A Nudge to in�luence consumers’ behavior & choices to purchase Design Harvest products
a project by Angelica Fontana
WeHARVEST A Nudge to influence consumers’ behavior and choices to purchase Design Harvest products
student Angelica Fontana student number 766478
Italian tutor Anna Meroni Chinese tutor Lou Yongqi
POLITONG DOUBLE DEGREE POLITECNICO DI MILANO
Design Faculty
TONGJI UNIVERSITY
College of Design and Innovation Master Degree in
Product Service System Design (PSSD) A.Y. 2012-2013
Thesis defense day 3rd October 2013
English Abstract
We have one planet where to live, and by 2050 we will be more than 9 billion people living on this planet, which means that we will need to optimize the way of living together. First everyone need to be aware that in fifty years we should use 90% less resources. This will be possible by reshaping new scenarios where to learn how to move from creating new to reusing and replacing products and services, and from ownership to accessibility. In fact, the 21th century has been named the age of the collaborative consumption, as an answer to the last century hyperconsumption. As consequence, in the new century, traditional concepts of sharing, bartering, lending, trading, renting, gifting has been redefined through technology and peer communities. One of the most discussed and researched topic is the Food and the world’s feeding issue. The right to meals and nourishment is vital for all human beings. However, at this time the accessibility to real safe food has turned to be a luxury and the challenge of providing it for the Earth’s growing population, is putting major stress on our natural environment. From here the question, how might be possible to make the safe food accessible and available to a global village where there is a bounded marketplace for efficient peer-to-peer relationships? More and more the framework of this efficient relationships is entering the online net. Social networks are becoming the interaction point between people, even more in developing countries than in the developed part of the world. Shanghai, a fast growing metropolis, Chongming, the old agricultural island close to the town, and Design Harvest, the project which was supposed to create the bridge between these two polars, but which, in reality, lacks of people involvement, are the key points of the research. The strategy has been identified in a framework where the individual works for himself and for the group in a win-win profitable system. From the context analysis, the thesis wants to demonstrate that the net of relationships, both virtual and real, is the key to the success of a product or a service in the market.
keywords: collaborative consumption, nudging behavior, social networks, real food accessibility, Design Harvest
Italian Abstract
Risulta verosimile che nel 2050 il nostro pianeta sarà abitato da 9 bilioni di persone e questo implicherà la necessità di rivedere le modalità del convivere, in una nuova ottica di ottimizzazione delle stesse. La consapevolezza da cui dobbiamo partire è in primo luogo la necessità di ridurre in 50 anni il consumo di risorse del 90% e ciò sarà possibile grazie alla modellazione di nuovi scenari, nei quali impareremo a spostare l’attenzione dal “creare il nuovo” a riutilizzare e implementare prodotti e servizi esistenti, passando dal concetto di possesso a quello di accessibilità. Il 21esimo secolo è stato infatti definito come l’età del consumo collaborativo quale risposta all’ iper-consumismo del secolo precedente, una nuova era in cui i tradizionali modelli di condivisione, baratto, prestito, commercio, scambio, sono stati ridefiniti in un contesto che coniuga tecnologia e comunità collettive. Uno dei temi più discussi e ricercati al giorno d’oggi è il cibo e la necessità di nutrire il mondo, poichè Il diritto al nutrimento e ad un’ alimentazione sana, sembrano essere diventati un lusso e l’obbiettivo di assicurarne l’accessibilità alla popolazione globale, sembra mettere sotto stress il concetto di sostenibilità dell’ambiente naturale. A seguito di tali considerazioni una domanda sorge spontanea: come è possibile riuscire a rendere disponibile l’accessibilità al cibo, sano e reale, per nutrire un villaggio globale il cui mercato è aperto ad un sistema efficiente di relazioni personali? Con il passare del tempo, la realtà di queste relazioni sta sempre più penetrando nel mondo di internet, portando i social networks a configurarsi quali punti di interazione tra le persone, sorprendentemente, più nei paesi in via di sviluppo che in quelli già sviluppati. I punti focali della ricerca si sono concentrati su Shanghai, metropoli in rapida e fervida espansione, Chongming, storica isola agricola sita a pochi chilomentri dalla città, e Design Harvest, progetto avviato per creare un link tra i due poli, ma che, di fatto, si trova senza attori economici e sociali coinvolti attivamente. La strategia è stata identificata in un sistema di mutuo profitto, un contesto vincente in cui l’individuo lavora per sè e per il gruppo. L’obiettivo di questa tesi, a partire dall’analisi del contesto di ricerca, è quello di dimostrare che la rete di relazioni virtuali e reali è la chiave per il successo di un prodotto e/o di un servizio nel mercato. parole chiave: consumo condiviso, nudging behavior, social networks, accesibilità al cibo, Design Harvest
Chinese Abstract 我们只有一个地球可供生存。直至2050年，地球人口 会超过90亿。这意味着我们需要优化我们的生存方式。首先， 所有人都应该明白在未来50年中，我们必须减少90%的能源消 耗。而只有从产品和服务的制造走向再利用和再分配，从其拥 有权走向使用权，才能达到这个目标。 21世纪被称作合作化消费时代，这是相对于上个世纪的 超消费时代而言的。因此，在新的时代，传统概念中的共享、 物物交换、借用、交易、出租、赠予等行为方式都通过科技与 群体社区被重新定义。 最受关注的话题之一是食物与世界粮食问题。食物与营 养对人类而言至关重要。然而，在新时代中，真正安全的食物 却成了奢侈品。为地球不断增长的人口提供充足的食物，不仅 对人类而言是一大挑战，对我们赖以生存的自然环境也造成了 巨大的压力。 那么问题就是：如何在这样一个群体间沟通无碍的有限 的市场中，提供给整个地球村以安全易得的食物呢？ 这种高效的群体关系框架在互联网中的体现越来越显 著。社交网络正在成为人们互动的主要平台，不仅发达国家如 此，发展中国家更是如此。 上海作为一个快速发展的国家大都市，有着崇明岛 这个农业发展基地。在崇明设立开展的“设计丰收”（Design Harvest）项目旨在连接项目两端的群体。事实上，在这个项目中 体现出的群体参与度的缺乏是此次研究的重点。 当个人为自己工作而同时整个群体也以双赢的方式盈 利，那么在这样一个框架下设计策略得以产生。 从对背景的分析看，本文旨在阐述这样一个观点：无论 是现实的或虚拟的群体关系网，它都是产品和服务在市场中成 功的关键。
关键词:
合作化消费，推动行为，社交网络，安全易得的食物， 设计丰收
Acknowledgment No human is an island. No thesis is solely one person’s work. So, I want to express my gratitude to those people who helped me on carrying on my ideas, and ideals, let them blow and become real, and to those people who assisted me when I was close to give up an helped me finding the way to go on. Special thanks to my whole family, my big treasure, who helped me growing and becoming the person I am now, with my believes and values. To my parents and my sister, for have let me gone 9097 km away from home, waited for one year and seven months, and made me feeling their love every day. To Politecnico di Milano, Tongji University, the Politong program, Davide Fassi and Simona Rodella, for their support, dealing with the exchange issues. To all the Politongers, for sharing this great experience. To my thesis advisor, Anna Meroni, who believed in the project and drove me in the direction to the problem solving. To my colleague and friend Jiao Yu, for her cultural and language support. To Xianqiao habitants, because through them I discovered a special, real and impressive shape of China. To my friend, flat-crazy-stuff-mate cricket, for all the mindblowingly talks and discussions. To the little rou baozi, for all the too-manyshoots nights. To my very friends, those who waited for me, and those who flew 9097 km and tried to understand To Chelcy, Luca, Adriano, Luca, Roberto and Pico, for their support on the long-distance prototype phase. To Clara and Cai, for their translations help while writing this thesis. To China.
Table of contents PREFACE My Journey My Politong Experience Declaration of intent
PART I: THESIS BACKGROUNDS 1. NEW ERA, NEW DESIGN
15 16 18 20
23 24
1.1 Understanding the design process
26
1.2 Design from product thinking to service thinking
29
1.3 Design to shape behavior for a preferable future
33
Case study 1. Buffet Serving, a Nightmare of choices
35
chapter conclusions
36
2. SUSTAINABILITY THE MATTERS
38
2.1 Sustainability in the 21th century
40
2.2 Sustainable development
43
Keypoint 1: Collaborative consumption
46
Case study 2. Dropis, paypal for barter
47
Case study 3. Bitcoin
48
Case study 4. Arcipelago Scec
49
Keypoint 2: Resources empowerment
50
Case study 5. Eco-village
51
Case study 6. Jenuino
52
Case study 7. Buycott
53
Keypoint 3: Peer-to-Peer exchange of relationships
54
Case study 8. Gofundme
55
Case study 9. OuiShare
56
Case study 10. Green Drinks China
57
chapter conclusions
58
3. FOOD AND THE CITY
60
3.1 Man is what he eats
61
Keypoint 4: Never eat alone
64
Case study 11. Eatwith
65
3.2 Globesity epidemic
66
Keypoint 5: Here and now food
70
Case study 12. Zerobriciole
71
3.3 Eating is a contagious behavior
72
Keypoint 6: Ego Food
74
Case study 13. Housefed
75
3.4 Organic, Natural, Green, Normal Food
76
Keypoint 7: Food for Trust
78
Case study 14. Con marche bio
79
3.5 Organic agriculture
80
Keypoint 8: Slowcal
82
Case study 15. Mahota farm
83
3.6 Local food challenges
84
Keypoint 9: Collaborative systems
86
Case study 16. Dott
chapter conclusions
PART II: THESIS FOCUS 4. CHINA
87
88
91 92
4.1 China, the fast growing country
94
4.2 Shanghai, the multicultural city
98
4.3 China-mobile-online
100
4.2 E-commerce in China
104
chapter conclusions
106
5. EATING IN CHINA
108
5.1 Multicultural, strange, unique taste all over China
110
5.2 Agriculture in China
114
5.3 R-urban realities
120
chapter conclusions
124
6. DESIGN HARVEST
126
6.1 Chongming Island
128
6.2 Design Harvest, the roots
132
6.3 Field research
140
6.4 Co-designing and workshops
146
6.5 Questioning and re-briefing
144
chapter conclusions
152
PART III: WeHARVEST 7. ACTION PLAN
155 156
7.1 Nudging active actions
158
7.2 Design Harvest analysis
160
7.3 Consumers’ behavior analysis
162
7.4 Scenario building and analysis
166
chapter conclusions
168
8. PRODUCT SERVICE SYSTEM
170
8.1 Evaluation of the current system
172
8.2 Stakeholders’ map
174
8.3 Offering map
175
8.4 The new system
176
8.5 Main actions interactive blueprint
177
8.6 Main actions touch-point
178
8.7 Customer journey
182
8.8 Business model
186
chapter conclusions
190
9. PROTOTYPE AND FUTURE DEVELOPMENT
192
9.1 Testing the service experience
194
9.2 Future implementations
197
chapter conclusions
198
CONCLUSION
201
REFERENCES
205
Bibliography Sitography List of Images List of Graphs and Maps
APPENDIX 1.Volunteers questionnaire 2.Consumers questionnaire
206 209 210 211
213 214 216
PREFACE
16 Preface
My Journey
MILAN, Italy where I collected my background skills
KOLDING, Denmark where I developed a mature approach to the design research
SHANGHAI, China where I had to face a controversial and fascinating reality
17
Preface
KOLDING SHANGHAI MILAN
18 Preface
My Politong Experience
It was the 14th of February 2012, when nine Italians set their foot in China. It was raining, and we were freezing, feeling completely lost, waiting for a taxi in the middle of one of hugest square in the world. After one year, looking back at all the pictures and memories I have, that square feels like home. I have been traveling in Asia, even before, but nothing can be compared to China, and no culture or people is more mysterious, hidden and full of so different aspects and realities. I lived in Shanghai from February 2012 to July 2013, and after this time I can say this city is one of the most surprising, in the East side of the world. Well I have to admit, few times I escaped to Europe. Truly I love and hate Chinese people at the same time. “Epidermicamente non li sopporto” (epidemically I can not stand them), as I said to my flatmate once, while taking the metro, in the morning, squeezed into different smells (noodles, chicken feet, fried rice, baozi..) and sounds (people screaming and listening to music or watching TV programs with their i phone of course without headphones). Since I was little, my mum used to tell me that, while moving to any other places beside those I was familiar to, I had to be ready to understand and adapt myself to others’ way of living and thinking. However, for a newcomer, as I was when I arrived in Shanghai, it was quite hard to understand its soul, enter the local life and be able to integrate within the people. The language barrier is something quite important. I used to study a little bit of Chinese speaking, I tried the written, but that takes ages and truly Shanghai is the latest city where you want to go for studying (really studying) Chinese. To be honest, I am pretty convinced that Shanghai is not -completely- China (or is not anymore). I mean that, in this city you can decide what you want for your life, how you want to live and where. Literally, you can walk around, in some district, and you can barely see Chinese looking people. I swear I haven’t seen, and heard, so many Italians together in a foreign country. There are people who have never eaten with chopstick, or have never been (or at least seen) to a street food shop, or to a laomien place. They simply have never been in contact with a Chinese taste. Shanghai can offer the same lifestyle Milan does, with its restaurants, and clubs and people. But Shanghai is more than this. Many things are well hidden. You have to go seeking for it.
