritchie Hassan
For more information on the project go to http://bagpi.co.uk/index.php/studentwork/food-up-front-project For more information on the course go to http://bagpi.co.uk/
contact Silvia Grimaldi Course Director BA (Hons) Graphic Product Innovation London College of Communication University of the Arts London Elephant and Castle SE1 6SB 020 7514 9637 s.grimaldi@lcc.arts.ac.uk