19
Preface
No matters if is during the day or the night, you just have to start walking on the street without a path, letting yourself lost. This will provides you the best journey in this city. It will brings you to discover its soul and treasure, made of little street shops selling I pad and I phones, and maybe you can find the one, you got stolen, the Family mart, opened 24hour, where, most of the time the worker taking a nap, the “arrosticini� spot, where, all the night long, they cook skewers on a handmade grill, and you taste only the spices, and in the evening you can go dancing with old woman in the park, or try taichi. In Shanghai you never get weary. In Shanghai, every day, you can be fascinated. Of course my purpose of being in China, was not only to get lost, but all those insights and thoughts I’ve collected day by day living there and the academic and professional experience I had, brought me to a deeper understanding of this culture. Due to the exchange program we spent a semester in Tongji University, and even if the level of the courses was not as we were used in Milan, the experience has been quite positive. We had the chance to attend really inspiring lectures hold by professors and professionals from everywhere in the world. In the overall the knowledge I have acquired enriched not only my cultural background, but also enhanced my way of thinking and working.
20 Preface
Declaration of intent
To come out with this thesis, it took me a long journey. Last September 2012, I started my internship at Tektao Urban Design, the company who is leading a project called Design Harvest. I already knew about the idea behind, connecting the rural with the urban context and I was curious to experience the so-called “Shanghai countryside�. In fact the project takes place in Chongming, an Island one hour drive from Shanghai. I had already been traveling in rural villages around China, but I never had the chance to step inside its reality and to really interact with locals. I worked 8 months on this project and during this period of time I was trying to find the topic of my thesis research. Since the main core was about agriculture and safe food production, I started to investigate on this field. As I love to eat and to try different food, I have been always attracted to learn more about local traditions. I remember, while I was getting ready for China, all those people who were telling me what to eat or not and where to go purchase, to avoid to eat rats, cats, dogs, (people maybe). Well I think I have never eaten people, neither cats and dogs (rats maybe). However for sure I ate junk food, which, I later discovered, is not only Mc Donald’s and Kfc, but is also all the industrial products I was purchasing in any market. More and more I was searching into this field, more and more I was getting sick of the context, where the industrialized agriculture has been poorly efficient, and the income of farming quite low. As result farmers left their villages and settled in the city, without a job. On the other hand, Shanghai citizens have a great deal of demand of agricultural products, especially safe, local, seasonal food. The problem was, that I could not stop searching and searching and breaking up with ideas, without realizing I could not save the world, or at least not in that way. I have to say I completely got lost in my own topic. I decided to take a step back. I waited to be in Italy and I reviewed all my research and the purpose of the project I was carrying on. I literally zoomed out from the problem and I analyzed each key point, one by one. The result is the sum of this research and a simple but efficient proposal which might not change the world but might support this change.
image.1: photo, Angelica Fontana, Temporary Design, Hong Kong 2012
PART I THESIS BACKGROUND
Nudging Behaviors
Collaborative Consumption
Real Food
CHAPTER 1
NEW ERA
NEW
DESIGN
This chapter contains a briefly introduction to Design and Service Design. It is specially thought for those people who have asked me if I was doing “art attack” and for those who were doing “art attack”. It is for those people who wants to approach to the Service Design, and for those who are not aware they are already designing services. This chapter is for me, to have a guideline when I have to explain to my grandmother who I want to be in the future.
26 Part I: Thesis Background
1.1 Understanding the design process
The designer role in the society has always been a crucial one. People usually misunderstand which is the real position and strength of this professional purpose. There are two main misunderstanding about designers : one is the misleading of the difference between art and design, and the second is about the meaning “innovation”. First of all, due to the multiplicity interpretation the design in made of, it is wrongly mixed with art. Truly the artist provide an in-sight point of view, while the designer works on the out-sight. Basically good art is a talent, good design is a skill and you don’t need to be a great artist to become a great designer. Personally, the first day I set in a design class I was not able to draw and now, after six years studying and working, I am still not that good on drawing. Both artists and designers are “creative” people, although they work in different ways within different aims. The artist has a natural talent and his focus is on how he manages to communicate visually his personal perception about the world. The designer has a natural curiosity and a bit percentage of foulness and he seeks for people perception about the world. Moreover art tend to decorate the world with its beauty, while none design piece is beautiful, nevertheless it is useful. According to Bettina Johnson, a creative multimedia designer, design is a defined process that gets discussed and implemented by taking careful steps to make sure the objectives of the project are met. In this way, designers are the engineers of the creative world and must have an eye for color and style while adhering to very intricate functional details. Into the “playground” world of designers, different professional skills get mixed, and collaborate each other for a whole 360 grades outcome. It’s all a matter of collaborative systems. What characterizes a design process is the systematic and scientific approach, which means that the detailed collection of any data, resources and findings is well proved and demonstrate. Every designer has a personal methodology, which always change according to the project aim. The general guideline for any kind of design process is to work for and with people. Humans are the central part of the investigation. To better drive the research the team should be mixed and different perspectives should be analyzed.
27
Part I: Thesis Background
As consequences designers usually work together with engineers, architects, psychologists, sociologists, and all the professionals needed for a deep understanding of the field of studies. Now, the question frequently ask is, what are designers designing in the 21th century? We all have a chair where to sit, or a bed to sleep, we all have a phone to call, so where new designs take place? The answer lies into people and their way to sit on the chair, to keep the same example. The question is, not where to be placed in relation to the chair itself, but to the person who is going to use the chair. The key is the interaction between the chair and the person. This concept introduces to the second misleading point, that occurs when talking about the designer role is the meaning of innovation. By definition, “innovation” means the “introduction of something new.” The word was first seen in the 1540s. It comes from the Latin innovatus, which means to renew or change and is made up of two words: in which means “into” and novus which means “new.” To innovate means to go into the new. Nowadays, when asking people to define what is the innovation, they usually relate it to a new product, a new phone or a new car. This common thought comes from those big companies who lead their communication into the innovative products. Business leaders have to stop talking about innovation as only the invention of new objects undertaken by a handful of entrepreneurs or a cluster of scientifically oriented industries. Rather, we have to start looking at innovation as integral to every organization’s culture — how it operates internally, how it interacts with other organizations and its customers, and how it views itself within the global marketplace.
In the era of the overproduction we need innovation in terms of symbolic value and meaning of the product.
We live and work in an era of instant messaging, social networking and ubiquitous wireless communications. Real-time competition is the reality and complacency is never an option.1
To be able to break the market, companies need to consider not why people need a product but what they need in a product. In the era of the overproduction we need innovation in terms of symbolic value and meaning of the product. Organizations should use design as a process through which the innovation of meaning is possible. This is what is called “Design driven innovation”.
Stephenson Carol, From the Dean: The True Meaning of Innovation, article, Ivey Business Journal, 2011 1
28 Part I: Thesis Background TECHNOLOGY
radical change
technology push
design driven incremental change
market pull (user centred)
incremental change
radical change
MEANING
Graph.1: Roberto Verganti, Design Driven Innovation
According to Roberto Verganti (graph.1), Firms that develop design-driven innovations step back from users and take a broader perspective. They explore how the context in which people live is evolving. The question is “How could people give meaning to things?” As usual, people gives meaning to something they have a relation with. Your old grandmother’s chair will always have its own special meaning for you and that is about what you remember. That’s about the experience you had with that chair. Meanings, in feasible terms, are shaped as experiences. Experience Design, or better say Design for Experiences, is both a new discipline (as the concept has been newly defined) and an old one (as it has been adapted in different fields, without been called with the same name). Basically it is the combination of disciplines, which have hardly had the possibility for being integrated, such as psychology, linguistics, copy-writing, humanities, information architecture, storytelling, marketing, anthropology, pop culture, and more. It actually works across time by shaping what you recall of the past, shifting how you perceive the present, and influencing your plans for the future. (graph.2) In the world of endless options of products, experiences are those values, which drives customers to a choice. Briefly, the importance is not what you find at the end of a run, but how do you feel while you are running. Moreover, is the very personal meaning everyone perceives through his or her run.
29
Part I: Thesis Background
SUSTAIN
TRANSFORM
IMPROVE
time Graph.2: The consumer experience quality depends on the transformation of the experience itself
1.2 Design from product thinking to service thinking Design used to be seen as a profession that operates in specialist area such as graphic design, product design or fashion. One of the skills that designers were asked to have, was to make things look good and in most companies design used to be considered at the very end of the process. Nowadays design is not anymore restricted to the surface of things and how they look, but it operates at before, during and after the process. Design has changed his scope and goes beyond designing artifacts. As said before, it extends to the experience that clients have with products, services, spaces and the mix of these. In fact it combines expertise from different design disciplines to develop holistic concepts were products are just the tools to a reach a bigger system. (graph.3) It is already well-known that in the age of globalization and information technology, corporate strategies are challenged to bring production in line with a complex demand, which requires a substantial shift from production of goods to the provision of knowledge-intensive systemic solutions. Such solutions are included into product-service systems, a set of products and services capable to fulfill the users’ need.
30 Part I: Thesis Background
marketing
SERVICE DESIGN
client
niza rga tio
n
o
design
Truly, in our everyday life we are surrounded by services and those have been around since the ancient age, the old Greek and Romans had servants and even prior to that, services were provided and they were also paid for. This swift in the perception of products and meanings, came with the historical situation. In fact, from the industrial revolution, the mass production has increased more and more and products got more and more similar. More inventions and markets (the Chinese one, for example) have been opened and pushed a mass of cheap goods. As result, products surround people and the choice between those is getting more and more difficult. In the last years branding companies have worked on positioning, creating unique selling propositions and marketing has pushed and promote those products. Plus many new versions of old products has being created all the time, even though the results are not always innovative or different from before.
Graph.3: Stephan Moritz, service design field, Practical Access to Service Design, 2005
Graph.4: Stephan Moritz, from product to strategies, Practical Access to Service Design, 2005
31
Part I: Thesis Background
In this jungle of mass production, nowadays what makes the difference are experiences and the services that come with the product and drive the user to the choice. In easier world, if you stand in front of two restaurants, both they sell exactly same products at the same price, service design is the plus which makes you choose one. Like the industrial revolution that transformed society and economy we are now about to experience the service revolution.
There’s been a lot of focus on product innovation over the years, but very little discussion on innovation in the service sectordespite the vast growth of the part of our economy2 John A. Byrne: Fast Company Magazine, article, January 21, 2005 2
This doesn’t mean that products are no more important, but that they become tools for services.(graph.4) Properly the challenge for designers of the 21st century is to deliver user-oriented hybrids where the service has been designed as an inseparable part of the product. We are in the era of the switching from mass- production to mass customization. Services do not qualify as property. They are immaterial and intangible. They are performed, not produced. They exist only at the moment they are rendered.
characteristic
process
problems
PRODUCT
SERVICE
material
immaterial
tangible
intangible
produced
performed
can be stored
cannot be stored
user not involved (usually)
user involved (always)
consuption after production
consuption during production
in manifacturing
in behaviour
When talking about products, services and delivered meanings, we always refereed to a relations between providesproducers, users and environment. Design for Services aims to create a win-win solution where all the parts involved are satisfied with the offer.
Graph.5: Stephan Moritz, product and services, Practical Access to Service Design, 2005
32 Part I: Thesis Background
Above, the graph n.6 illustrates how Service Design operates as a mediator between organizations and clients. In the bottom part it shows that Service Design delivers higher productivity to organizations n making their service more effective and efficient, while raising client satisfaction in providing more useful, usable and desirable services. In the top, it shows how Service Design explores both organizations, in their resources, constrains and the context the operate in, and clients and market needs. The organization’s context consists of stuff working for the organization, suppliers that are or could be used, partners that are available, the market the organization operates in, the competition and relevant technologies. The client’s context is about the marker, the community, the society, politics, economy and trends. The diagram shows how Service Design operates as an interface to create a win-win situation for organizations and clients.
Graph.6: Stephan Moritz, Practical Access to Service Design, 2005
Service Design helps design all touch-points that a client encounters and so improves the overall experience that clients have with the service. In creating innovative service ideas and fostering the relationship between organization and client Service Design increases brand affinity. Part of the relationship is the way it manages feedback and integrates people from the organization and clients in the design process.
Stephan Moritz, Practical Access to Service Design, 2005
33
Part I: Thesis Background
1.3 Design to shape behavior for a preferable future According to Rob Girling, principal of Artefact group, ‘shaping’ behavior becomes the new function of design in the 21st Century. By defining ‘preferable futures’ as the outcome of our work we are forced to consider the longitudinal impacts of our work socially, culturally, ethically, and environmentally. At its core, design is a creative tool to problem solving, in the way it develops solutions to problems people encounter, and, will encounter in the world. The new approach that has recently got place into the designers’ investigation is about people’s behavior. Designers have been trying to influence behavior for long time. You can consider, for example, the communication power, and how designers have work on attractive, eye-catching brand stories. All these examples of persuasive design, took the role of more implying static transfer of knowledge, but not real behavioral change. Truly, to change peoples’ attitudes is not the same as to change peoples’ behavior. Recent advances in pseudoscience and behavioral economics, cognitive psychology, and anthropology are helping to better understand how our brains works, and how decisionmaking takes place. A core finding of this work is that we are not primarily products of our conscious thinking, we are instead products of thinking that happens below the level of awareness. The designer role on shaping behavioral change is based on a framework of values and beliefs. They are armed with a growing set of persuasive techniques, but this power comes with great responsibility. We all have to think about the preferable outcomes, which will create a preferable future. In few words the designer duty is to build a bridge between the user’s intent and the actual outcome of that intent , meanwhile profits, wealth acquisition, growth, market dominance are supporting outcomes, not prime directives. One of the latest theories on how to change people’s behavior is called Nudging. Last October 2012, I had the chance to take a flight from China to Denmark and spend three amazing weeks at the Kolding Design Scholen. I attended the international Design Camp and I worked on the Nudge.
34 Part I: Thesis Background
The Nudge principles are quite simple. They do not work on the co-design and the interaction with the user-consumer, instead they work on the external observation. Whether design a product, service, policy, or a holistic experience, understanding what motivates and what hinders behavior is critical. Furthermore, behavioral science is particularly useful in attempting the align action with intentions.
We generally have the right intentions. We want, for example, to be financially prudent, be active, and eat healthily. Our intentions are clear and pure. But in many instances, we do not act on these intentions, or we do not sustain the right actions. We falter.3
Rani Saad: Design Camp talk Kolding, 2012 3
Designing with behavior in mind aims to deal with these factors, with the goal of closing the intention-action gap. It involves a series of iterative steps.
The first is that of defining the problem without presumption, biases, or restrictions, on the scope and scale. This would allow the clear determination of the desired behavior. Next is the diagnosis of the full experience spectrum that the desired behavior would entail. This should cover the different possible scenarios in details. The obstacles could be related to the decision making process or the action-taking. Once the possible obstacles are identified, behavioral interventions to counter them would then be determined and designed into the offering. The designed offering would then be prototyped and tested4. Rani Saad: Design Camp talk Kolding, 2012 4
Nudging requires developing skills as well as maintaining careful attention to possible consequences and implications. Truly the purpose of the nudge is not to manipulate, but is to create an environment where people make choices in accordance with their reflected preferences without limiting their choice-set.
case study n.1 Buffet Serving - A Nightmare of Choices, DK For the last two years, the Danish Cancer Society has tested several nudges primarily focusing on promoting healthy food choices in out of home settings. Researches show that more than 50% of the population in the developed countries is overweight or obese to a degree that it threatens their health, welfare and quality of life and represents a massive burden on society. The target behavior has been discovered in the way people are provided with unhealthy choices in most of the canteen and selfservices. The question has been: how might we address people to eat healthier out of home at buffet servings? Looking at people’s choices and way of keeping the food in a buffet, the solution has been found by apply little changes. First, the layout of buffet area. Where customers enter the buffet area, lines cuing and check out
influence food choice. In a shortterm intervention they placed green arrows on the floor-suggesting customers to start at the salad buffet instead of the hot dish. While doubling the consumption of greens, they reduced the meat consumption. The second change has been about the order of presentation. Customers use to pick significantly more from the foods that are presented first compared to the foods they meet later in a lunch line. In a work site canteen a chef complained that the customers didn’t eat bread with the soup. Moving a breadbasket next to the soup bowl ensured that the customers picked the bread as well. Moreover, they found out that by reducing the plate size from 11 ounces to 9 ounces, they reduced not only the mean portion size but also plate waste.
image.2: photo, Danish Cancer Society, Kolding, 2011
CHAPTER 1
CONCLUSIONS
Design involves the understanding of the client wants, needs, motivations and context as well as business. It ensure that the overall experience of products, services and spaces is useful, usable and desirable, for the consumer, as well as effective, economically viable and technically feasible for the client.
Designing with behavior in mind is about observing and knowing human automatic thinking and actions. The Nudge is a new, effective and easier way of thinking the design process. It yet creates a measurable and durable change in people’s behavior, without them being completely aware of it.
CHAPTER 2
SUSTAINABILITY
THE MATTERS
This chapter doesn’t pretend to provide a statement about sustainability. Instead it wants to focus on how nowadays concepts as sustainability and trans formative strategies, are strictly linked and state the measurement for a country in terms of development. In the 21th century companies starts to move towards this scenario, with small but effective solutions for a change.
40 Part I: Thesis Background
2.1 Sustainability framework in the 21th century The world sustainability, literally derived from the Latin sustinere (tenere, to hold; sus, up), nowadays, is quite controversial. We can just assume how sustainable world will be like - how people will live and on what residential and production systems their existence could be based. Nowadays there is even a lot of confusion and the concept of sustainability is mostly misunderstood. If you try to google “sustainable is”, the result is quite funny, sustainability is good, sustainable is unsustainable, sustainable is bullshit, is impossible, is myth, is too expensive, and so over. It is all very confusing. Professionals, Scientists are working on trying to to find the right definition. According to the United Nation 2013 report, Sustainability can be equated to a collection of low-carbon investments in specific sectors, which can be “addressed” at the national level, given appropriate support. What does this actually mean? During his presentation at the Urban Agricultural Summit 2013, Dennis Palmin, CEO/Founder 21st Century Frontiers & Research Fellow Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), proved how is quite easy to frame the reality. We have one planet, were to live, by 2050 we will be more than 9 billion people living in this planet, and we have to make sure that what we do can be used by people. We have no time left, but we have infinite possibilities for acting. The problem is not about technologies and infrastructures, is about people and how can we work to better use those tools we have. Today most consumer are involved in a fast consumption behavior society. This kind of life-style has various effects on their life directly or indirectly.
A number of global challenges, such as climate change, biodiversity loss, overconsumption, obesity, poverty, population growth and geopolitical changes, are acceleration and converging in ways result in increased economic and political tensions around the world1. Dennis Pamlin, Green Solution leadership: Six trends in 2013, Pamlin website article, 2013 1
41
Part I: Thesis Background relevance/how easy are to implement
threshold level
0-25
25-50
50-80
80-100+
The challenge we face will require trans formative solutions. It not enough to provide incremental improvements in existing systems. We need totally new ways of providing similar, or better services. This requires new business models that focus on what people really want and need, not superficial material needs generated by intensive marketing. (graph.7) According to Dennis Palmin today there are six major trends that can support companies that want to become global green. These trends must be understood by anyone who wants to stay relevant in the 21th century. • The first trend is the age of heroes, which focuses on companies that can help living sustainable, providing strategies to involve the new generation. This age comes after the age of science. During this period, from the 1950’s up to now, scientific research showed that western industrialization was not sustainable. Time by time, from a debate, it crossed to allegations of polluting companies. • The second trend is the connectivity, thought which companies have the opportunity to gathers relevant information in way that was impossible just couple of years a go. Few numbers to understand. In 2008 Google search discovered one trillion unique web-pages. Not just people, even things are getting connected. Estimations indicate that 50 billion devices will be connected to each other by 2020. This connectivity network will help companies to better establish a dialogue with stuff, partners, customers and others.
% change needed compared with baseline
Graph.7: Dennis Pamlin. The opportunity hook. The threshold levels for formativeness change.
AGE OF HEROES: companies who enables the process towards a better lifestyle
CONNECTIVITY: useful on-line network system
42 Part I: Thesis Background
• Palmin set the crowd-development as the third trend in his sustainable framework. It is changing both the way businesses operate and trigger new solutions that are changing the world. New digital tools today allow people to work on the same documents regardless of time zones and office hours. All of the sudden national borders, age and titles matter less than the concrete contribution to a project. • Moreover, over the last years the world have seen a new historically unique transparency emerge. From Wiki to micro blogs, the information flow is getting spread all over. This transparency should help not only to improve the accessibility to information, but also to reduce corruption, support innovation and allow people to discuss important issues. Of course, the problem around fake rumors, billings and shallow gossip will come together. Companies and people have to work to limited this. • Talking more and more about services and accessibility to new system of meanings, we are going towards an age where sustainability is link to the de-materialization. In fact, if we just look how the music has changed, from purchasing a physical product (the cd) to have it available online. Companies are exploring possibilities to digital delivery which might help reducing the need of natural resources, as well as decentralizing the production. • The sixth trend, is about the better life. This seems to be a clear concept, but are we really sure to be settle for the better life? Since the second world war, companies worked on pushing their marketing to the creation of a culture focused on material needs that never can be satisfied. The success of this campaign resulted in a society where people focus much on their lives on material consumption, but little time is spent on ethical question, art or photography. Increasing income and luxury living seemt to be the most important goal in life. Companies have now to move proving solutions to important challenges in society. They support discussion about a good life, where the immaterial is making the world better.
CROWDDEVELOPMENT: digital tools breaks national borders
TRANSPARENCY: information access improvement
DEMATERIALIZATION: decentralized products
BETTER LIFE: needs for solutions
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Part I: Thesis Background
2.2 Sustainable development
Since the late 1960s there have been lots of literature talking about sustainable development issues on poverty, hunger, employment, equity between generations and countries, environmental pollution and more over. Was in the late 1980s when The World Commission on Environment and Development to the United Nations Assembly, in the report entitled Our Common Future, popularized the concept of sustainable development as a development which meets the needs of today’s generation without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. (United Nation, 1987). One of the defining moments for sustainable development was the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED, known as the “Earth Summit”) hold in Rio De Janeiro in 1992. The Rio conference came twenty years after the one in Stockholm and its goal was to translate into international agreements those ideas expressed in 1987. The deal arose from the Summit were referred to the issue of integrating economic and environmental values. Three main approaches were fixed: · Developed countries would take the lead in changing production and consumption patterns (their economic model); · Developing countries would maintain their development goals but take on sustainable development methods and paths; · Developed countries committed to support developing countries through finance, technology transfer and appropriate reforms to the global economic and financial structures or practices. The summit enhanced the creation of series of international instruments to provide deep frameworks for sustainable developments. The Agenda 21 offered a practical approach to apply sustainable development policies at the local and national level. The goals stated in the agenda where related to the improvement of the standard living, to the managing and protection of earth’s ecosystem and to provide a more prosperous future for all. Moreover, after the Earth Summit, the Commission published The Rio Declaration on Environment and Development, which set 27 Principles to have the sustainable development guideline applicable in an international framework.
The sustainable development meets the needs of today’s generation without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs
44 Part I: Thesis Background
Those principles were promoting for example the centrality of human beings to the concerns of sustainable development (Principle 1); the primacy of poverty eradication (Principle 5); the importance of the environment for current and future generations and its equal footing with development (Principles 3 and 4), the participation and the importance of specific groups for sustainable development (Principles 10, 20, 21, 22). Overall, since from 2009 to the next Rio+20 Earth Summit, in 2012, progress on sustainable development has been limited. On the global level some countries have developed rapidly and progress has been registered, in access to education, citizens information, healthcare, human rights and participations, but still some gaps remain. Moreover, the impacts of the human enterprise on the environment have been increasing (UN, 2012). In 2005 the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment report that over 60% of the world’s major ecosystem goods and services were degraded or used unsustainable (MEA, 2005). In the global scale, developed countries did not change their consumption level and most of the time failed to find sustainable development paths on the production. Meanwhile in the emerging countries, middle-income groups have been growing fast, contributing to the rapid emergence of a global “consumer class� whose consumption choices tend to follow patterns observed in developed economies. Even if the public consciousness at the national and international level, have been touch, since 1992 development as a discipline and practice has remained largely independent from sustainable development. Talking about sustainable development, (graph.8) three dimensions have to be taken into account and also be aligned : The environmental dimension includes the protection of natural resources such as climate, soil, water and air, but also the diversity of species and ecosystems. The economic dimension means to evaluate the increase of the economy and the long term welfare, security and prosperity of the society. It has been called the green Gdp. An essential objective is safeguarding the market functions as, for example, competitiveness. The social dimension requires the evaluation of lifestyles to leave future generations opportunities to satisfy their own needs and the fairness of distribution systems. All this three dimensions need to be considered together as part of a bigger system.
There is the need to break the connection between perceived welfare, availability of products, consumption of resources
45
Part I: Thesis Background
Environmental visibile natural environment
SUSTAINABLE NATURAL AND BUILT ENVIRONMENT
SUSTAINABLE ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT
SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT Social nurturing community
EQUITABLE SOCIAL ENVIRONMENT
Economic economy
Graph.8: Sustainable development framework
All the definitions of sustainable development require that we see the world as a system that connects space, and a system that connects time. When thinking of the world as a system over space, you grow to understand that air pollution from North America affects air quality in Asia, and that pesticides sprayed in Argentina could harm fish stocks off the coast of Australia. And when you think of the world as a system over time, you start to realize that the decisions our grandparents made about how to farm the land continue to affect agricultural practice today; and the economic policies we endorse today will have an impact on urban poverty when our children are adults. We also understand that quality of life is a system, too. It’s good to be physically healthy, but what if you are poor and don’t have access to education? It’s good to have a secure income, but what if the air in your part of the world is unclean? And it’s good to have freedom of religious expression, but what if you can’t feed your family? The concept of sustainable development is rooted in this sort of systems thinking. It helps us understand ourselves and our world. So that’s what I did. After reading papers about sustainability and cities-to enable smart solutions I started to search where were this solutions and how they were bringing a change. My goal was to try to find examples and real cases of how to start to work on a problem. Here following I provided a list of case studies, and a series of key-points, I summed from my research.
46 Part I: Thesis Background
Keypoint 1: Collaborative Consumption
Nowadays, there is the need of something to fade away the "I wish-but-I-can't". We are all facing the so called "crisis" and we are trying our best to keep and save our resources. Today there are a lack of money and people are cutting out expenses, but we may have to consider which is the limit for not being able to satisfy our personal and social needs. More we have to understand which is the role of money. Money was defined as a tool to access to goods and services. However in the modern economy of consumerism, it seems it has turn to be the object and the goal of our life. "We work to make money", but money is a tool, so "we work" to posses a tool, and let me ask‌a tool for what? In reality we need money to invest and answer our need. We need to eat, to move, to have a house or a place to live in. However, if we consider Maslow’s pyramid, actually these are the real needs, but the money itself is not included in any level. Money is again, just the tool to reach our need. Collecting money without spending it, its just a waste of time to reach our happiness. The one who always rush to gain more money, will be never satisfied, but he will always want more, whiteout understanding that what he was searching for was not the coin he already has. As said, money is the tool to gain something in need and most of the time one should pay that money to someone else to have it. This means that with the money the person received, he can pay another service or goods to satisfy his need. It is than, a matter of exchange between people. Here it comes, than,the concept of poverty. In fact poverty is not a matter of being lack of money, but of not being able to help and support others. The point is, if we all really need something from each other, and the economy is made of a pro-sumer and a consumer, who anyway becomes a pro-sumer too, why are we all focused on "money" and how to gain more, compare to others?
Economic sustainability: strategies that make it possible to use available resources to their best advantage. The idea is to promote the use of those resources in a way that is both efficient and responsible, and likely to provide long-term benefits.
case study n.2 Dropis, paypal for barter, IT Dropis is a virtual credit for barters of services and goods. 1 euro is 1 credit, but you are not allowed to buy credits, you have to earn credit by swapping services and goods with other people through different online platforms. Sebastiano Scrofina and Leonardo Dario Perna, worked for more than ten years trying to find a new payment model. They came out with Dropis, to facilitate the interchange between people, and more between consumers and pro-sumers. Everything is transparent. People are recognized by their name and surname and they can be rewarded by others’ feedbacks. The idea on the base is to enhance the usage of existing resources and to have goods and services available without spending money. The team who designed the service is sure that poverty is not a matter of being lack of money, but to not being
able to help others. When you don’t have cash, you can always find a new solution. The main goal of Sebastiano and Dario is to be able to move dropis to become part of everyone’s life. Dropis is the platform which provide the switch of credits. It is then link to other website where to use these credits. Since now, it is partner with Sfintz, a platform where exchange skills, ans Swap Italia, a fashion online swapping service. Soon it will provide credits could be used with Jenuino, a multi-local and social farming network, Gnammo, a sharing dinner service experience, and more.
image.3: illustration, Dropis, 2012
case study n.3 Bitcoin, worldwide Bitcoin is one of the first implementations of a concept called crypto-currency, which was first described in 1998 by Wei Dai on the cypherpunks mailing list. Building upon the notion that money is any object, or any sort of record, accepted as payment for goods and services and repayment of debts in a given country or socio-economic context, Bitcoin is designed around the idea of a new form of money that uses cryptography to control its creation and transactions, rather than relying on central authorities. Since 2010, the Bitcoin community has grown with many developers working on the project. During June and July 2011, Bitcoin suddenly gained media attention leading to a massive buy rally. On September 27th 2012, the Bitcoin Foundation was created in an effort to standardize, protect, and promote Bitcoin.
image.4: photo, Michael Knight, Bitcoin, campaign 2011
Today, the Bitcoin economy is developing quickly with new users joining every day. Bitcoins can be transferred between arbitrary nodes on the network. Transactions are irreversible and broadcast within seconds and verified within 10 to 60 minutes, can be received at any time, regardless of whether your computer is turned on or off. The Bitcoin network has been running continuously for more than 48 months, everywhere in the world. However there are still some doubt about its security. In fact since there is no central authority to control the value exchange, it can change daily and can make you lose your value. For example, in the USA it happened that between day one and the end of day three, bitcoin’s value dropped from $142 to $91. This service still needs to be reviewed.
case study n.4 Arcipelago Scec, IT Arcipelago Scec an association running since 2007, is working to promote an economy based on human need, free from financial speculation. The idea is to provide a complementary payment which works without the usage of money, but swapping the “Scec”. The aim is to empower all those local producers who are crushing due to the industrial production. There are more than 1500 people in Italy who subscribed to promote “scec”. It represent a value, which members of the association can swap each other. Who wants to join the group, needs to find the partner spot in his town where to take his scec. While there he needs to full fill a form and he will receive his “scec”. Basically “scec” are shaped exactly the same as the 5-10-20-50 euro banknote.
When he needs to purchase, he can go in those places where they show the scec logo. There they can have a discount on the purchase. To provide an example. If the bill is 120 euro, he will pay a part by cash in euro and a part in scec. The percentage could be between 10% and 30%, and it is up to the pro-sumer to decide. To become a member of the association, it is required a fee, which will cover the expenses of the service. People are asked to pay 10 Euro plus 10 scec, every year.
image.5: photo, Arcipelago Scec, campaign 2012
50 Part I: Thesis Background
Keypoint 2: Resources Empowerment
Talking about sustainability, we almost link it to the environment. So what really is the environmental sustainability? It refers to the systematic conditions through which, at a global and regional level, human activities should not interfere with the natural cycles (on which they are based) more than the planet’s resiliency can take. At the same time, these human activities shouldn’t impoverish the natural capital to be transmitted to future generations. What we can do then? How can we maintain the environment we are live in? There are few level of intervention: • The redesign of existing products or services, with lower impact materials and energy • The design of new products and services, environmentally more sustainable, to replace the current ones • The design of new systems and services, based on users satisfactions ans intrinsically sustainable • The design of scenarios of sustainable lifestyle Through the combination of product, communication and services, we can create proposal socially and culturally attractive. We, designers, have to work promoting the capacities of users, their possibilities to participate personally and directly in the definition of results and the means to achieve those results. Moreover, people should start to rethink about their resources value and how they can reuse instead of trash and looking for something new. Data are clear, in 2050 we will be 9 billion people, living in our planet and we all need to be aware we will need to use 90% less resources. According to this we will be asked to start reusing materials and energy, replacing products and services and shaping new scenarios of better life.
Environmental sustainability: a state in which the demands placed on the environment can be met without reducing its capacity to allow all people to live well, now and in the future.
case study n.5 Eco Village, Shanghai Eco-village is Shanghai’s first green manufacture community. It represents ideas of sustainability, and tries to implement a sustainable way of thinking in Chinese society. Relatively new to Shanghai, the Village complex, at 485 Fenglin Lu, near Zhongshan Nan Er Lu, is home to an array of shops and coffee. The converted textile warehouse has been taken over and completely renovated by the natural and personal care company, Eco & More, which has a branch on site. Although the area is still not completely finished it is a diamond in the rough, with new businesses frequently moving into the complex. During one of my journey there, I had the chance to interview Jeni Saeyangthe, the managing director of Eco-more Company and also founder and inspired mind behind Eco-village. “What we are doing with the village is we negotiated with the
landlords to take a large percentage of the space and they give us very cheap rent and then we invite all our green brands together. That is why the rent is very cheap. Now by doing this we bring a lot of green brands together and help them to manage. “ “Not many people understand when you are talking about the circle of life and sustainability. The way we are active in a Chinese market - only a small part of our consumers buy our products because it is Eco. China is not at the point yet, where people can buy the product because it is good for the environment. I think in few more years...” Eco-village is supposed to grow into a big complex. They have plans about organic farming, working with scholars, organizing a children’s library and yoga classes, galleries and even sustainable technology museum. “We want to make people think differently”
image.6: photo, Angelica Fontana, Eco-village, Shanghai, 2013
case study n.6 Jenuinō, IT Jenuinō is a service design company, based in Toscana, who offers both consultancy to local farmers and a safety and transparent channel to bring fresh and quality products, directly from producers’ field to consumers’ table. This project took place as a cultural movement to face the food issue. In fact the marketing played a strong role on moving consumers’ behavior to link the concept of good and to the beautiful. In-fact, while purchasing at the supermarket, we are just surrounded by selected and packed products which path from the farm to the shelf is being a way to long. Moreover, every time we purchase in the supermarket, for every euro we spend, 12 cents goes to the producer, and the other 88 cents are lost between advertisement, media, transportation. fees, etc.
image.7: illustration, Jenunino, campaign 2011
Jenuinō aims to help those farmers struggled by this situation and who are left aside from the market. The mission is to enable a collaborative system of mutual support between farmers and to engage consumers to being part of the process, while discovering their traditions. Indeed food is culture, and more is a strong key to the tradition sharing.
case study n.7 Buycott, worldwide Buycott.com is a web-based platform that elevates consumers' voices by connecting them with business and advocacy groups. Buycott users collaboratively inform and co-design products around common principles by connecting with others interested in similar issues to share knowledge and brainstorm solutions. Every time a shopper tosses a tube of toothpaste or carton of orange juice in their cart, that’s a decision -- conscious or not -- to support the company that makes that product. But what if you don’t want to do business with companies embroiled in ethical scandals? What if you actually want to boycott brands whose practices aren’t up to your standards?
There’s a new (and free) smart-phone application -- “Buycott” -- that makes it easier for consumers to make sure what’s in their cart is aligned with what’s in their heart. Simply choose which campaigns to join, and scan items before purchasing them to determine whether they’re produced by companies you wish to avoid or companies you wish to support. Buycott includes a wide range of user-sponsored campaigns covering social issues from animal welfare to economic justice to gay rights. These campaigns specify which companies to avoid (“boycott”), and which companies to support (“buycott”). Basically it encourages companies to create products that are responsive to their customer and community priorities, increasing supply chain transparency and informed, social consumerism.
image.8: screenshot, Buycott, website 2012
54 Part I: Thesis Background
Keypoint 3: Peer-to-Peer Exchanges of Relationships Social innovation refers to changes in the way individuals or communities act to solve a problem or to generate new opportunities. In the sustainable development framework, people are those who need to socially collaborate to provide a bottom-up scale growth, from the personal to the international level. Since the last decade, there have been different talks, papers, prototypes, about communities all around the world who are trying to collaborate together, aware of the advantages they can gain through this. Again which is the role the designer can assume in this context? Well we designers, are people before being designers and we as people are part of the change process. Basically designer, citizens, governments and administrative, needs to collaborate together in codesigning(working) services and solutions. That’s the age of collaborative services, bottom-up initiatives born within peer-to-peer interactions between institutions, civic organizations and companies. This form of collaboration calls for trust, and trust calls for relational qualities: no relational qualities, means no trust and no collaboration, and consequently no practical results from collaborative services. . Pay it Forward movement, is just a perfect example of how in the social fabric, a small action can make a big difference. This is the power of the shaping peoples’ behavior through a social exchange
Social sustainability: the ability of a community to develop processes and structures which not only meet the needs of its current members but also support the ability of future generations to maintain a healthy community.
case study n.8 GoFundMe, worldwide GoFundMe allows users to create their own website to describe what they are raising money for. During this process, members can enter the fundraising cause, the amount they hope to raise, and even upload photos or video. Once the website is created, GoFundMe allows users to share their project with people through integrated social network links (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) and email. People can then donate to a user’s cause through the website and track the progress of their funding. Those who donate can also leave comments on the website in support of the project. GoFundMe, itself generates revenue by automatically deducting a 5% transaction fee from each donation a user receives. If the user receives no donations, then no charge is made.
GoFundMe is unique to crowd-funding in that they are not an incentive-based crowd-funding website. Although they do allow projects that are meant to fund other projects for musicians, inventors, etc., the business model is set up to allow for donations to personal causes and life events such as medical bills.
image.9: screenshot, Gofundme website, 2012
case study n.9 Oui Share, FR OuiShare is an open global community of passionate people (entrepreneurs, designers, makers, researchers, public officials, citizens and many others) working to accelerate the shift toward a more collaborative economy. It is a not-for-profit organization, born in January 2012 out of a Facebook group in Paris, whose mission is to explore, connect and promote the ideas and projects which we believe can bring upon huge societal benefits through sharing, collaboration and openness. If the past ten years have been about finding new ways to connect, create and share on the web, the next ten years will be about applying these principles in the real world. Right now, countless collaborative, peer-to-peer and open alternatives are reinventing the way we produce and make use of goods, resources and services, harnessing the power of communities.
image.10: photo, Silvia Robertelli Oui Share fest, 2012
Offline, OuiShare connects local hubs to foster collaboration and new ideas, by organizing events all around the world, such as meetups, conferences and creativity workshops. Since January 2012, they have organized 40+ events in 20 european cities. Online, they provide people from the community with a place for online conversations, and invite them to share their ideas and inspirations on OuiShare.net, our collaborative online magazine. Launched in July 2012, it now counts 120+ articles from 70+ contributors, 400+ members from 20 countries in Europe, North America and Latin America, contributing in English, French, Spanish, Italian and German. Among them, a passionate team of 30 connectors is now bootstrapping OuiShare and co-designing this collective adventure with the community.
case study n.10 Green Drinks China, CH Green Drinks China is a nonprofit group who’s mission is to promote awareness and encourage action in the areas of environmentally friendly technologies and sustainable models of growth and consumption. It began in Shanghai in 2009 as a monthly networking event with an idea that real links, connections and projects can start over something as simple as a drink. Monthly GDC events feature speakers on green-related topics and offer forums for anyone interested in sustainable development in China to meet, chat and network. Over the last 3 years GDC has spread to 8 more cities in China, organized more than 100 different events including 45 monthly forums, 20 environmental film screenings, Dutch Days events, LEED training workshops, university forums and planted more than 400 trees in Inner Mongolia with Shanghai Roots & Shoots while also raising
money for Shanghai Sunrise – an organization working for education for underprivileged youth. It is also a playing a role as a networking event where designers, architects, engineers, entrepreneurs, professionals and students can meet to talk and exchange ideas about sustainability and and growth.
image.11: photo, Angelica Fontana Green Drinks China event, 2013
CHAPTER 2
CONCLUSIONS
The 20th century has been defined as the age of the hyper-consumption. In 2050 we will be 9 billion people, living in one planet. We need now to stop wasting resources. The 21th century is the age of the collaborative consumption. Traditional sharing, bantering, landing, trading, gifting, swapping, are being redefined through technology and peer-to-peer exchanges of relationships.
CHAPTER 3
FOOD
AND THE
CITY
“Humans used to know how to eat well but the balances dietary lessons that were once passed down through generations have been confused and distorted by food industry marketers, nutritional scientists and journalists. As a result, we face today a complex culinary landscape dense of bad advice and foods that are not “real”. M.Pollan, 2008
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3.1 Man is what he eats
Everything having to do with food, its capture, cultivation, preparation, and consumption, represents a cultural act. Massimo Montanari, professor of medieval history and history of food at the University of Bologna, in his culinary historian book, Food Is Culture (2006), begins explaining with the invention of cooking allowed humans to transform natural, edible objects into cuisine. Cooking led to the creation of the kitchen, the adaptation of raw materials into utensils, and the birth of written and oral guidelines to formalize cooking techniques like roasting, broiling, and frying. The type of food we eat, how we prepare the ingredients to make a certain recipe and ultimately how we consume and share it, is very telling of the actual essence of who we are and where we are from. Indeed food comprises an intrinsic part of our cultural profile. Food encompasses everything that is important to people; it marks social differences and strengthens social bonds. Common to all people; yet it can signify very different things from table to table. Certainly, the social context for food is extremely significant. In a similar manner to how we observe the impact of contact with other cultures has on our own language and communication styles, the same is true of our dietary customs and practices. The impact of globalization and increased immigration has undeniably had a tremendous impact upon the local diet. Our supermarkets represent a snapshot of the marketplaces around the globe. The choice of ingredients and produce seems immeasurable. We may ‘go’ Italian, Mexican, Indian and French all in the same week. As result, what happened in most of the big metropolis, as I was experience on my own in Shanghai, a lot of people are so getting in used to eat different that they forget their own food value. The question is, who will keep our grandmother’s secret recipes alive, if we, ourself, forget about it?
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image.12: photo, Angelica Fontana Milan, 2012
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Keypoint 4: Never eat alone
In the growing “sharing” economy, online communities are offering peer-to-peer services for almost anything, apartment rentals (Airbnb), car rides (Lyft), house cleaning (Exec), shelf-building (TaskRabbit), laundry pick-up (I mean, really) and many other tasks and experiences. Food plays an important role as a social link. The new “meal with locals 3.0 concepts sell their service as an experience, and beyond that, as a way to build social connections with people that may not always be on time, but will always be “real”. App and website are already worldwide, and they offer services to share a meal with people you may not know. To save the heritage of old unknown way of how and what to eat, these systems help people to share with others. At the same time they enhance a safety and affordable meal, shared between different people, with different backgrounds and cultures. But this is even more. In the era of entertainment and in a context of austerity and greater self-control, we must not forget that people are emotional beings ultimately driven largely by the aspirational and the desire to experience. Food can provide a whole sensorial experience, as a storyteller of each one human being.
case study n.11 Eatwith, worldwide EatWith is one such website, and this one, as its name implies, lets you eat with local families while traveling, instead of falling into tourist traps. And now the year-old, Israeli-based startup is expanding into the U.S., starting in New York City. Here’s how EatWith works: If you’re interested in hosting, an EatWith representative will swing by to meet with you, check out your digs and judge your cooking. If deemed worthy, you then set up a profile and advertise your own brunches, lunches and dinner parties, often with themes (such as a Cinco de Mayo brunch, a contemporary ThaiBrazilian feast, or a “crazy dinner of borscht and flautas”). Hosts also set a suggested donation per attendee. If you’re a guest seeking a slice of local life, you can search the website by location and apply for a seat at a gathering nearby.
The host will assess your online profile, start a dialogue with you and decide whether to accept you as a guest. Most gatherings range in price per guest from $25 to $50. EatWith then takes a 15 percent cut of each transaction. In other words, it’s like Airbnb for meals. “There are so many ways to communicate now — we can talk very easily with Skype, text, everything,” said Maya Lerner, a partner at EatWith. “But people don’t meet face-to-face as much anymore. We want to help make that happen, especially while people are traveling and want tips on the area.”
image.13: screenshot, Eatwith, website, 2013
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3.2 Globesity epidemic
Humans used to know how to eat well but the balanced dietary lessons that were once passed down through generations have been confused and distorted by food industry marketers, nutritional scientists, and journalists. As a result, we face today a complex culinary landscape dense with bad advice and foods that are not “real”.1 Globalization, the inexorable spread of knowledge, technology, culture, and capital from country to country, has been a force both for good and ill, especially when it comes to health. • The good: globalization has lifted millions of people out of poverty, reducing hunger and infectious disease, and, in turn, improving quality of life. • The ill: the same social and economic shifts that have increased people’s wealth have also increased their waistlines and are driving the obesity epidemic in China, India, and other developing countries worldwide.
M. Pollan, In defense of food : an eater’s manifesto, New York Penguin Press, 2008 1
Until recently, obesity was a public health problem only in Western countries. But over the past two decades, it has become truly a global problem, a “globesity epidemic,” affecting countries rich and poor. An estimated 500 million adults worldwide are obese and 1.5 billion are overweight or obese. And if recent trends continue unabated, nearly 60 percent of the world’s population—3.3 billion people—could be overweight (2.2 billion) or obese (1.1 billion) by 2030.2 Harvard School of Public Health , Globalization -Obesity Causes - The Obesity Prevention Source - web article 2012 2
Many low and middle income countries struggle with the socalled “dual burden” of obesity and underweight; but although malnutrition persists in many places, overweight is rapidly becoming a more common problem than underweight. Indeed, for the first time in human history, the world has more overweight than underweight people, and globalization is a major reason for this: It has brought McDonald’s franchises to Mumbai and SUVs to Shanghai, digital TVs to Dar es Salaam and Nestle’s supermarket barges to the Amazon River delta.
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It has thus super-charged the “nutrition transition,” a term for the obesity-inducing shift from traditional to Western diets that accompanies modernization and wealth. At an individual level, obesity results from energy imbalance, too many calories in, too few calories burned. But the food and physical activity choices that individuals make are shaped by the world in which they live: • The “food environment”—what type of food is available, how much it costs, how it is marketed—influences what people eat. • The “built environment” buildings, neighborhoods, transportation systems, and other human-made elements of the landscape —influences how active people are. • New technologies, cars, computers, televisions, labor-saving devices, and so on, change what people do for work, transportation, and leisure. Three broad global forces, free trade, economic growth, and urbanization, are rapidly altering people’s food and built environments and spreading new technologies. These macrolevel changes are driving the global obesity epidemic, especially in low- and middle-income countries. Urban food and built environments, as well as the new technologies that accompany city living, can lead to poorer diets and more sedentary lifestyles. Urbanization does make it easier for people to receive health care and education, both of which can help curb obesity rates. The urbanization problem is playing an important role. More than half of the world’s population lives in cities, compared with 10 percent in 1900. Countries where most of the population is rural are seeing urbanization progress at staggering rates: In China, for example, more than a billion people will be living in urban centers by 2050, nearly double the number today. According to the researches of Harvard School of Public Health, a rapid shifts to urban lifestyles and economic growth have also brought about behavior changes that may be contributing to the obesity epidemic in low- and middle-income countries: • Shifting consumer preferences. Heavy food and beverage advertising on television and other mass media, as well as depictions of the West’s overeating culture, can directly influence food choices and reshape cultural norms around food, luring people toward the unhealthier options that originated in richer countries. Children are especially vulnerable to advertising’s sway, and food advertising on television is no exception: Studies have found that advertising strongly influences children’s food preferences, as well as what children
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ask their parents to buy, and what they eat . • Sleep deprivation. People who get less sleep tend to weigh more than those who get a good night’s sleep, and researchers have observed this trend not only in high-income countries but also in low- and middle-income countries such as Senegal, Tunisia, Brazil, and Taiwan. Researchers speculate that the noise pollution, artificial lighting, and night life of urban environments may contribute to sleep deprivation. • Stress. Psychosocial stress, a risk factor for obesity in Western countries, may also contribute to obesity in low- and middle-income countries, though more research is needed. It’s possible that when people migrate to new urban areas, they could face more stress, since they are leaving behind traditional village social support, earning very poor wages, or struggling to find work. • Women entering the formal-sector workforce. As women take jobs outside the home, they breastfeed less and their families consume more commercially-prepared foods. In high–income countries, these nutrition shifts have been associated with increased risk of obesity in children. More research is needed in low- and middle-income countries to see if these worrisome trends play out as more women enter the formal workforce. • “Little emperor syndrome.” Researchers thinks that China’s “one child policy” may contribute to childhood obesity. Parents with greater purchasing power are tempted to give their “little emperors” the televisions, computers, and other treats that they themselves never had growing up , inadvertently adding to child health risks.
There’s no question that globalization has improved the quality of life for many people in the developing world. But it has also increased access to cheap, unhealthy foods and brought with it more sedentary, urban lifestyles.
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image.14: Philippe Lopez, Shanghai, 2010
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Keypoint 5: Here and now good Food
In today’s trend, “here and now” , demand the fast pace of life in Western societies, marked by the mobilities, the connection now , time pressure ... Part of the “fault” has technology, such permanent connectivity that keeps us hooked to real time and the instant gratification , and where it becomes necessary to reconcile on and off line. The trend is contextualized in urban environment , and associated with the so-called “urban nomads”, characterized by flexibility, active parallel seeking connectivity and can not imagine life without being online. Focusing the trend in the food sector, these consumers are seeking for meal solutions that enable and facilitate this lifestyle. The time of consumption here loses importance given in the context of other trends, while enforces the importance of parallel tasks at the time of consumption . In general, the fast-food concept has always been associated to junk food, easy, tasty, cheap and time-saving. However, to face the hyper-consume of trash, unhealthy food, some companies have taken advantages of the fast-trend to deliver solutions to change this behavior. New concepts of healthy food which are sold in a fast and accessible way turned to attracted citizens.
Make Simple: flexible and easy solutions that enable smart purchase and consumption, simplifying the selection and choosing the best option, while ultimately saving time and making life easier for consumers .
case study n.12 Zerobriciole, MIlan Zarobriciole is a new way to think about the food delivery. This company was born due to the creative approach of Martina Caporeale. In a smart way, she understood the behavior of people to consume unhealthy fast food during the working time. The pressure of the time saving during the day has become more a trend than a real state. People seems to believe they produce more if they keep feeling to be in a hurry. Changing eating behavior of this targeted people has been the goal of different projects during the last century. Zerobriciole found the way but offering a lunch solution packages of fast home made food. Consumers can order online and choose between different type of set, designed for different situations.
There are rice stick, easy, tasty and cheap. Seasonal soups and salads. In one hour they can receive their order directly at their working station. To better address the work on the targeted group, the company decided to push their strength in the working time, so they offer the service from the morning to the afternoon.
image 15: Zerobriciole, website gallery, 2013
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3.3 Eating is a contagious behavior
If the person you’re eating with orders a salad, do you as well? After crunching data on hundreds of thousands of meals, Eatery, an app from health technology startup Massive Health that lets users take pictures of their food and then asks them to rate photos of other users’ food based on perceived healthiness, finds that healthy eaters make each other more healthy, while bad eaters just encourage each other. Basically your friends are why you’re fat. Based on crowd-sourced healthiness ratings of photos, Massive Health has deduced that friends influence the healthiness of what we eat by 34.5.%. If your spouse is obese, you’re 37% more likely to also be obese. So, the old adage: “You are what you eat” should perhaps be updated to: “You are what you and your friends eat”. Truly, socializing with obese people affects a person’s perception of what constitutes a normal body weight. According to Dr. Nicholas Christakis, a professor at Harvard Medical School’s Department of Health Care Policy, you change your idea of what is an acceptable body type by looking at people around you. New researchers have taken a two-way approach to examine how eating patterns can be influenced, hypothesizing that each diner’s eating behavior mirrors the other’s back and forth. A study published in PlOs One found that women tended to take bites of food at the same time, demonstrating behavioral mimicry. In the study, researchers observed 70 pairs of women who had never met share a meal; they found that mimicry was more pronounced in the beginning of the meal than at the end. The researchers believe that because the women were unacquainted, they attempted to bond by mirroring each other’s movements, in just the same way that we unconsciously mimic hand gestures and facial expressions when we try to socially connect. Social networks could be the solution.
Even if the spread of obesity in social networks appear to be a factor for the obesity epidemic, online network phenomena could be used to spread healthy behavior. While you may not be able to change where you live, you can drive a positive change in your health by choosing who is in your social network.2
Nicholas Christakis, James Fowler, The spread of obesity in a large social network over 32 years, N Engl J Med. 2007 3
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A few years ago, Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler made a striking discovery about obesity: it spreads from person to person, much like a contagious virus. They were able to demonstrate this by mining the data sets of the Framingham Heart Study (FHS), a longitudinal survey that has revealed many of the risk factors underlying cardiovascular disease. Because the FHS noted each participant’s close friends, colleagues, and family members, Christakis and Fowler were able to recreate the social network of the town, to see how everyone was connected to everyone else. The Christakis, Fowler work is an important reminder that Jhon Donne was right: No man is an island, entire of itself. Instead, we are all plugged into a vast network of social contacts and cultural norms. While we think ourselves as autonomous individuals, that autonomy is severely constrained by those around us. Researchers at MIT found that by bringing people who had similar traits together into a social network, with the aim of increasing physical fitness, they increased how many people picked up a new activity that could bring about healthy lifestyle changes.
image 16: Pauline Cutler, Bubbles Photolibrary / Alamy, 2006
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Keypoint 6: Ego food
There is so much emphasis on monitoring and analyzing written communication across the web and in social media. Online listening has become a standard for many companies and brands, but what is the next frontier? What are we missing? Photos that consumers upload and share amongst themselves are a major missing piece of the online listening pie. The numbers speak for themselves. By the end of 2010, more than 80 billion photos were uploaded across a variety of social picture platforms (source: Pixable). At least once a month, 52% of mobile users take photos with their phones and 19% upload their photos to the web at least once a month (source: comScore MobiLens January 2011: 3 month average). Why consumers share photos: • Food Diary (25%): A quarter of food photos are motivated by the relatively mundane activity of publishing a food diary – in other words, to simply document and show others “what I’m eating.” People see personal value in just sharing the simple moments in life. • Documenting Self-Creation (22%): Another major motivation for posting food-related photos is to show off a self-created meal or dish. Perhaps people are trying out a new recipe, or are particularly proud of how a meal turned out. This involves a more egotistical-related motivation, where people are proud of their efforts and want to show off their creations and implicitly seek approval or credits. • Special Occasion (16%): Special occasions and cameras go hand in hand. Most households have a camera on hand for all special occasions because special occasions usually bring many family members together in one place. It must be documented! Also, a major element of all holiday celebration is food. • Food Art (12%): Photography is an art form and food is an art form – mix the two together and you have a masterpiece. • Friend/Family Moment (10%): In general, people are less important than the food in the photos analyzed; friends and/or family were the focus only 10% of the time. The motivation for this is similar to that of sharing special occasions and other events – capturing a moment of people coming together around the table. There is something social, fun, and happy about the combination of good food and good company.
EgoFood looking both facets coexist and express, so focuses on the "personification" in consumer products of desires, values, aspirations or personal status .
case study n.13 Housefed, worldwide I love photo-sharing sites, especially when they involve food. Housefed isn’t just about sharing pictures though; you can invite random people over and literally share your meal. Founded in March 2011, Housefed is a website that empowers locals to host meals at their own homes where a diverse mix of people can come together over a home cooked meal. The site facilitates an online reservation system making the process of hosting and attending a meal an easy and painless process. Housefed is based in San Francisco and has users in more than 35 countries. Users can share photos of their homemade dishes like many sites let you do for restaurant photos. Users have a profile, a reputation, and are able to communicate with other users. So unlike review websites, they are building a vibrant online community where the offline
meals are just a natural extension of a user’s online activity. “The incentive for new users is finding a homemade meal wherever you are. The way I like to think of Housefed is like a modern supper club. You have a profile on the site, and build an identity that you can take with you anywhere in the world. Not only will you be able to join a meal in your hometown, but in Brooklyn, Melbourne, or wherever you happen to be!” says Emile Petrone, the founder.
image 17: screenshot, Housefed, webstie, 2013
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3.4 Organic-Natural-Green-Normal Food Food security exists when all people, at all times, have physical, social and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food which meets their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life.4 FAO, Food security concept and measurement, Food And Agriculture Organization Of The United Nations, Rome, 2003 4
Generally, Safe food will not cause any persistent and temporary damage to human body in long-term, while specifically, the safe food include the manufacturing process according to the standard of nutrient, health and different principles. However, at present, what we are seeing is that consumer trust of food in China is very low. From the food itself, to the oil it is cooked in, to the handling of problems as they arise. The problem with the food is even related to the demographic issue. In fact the challenge of providing food for the Earth’s growing population, estimated to reach 9 billion within the next century, will put major stresses on our natural environment. The UN predictions also give interesting information about the distribution of people between cities and rural areas in the future. In fact beside the new birth and the increasing of children, due to the reshaping of the one-child-policy, the problem is the moving from the rural to the urban file. For the last several thousand years, the number of people living in cities as opposed to rural areas has slowly increased. In 2009, for the first time in history, 50% of the human population lived in urban areas, and the increasing urban trend is likely to continue. This is mostly related to the inadequate income, the weak social networks, the lack of access to productive resources and employment (22% of total 176 million) By 2020, the world’s rural population is expected to start to decline, and will probably continue declining for the rest of the century. The global urban population, on the other hand, will probably increase dramatically. In 2050, 6.3 billion people will live in cities, or 69% of the world’s projected population. When talking about food safety consumers are becoming more concerned about the food they eat.
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Everyone expects that the food they buy will be safe to consume. However, recent cases of contamination show that this is not. Food Problems lies in the fragmented system of controls which are not keeping clear enough. The first problem is about the definition of organic, natural, green and normal food. When it comes to the much-touted word “organic,” there is much at stake. Not only is the sector the fastest growing in the food industry, but also advocates are positioning organics as a great hope in the battle to protect the environment from the ravages of industrial agriculture and even oil-fueled climate change. There are perhaps as many detailed definitions of “organic” as there are farmers, chefs and consumers. But here are some of the most important labels: USDA Organic: In 2000, after a 10-year development process, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) rolled out its rules covering use of the word “organic” on foods. • “100% Organic”: Can only contain organic ingredients, meaning no antibiotics, hormones, genetic engineering, radiation or synthetic pesticides or fertilizers can be used. Can display the USDA organic logo and/or the specific certifying agent’s logo. • “Organic”: Contains 95% organic ingredients, with the balance coming from ingredients on the approved National List. These products can also display the USDA organic logo and/or the certifier’s logo. • ”Made with Organic Ingredients”: Must be made with at least 70% organic ingredients, three of which must be listed on the package, and the balance must be on the National List. These products may display the certifier’s logo but not the USDA organic logo. The natural label has become ubiquitous. The government does not regulate the use of the word natural on products, except for poultry and other meats. Natural meat and poultry cannot contain artificial flavors, colors, preservatives or sweeteners, and processing kept to a minimum. A label of natural does not indicate anything about the raising, feeding or care of the animals. On other products, the natural label ideally means minimal processing and no artificial additives. The lack of regulation, however, makes it difficult for consumers to determine if this is the case. The green and the normal food, are different from the organic food because they allow a restrict (green food) or total (normal food) use of pesticide, chemical fertilizer and growth hormones.
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Keypoint 7: Food for trust
It’s no secret we move towards a society with dietary and health problems due, in part, to poor nutrition or rather, a bad supercharger. The World Health Organization estimates for the coming decades global rise of chronic diseases related to diet (cardiovascular, obesity or diabetes mellitus, etc.) derived from the current system of life. According to a study conducted by Telefónica I + D, in 2020, 2,000 million obese people in the world, ¼ of the world’s population. All without losing of course the economic point of view, as all these trends imply a significant increase in health care costs to be borne by individual countries to address this problem. The same study indicated above Telefonica expects to increase health spending from 50% in 2020. Therefore, the health factor is still very relevant in many areas, particularly in the food. While health is itself a concept with a lot of weight and influence in the food sector for some time, Consumers want to be under control, but by themselves. Hence the more proactive to prevent, examine, improve, monitor and manage personal health. The improvements in the nutrition of the population which is at the base of the pyramid (developing countries, low-income and number of population).
case study n.14 Con Marche Bio, IT Since 2010, the Consorzio Marche Biologiche has been planning new common strategies to reinforce the organic supply chain in the Marche region. It is a modern organizational structure that is capable of combining the energy of all the organic farmers in the region in a single supply chain. The initiatives carried out by Con Marche Bio support a return to biodiversity also through the use of ancient grains. Con Marche Bio is the next step forward in the evolution of the organic segment in the Marche region. It is the proof that the organic production chain is alive and kicking. In fact, over the last few decades it has played an important role financially speaking, not only in Italy but also in the rest of the world. And the Consortium was founded precisely to confirm and improve the presence of regional
specialties on the markets. It is an operational body that encourages improvements in how agricultural companies are managed and in the production of cereals, by carrying out specific activities, such as, for example: training the operators in the supply chain, promoting the chain in Italy and abroad, developing new products, assisting farmers who decide to adhere to the control and certification system, making new investments in structural and technological projects.
image 18: Conmarchebio website, 2012
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3.5 Organic Agriculture
In the framework of sustainability and social innovation research, agriculture doesn’t just mean food production; it represents the system of community, local resources, open process and connected stakeholders.1 Serena Pollastri Serena, Valsecchi Fracesca, Yongqi Lou, Agriculture prototypes: A design experiment of sustainable open fields in China, paper 2012 1
Agriculture, literally comes from agri [latin: field, country] + cultura [lat: cultivation] = culture (eng: development or improvement of the mind by education or training). Agriculture was the key development in the rise of human civilization, and still today, the level of advancement of a civilization is often measured by its progress in agriculture (with other measurement factors as well). (FAO, 2012). Current data indicate that about 45 percent of the world’s population depends on agriculture, forestry, fishing or hunting for its livelihood. Since the end of World War II, agriculture has changed dramatically. Food and fiber productivity increased expotentially due to new technologies, mechanization, increased chemical use, specialization and global government policies that favored maximizing production. Even if at lots of farmers have been able to produce more, with less labor, there have also been significant negative turning point. The topsoil depletion, groundwater contamination, the decline of family farms, continued neglect of the living and working conditions for farm laborers, the increasing costs of production, and more the usage of pesticide and fertilizer to increase the production and balance the demand, are just some of the result of the so called “industrial agriculture”. In fact one of the problem, which nowadays occurs, is related to the population growth. It is estimated that by 2050 there will be an increasing of population as about 2 more billion people. Since the past decade, a growing international movement has been working supporting the role of agriculture, both in its environmental and social action, and in its innovative and economically viable opportunities for producers and consumers.
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On October 1945 The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) a specialized agency of the United Nations that leads international efforts to defeat hunger – was formally constituted. Serving both developed and developing countries, FAO acts as a neutral forum where all nations meet as equals to negotiate agreements and debate policy. In order to meet global food demands FAO estimates the need for a 70% increase in farm production and an additional 61 million hectares of farmland. However, the urbanization process of rural populations represents an increasing phenomenon all over the world. According to World Bank projections, the level of people living in cities is constantly increasing. Moreover, it has been estimated that almost all of the world’s population growth between 2000 and 2030 will be concentrated in urban areas in developing countries (United Nations, 2005).
According to IFOAM definition, Organic Agriculture is the production system that sustains the health of soil, ecosystems and people. It relies on ecological process, biodiversity and cycles adapted to local conditions, rather than the use of inputs with adverse effects. It combines tradition, innovation and science to benefit the shared environment and promote fair relationships and a good quality of life for all involved. To address the social changes, the 21st century has faced a change of paradigm. The seeds of an agricultural revolution are taking root in cities around the world—a movement that boosters say will change the way that urbanites get their produce and solve some of the world’s biggest environmental problems along the way. It’s called vertical farming, and it’s based on one simple principle: Instead of trucking food from farms into cities, grow it as close to home as possible—in urban greenhouses that stretch upward instead of sprawling outward.
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Keypoint 8: Slowcal
Since few years, to face the food pollution and costs of transportation of fresh food, governments have started to push a worldwide movement of the Km0 food. Right now we are facing a scenario of skyfarms, urban gardens, urban plots, acquaphonic systems, etcetc, which are trying to close the gap between fast and safety food. Today it is the turn of Slowcal , born from the fusion of the concepts of “slow” and “local” as a counter to the fast pace of life, food abundance (in our latitudes, clear ) and waste in modern consumer society. Slowcal is full of consciousness, and is that what’s behind it is a greater awareness and responsibility for the impact of food consumption at all levels: personal, social, economic and environmental. A very important feature of Slowcal is environmental sustainability , is that food has become the new “eco-issue” where the growing awareness of the impact of food production and consumption on the environment is promoting many initiatives , by both businesses and consumers. In the first case ever greater relevance of badges indicating the impact of a product on the environment, as the carbon footprint
new communication technologies as facilitators of the sale and consumption of local products through interconnection and communities
case study n.15 Mahota, Shanghai Mahota Farm, located on Chong Ming Island, has a total of 33 hectares of land devoted to agronomic and horticultural crops. The farm practices Taisheng Agriculture, is an organically self-contained entity with its own individuality, which organisms are interdependent. Other than supplying fresh and safe produce for the resort and members, the farm is open to the public for tours and activities on the farm to get closer to nature. The farm features a multimedia auditorium, vast lands of horticultural crops, pig barns, waste lagoon pools and recreational activities such as cycling, animal feeding, growing and roasting your own vegetables and graffiti art expression. Day tour guests also enjoy from farm to table hot pot lunch with free flow of fresh vegetables. Mahota was build by a Singaporean Tan Hong Khoon, who moved his family’s pig farm from
Singapore to Chongming Island 19 years ago. He went on to build a thriving business including Sun Island Resort, a spa, golf and meeting centre, and five golf courses on Chongming and in Jiangsu. Then, five years ago, he suffered a cardiac arrest and the experience inspired an epiphany on the importance of health. Since then, many of Tan’s projects have begun converting into sustainable enterprises. Sun Island is transforming into a wellness retreat and the pig farm has a zero carbon emission goal. The most recent offspring of this drive towards sustainability is his new ‘farm to city’ grocery and hotpot restaurant on Kaixuan Lu, The Mahota. The hotpot restaurant offers lunch (68RMB) and dinner (158RMB, all you can eat) sets featuring vegetables and pork direct from their farm.
image 19: photo, Paul Piaret Mahota cafè, Shanghai, 2013
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3.6 Local Food challenges
We need to talk about local food. Not Monsanto, lopsided subsidies, or food miles. I don’t want to talk about veganism, haterade, or Portlandia either. I want to address the four most basic problems faced by farmers every day so we can all chip in and make an effort to solve them. Todd Jones, founder of the movement Every Last Morsel, from pitchfork to saladfork 1
According to Todd Jones, founder of a movement called “every last morsel”, which aim is to provide a market space for km0 food, there are four main challenges local food producer and supporters have to face nowadays.
• The first one is about the distribution channel. Farmers spend too much time driving trucks, not tractors. In most cases small farms are forced to distribute their products themselves because they don’t fit neatly into the industrial supply chain. To do this they set up tents at farmers markets and develop relationships with restaurants. Some even establish their own CSAs or make value-added products. The benefit, of course, is that these farmers get to keep more of the fabled food dollar when they sell direct. But most small farms, even those in the middle, get nickeledand-dimed as they try to build their own infrastructure— trucks, refrigeration, gasoline, and marketing. This is a costly part of doing business because distribution on a small scale is not efficient.
•The second challenge is the marketing. Farmers need to spend the vast majority of their time working on day-to-day production, which leaves little time for other equally important tasks, like business development. Ironically, I hear stories all the time about farmers who want to expand the farm and generate more revenue, but they can’t afford to go to the farmers market or find the time to drum up new business. Operating a small farm and making money is just plain tough, which is why most farm households earn all their income from off-farm sources.
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•The third regards the data management It may seem like drudgery, but keeping good records is an important task for any farmer. Technology has made recordkeeping easier, but it could be a whole lot better. Existing tools like spreadsheets offer great flexibility but it takes a considerable amount of time and knowledge to build a template. As a result, many farmers never get started, and those that do don’t always record all the information they should. Small farms need easy-to-use record-keeping tools that help them organize their crop rotations, manage labor, and keep track of sales. •The last challenge is about education While it’s true that the United States needs to educate a new generation of farmers, it’s just as important that we educate consumers, too. Shocking the American public about the perils of industrial agriculture and skyrocketing obesity just won’t cut it because it doesn’t address the problem at an individual level. People go to McDonald’s because they’re tired and hungry from a long day’s work. They go to KFC and Taco Bell because they simply don’t know any better. These may be “wrong” choices, but if we want to inspire change then we need to design solutions that make the “right” choice easy. If local food is to become a sustainable part of our larger food system, then these four problems must be solved with practical solutions. So let’s start a conversation about how to solve them. Let’s collectively invent the future of farming.
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Keypoint 9: Collaborative Systems
Farming and Agri-culture is not just a matter of food. Truly it represents the system of community. Community efforts can preserve agricultural land, encourage sustainable agricultural practices, support local food producers, and facilitate the production and distribution of locally produced food through farmer’s markets and cooperative food buying programs As said before, designers’ role is to enable communities to collaborate in terms of sustainable innovation. As an inclusive process that draws on citizens and communities as a critical resource in exploring challenges and identifying innovative solutions, design can reorganize aspects of daily life, improve its quality and reduce our impact on the environment (SEE, Sharing Experience Europe, 2011)
Part I: Thesis Background
case study n.16 Dott (Designs Of The Time), UK Dott was a two-year program operating from 2007 and it worked as a grassroots community design projects, based in Middlesbrough city, which intent was to improve design awareness at different levels of the society and to stimulate social, environmental and economic innovation within a given region. (Manzini, 2011) During the first year, the team evaluated the current community initiatives and from 200 projects, the program was lead on the analysis of 5 crucial everyday contexts: mobility, health, food, school and energy. In the second year, the design teams examined new tools and platforms for creating sustainable and innovative solutions to complex societal problems through design. As an example, the Urban Farming project hinged on an experiment to re-engineer food systems to make them more locally sustainable.
By looking at local resources and connections, a map was produced of where the citizens of Middlesbrough had access to food and where others were growing food within the broader city limits, on allotments, in market gardens and in greenhouses. More then 80 groups such as schools, residential homes, allotment associations, mental health units, voluntary organizations, etc. participated to the ‘soil to table’ local project. The local council provided some areas of the main local park to be cultivated by the participants with the support of local horticulturists, allotment growers, farmers and food producers. After few months they organized a ‘kitchen playground’ event with activities going on for three weeks and a final ‘Meal for Middlesbrough’ for 1500 people in the town’s main square.
image 20: photo, Dott, 2007
CHAPTER 3
CONCLUSIONS
Man is what he eats. This sentence has been copied, reformulated, framed. It became a status. Truly, eating is a physical necessity, but through the time food became a label for the self representation. Cookers are celebrities, food is a cult. 17.000 are the food blogs, seven out of twenty books sold in amazon are about cooking and baking. Media and the public opinion, are just creating a social net where people are more what others see they eat.
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image 21: photo, Angelica Fontana, Chongming (Shanghai), 2013
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PART II THESIS FOCUS
China
Social Netowk
Design Harvest
CHAPTER 4
CHINA 中国 z
This chapter is an introduction to the reality I met and I was living with for more than a year. There is no other place in hearth so mixed of cultures, traditions, myths and stories, as China is. In the following pages I will provide an overview of the people, the places, the culture and the new age of this amazing country, hated and loved at the same time.
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4.1 China, the fast growing country
I have been living in Shanghai for one year and a half. It was the first time for me, in China, but I already had the chance to travel in Asia. So, before leaving , I was expecting to experience something similar to what I already have seen, about the food, the lifestyle, the overload “copy and paste”. The reality is that I had to keep back my expectation. China is something you will never experience anywhere else. Truly I have to say, after living for more than a year in Shanghai, I found out western country have completely a wrong impression about this country. China is not copy and paste as is not just spring rolls and rice noodles. The culture behind is strong and has a long history. What now most of the western country can see is just the last century’s change. In fact, if we turn back the clock for a moment, and we look at the roots, we can still feel the power of this culture. In the ancient belief, the body and the personal balance were the core of the whole life system and it would have affects all the other elements, as your reputation, your relationships with others, your career, your health, your future and your selfawareness. According to Laozi,老子, an ancient philosopher at the center of your being you have the answer, you know who you are and you know what you want. He used to describe the Chinese culture through its harmony, balance, hierarchy and non-action during conflicts. Interesting is the fact that meanwhile, the Anglo-Saxon culture was based on working, success, results, competitions, values which are now associated with Chinese. It is quite clear how the ancient cultural paradigm changed completely shaping the colonial one. Nowadays, even if the ancient paradigm is still hidden under the globalization and the so called “westernalization”, it is still alive and the message which is being shared is to protect and treasure your own culture, by reshaping it with the new world. China is changing faster than any other society in human history. “Each generation is a new society coming to life”. This is a quotation from Alexis de Tocqueville, in the 19th century, analyzing the American society. Today, it can perfectly fit in the Chinese context. A quarter of a century ago China painfully came out of a period of social upheavals with dramatic consequences.
Each generation is a new society coming to life
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image 22: photo, Angelica Fontana, Chongming (Shanghai), 2013
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The “Cultural Revolution” and its spearhead, the “red guards”, had not only sealed the fate of a part of the population and ruined the economy but also destroyed the moral values of the society. By eradicating traditions, customs, and social codes, they set up violence in all its expressions as the ordinary means of action. At the end of this second revolution China found itself bewildered, having lost its references. Demographic pressure makes the social-economic situation even more unbearable. Here comes the major shift taken by Deng Xiaoping with the “opening policy” as part of the “four modernizations” that led to the present situation. According to Dezeen architecture and design magazine, the urbanization of Chinese cities over the past 15 years has been marked by “high-density, high-speed and low-quality duplication” that make urban spaces “meaningless, crowded and soulless.” The change in Chinese values and urban society in the last half century has been huge. Considering the 5000 years of Chinese history, the last 25 years have proportionally experienced changes that no Western observer had really been able to foresee. From the western point of view China has always been viewed as a world in itself, isolated from the rest of the planet. When first countries had the chance to step into this world, curiosity and fascination linked both the side. As western understood the opportunity to invest in this country, they started to import their world. China absorbs modernity, integrates the world economy at great speed. Despite common and trendy thought among fake and copies made in China, nowadays China is a matrix-culture (Guy Olivier Faure). Truly, since they got the taste of western habits and lifestyle, Chinese people started to import more and more, to imitate and generate copies. Seeing the progress in other countries and being able for the first time to compare their self, they had the illusion they could gain the same level just by placing the social, economical and even cultural structure. This fast limited progress has been perceived in the big metropolis. Beside Hong Kong and its particular history, this phenomenon is pretty clear in such cities as Shanghai, Xiamen, Guangzhou and Shenzhen and in the last few years more in the northen, in Harbin and Dalian. However, as said, China is not just the “copy and paste” country. From the 21th century, something has changed and we are facing a swift from made in China to created in China.
Seeing the progress in other countries, for the first time China had the illusion to be able to gain the same level of western countries, just by placing the social, economical and even cultural structure
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It refers to products actually invented in China as , for example, some national brands, which have developed their own products. Still the process is not completely distinctive. Zhou Shaopeng, director and doctoral advisor of the Department of Economics at the China National School of Administration, states, to realize “Created in China�, China must strengthen its independent innovation capability. According to him China needs to fix a market place for innovation technological systems combining manufacturing, studying and researches. Moreover, the country needs to lead a development of entrepreneurial risk investment, technological advice and services. It even should make good use of global scientific and technological resources. Finally, it has to strength the protection of intellectual property. This intellectual property is addressed to Chinese people and western companies should try to push in this direction, instead of spoiling it. Moreover a potentiality can be seen to the fact that China is getting older, In 2050 (graph.9-10) in the average people would be more than 50 years old, and those people could carry on the progress, from now on.
The population in China, at the end of 2012, was 1.33 billion people, and 8 million emigrants. 55 man to 45 woman. In 2050 the majority will be over 50.
Graph.9-10: These graphs show the change of Chinese populations’ life time, by age, for both female and male, source US Census Bureau, International Database, 2012
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4.2 Shanghai, the multicultural city
Shanghai, 上海, literally “on the sea”, started to grow 500 years ago on the bank of the Yangtze River Delta, with East Sea in the east and Hangzhou delta in the south. The small town supported by fishing and weaving before the first Opium War, is now, the skyscraper metropolis setting the pattern for the explosive urban growth in Asia. When, late the 19th, after obtaining the right to sell to Shanghainse citizens the opium that they cultivated in India, the British established in the city, there was nothing on what is now the urban landscape. Before the wave of new building really took hold, Shanghai staged an architectural competition for a redevelopment strategy to deal with the whole Pudong area, which was, at that time, just the remote flat countryside. Many of the world’s leading architects - Toyo Ito, Massimiliano Fuksas and Richard Rogers among them - were invited to take part. The inescapable fact is speed. Shanghai is a city whose development over the last ten years has by any standards been extraordinarily rapid. From 1990 to 2000, a total of USD 45.423 billion, from 22,270 projects, was invested in Shanghai (SSB, 2002). Out of the100 largest industrial enterprises in the world, 57 have invested in 147 projects in Shanghai. Nowadays, within a population of 23, 884, 600 people, the whole urban and suburban area covers 7,037 square kilometers. The city central is divided into two key areas: Pudong and Puxi, two sides of the Huangpu River. Pudong is the financial district, and it is well shaped by skyscrapers such as Oriental PearlTower (486m), which stands as the world’s third tallest TV tower and has become the new symbol of Shanghai, Jin MaoTower (421m), the World Financial Centre (492m) and the under construction ShanghaiTower (632m). Puxi, the cultural and entertainment center of Shanghai, remains the home of approximately 48% of Shanghai’s residents in an area of 288 square kilometers. Puxi is even linked to Shanghai historical background and reputation. In fact, Shanghai’s more graceful nicknames included the Paris of the East, but a more accurate moniker was the fruitier Whore of the Orient.
At the end of 2012, the US Census Bureau reported there were 23.8 Million people living in Shanghai, coming from 214 different countries.
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During Shanghai’s Golden Age from the mid 1800s until the Communists took over in 1949, the city was rife with drug dens, brothels and gambling houses, and the city grew rich on the proceeds of the opium trade. Nowadays is still possible to feel the multicultural atmosphere in the city. There are people coming from everywhere. The US Census Bureau , in 2012, reported that in Shanghai there are 173.000 foreigners coming from 214 different countries. The report states that this number proves that there has been an increase of the 6, 7%, compared to 2011 data. This migration phenomena , of course, brought the western print and played a role in changing the shape of the city. According to this, people used to say that Shanghai is not real China, too mixed with west, too keen to compromise and run for modernity and change, to leave everything else behind. It’s unfortunately true, but the city still hasn’t given up all of its old and original identity, it has hidden and denied it maybe, relegated it to the edges of beautiful new compounds and downsized traditional old districts to leave room for new constructions. This is the price Chinese decided to pay in order to bring their country to the modern level that West imposed them, to show how fast and forward they’re able to move and adapt.
image 23: photo, Daniel Al Baghdadi, Urban Planning Museum (Shanghai), 2012
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4.3 China -mobile- online
There are estimated to be more than 485 million Chinese surfing the net in China. Although Asia has a fairly low internet penetration rate compared to North America or Europe, it is home to the highest number of internet users due to the continent’s population of 1.33 billion (graph 11).
The size and demographics of internet users has seen some changes over the past several years. As shown in graph.12, since 2005, the percentage of the overall number of internet users in China, has moved from 8.5%, with 11,100 people to the 31.8%, with 42,000 people. Even though natizens under the age of 30 continue to account for the majority of internet users with 72.1%, now a days there is even an increase of the percentage of the over 50 internet users (graph.13)
Graph.11: The graph compares the internet users amout in million, in different continents Source internetworldstat.com, 2012
Graph.12: The graph shows the change of the overall number of internt users in China, from 2005 to 2010. Source: CNNIC, 2010
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image 24: photo, Angela Mathis, Shanghai, 2013
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Graph.13: The graph shows the increase of the over 50 internet users, from 2008 to 2012. Source MEC china
A typical Chinese internet user spends about the same amount of time online per week as a typical US internet user does. But when it comes to online behavior, Chinese internet users have some very unique characteristics that are different from their global counterparts. CNBeta,a mobile app group, collected some interesting data from internet users. Here some key takeaways according to the data: • 52.1% of China’s entire population will be online by the year 2016. • 73.5% of China’s online population live in urban areas. • China’s internet penetration rate is 38.3%. • Chinese internet users spend an average of 18.7 hours online per week. • More people (415 million) use instant messengers than search engines (407 million). • Portal websites are more popular and more frequently-used than are search engines. • As of November 2011, China had 145 million online shoppers, only second to the US • Chinese online shoppers are VERY active, making an average of 8.4% purchases per month, almost twice as much as a typical US online shopper purchases. Chinese people are not only at the top of the internet users in the world, they even won the record for devices per capite. Stenvall Skoeld & Co. found that one in every nine residents of Beijing and one in every 11 residents of Shanghai owns an iPhone or an iPad. Data rose if consider all the “copied” devices. Chinese people used to keep staying online as social action. Stenvall Skoeld & Co. listed the reason for chinese people to surf online:
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1 every 11 residents in Shanghai owns an I-Phone or an I-Pad These data are not surprising. China’s social networking landscape is diverse and thriving. Even thought Facebook is banned (but still, unlocked with a proper VPN services), there a number of social apps and networks which are keeping chinese people online wherever and whenever. Connections mean “power” in China. This is why social networks have become part of the relationship-building fabric of Chinese society. Chinese companies have the natural advantage of understanding the nuance of the Chinese consumer. This is why the following five social media platforms are worth watching. • Sina Weibo simply describing Sina Weibo as the Twitter of China understates Weibo’s unique capabilities and leadership role in the Chinese social media sphere. With more than twice as many users as Twitter, Sina Weibo is an essential platform to more than 22% of the Chinese Internet population. Part of its popularity can be attributed to the ability of users to include images and video, something Twitter is only now beginning to allow. • Ren Ren the chinese substitute to Facebook. With 147 million registered users and 31 million active users per month, Renren is poised to take over as the social networking platform for the college-educated population in China. • Weixing There’s no question that the mobile space will be the next battleground in China for social networks. That’s because more than 69% of the Chinese population accesses the internet through mobile devices. Weixin is a mobile voice and text app with social features like “friend discovery.” Although not initially a typical social network, Wechat has continually added more social networking features to its product, including a photosharing platform and an LBS component. Currently, it has more than 100 million users. The rise of these apps and their features is the reflection of Chinese’s need to expand their social circle. “Shake” to find other users who are shaking their phones at the same time, and “looking around” to make easier to find new people are just the top of the social online system which is shaping a new level of social relationships.
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4.4 E-Commerce in China
E-Commerce spending in China is rapidly increasing and new more Western styled business to consumer (B2C) websites are starting to appear as the market is slowly starting to shift away from consumer to consumer (C2C) sites. With improvement to China’s communication infrastructure, increasing access to technology and a growing population, it’s no surprise domestic and foreign companies alike are flocking to China’s eCommerce market. The potential scale of the eCommerce market in China is highlighted by looking at the number of internet users as shown in the graph.12. The steadily increasing rate of internet users or citizens in China is the result of expanding broadband access in rural areas, as well as the adoption of 3G cell phones and improved mobile networks that provide mobile Internet access. According to China Internet Network Information Center’s (CNNIC) report in June 2010, web shopping ranks the as the fastest growing online application activity in China, exceeding activities such as blogging and forums. China Payment Services predicts the following trends will continue to gain traction among online consumers: • first, a popularity increase for bulk purchases or group buying website such as Groupon; • second, a rapid growth in mobile platforms as eCommerce retailers are responding to users demand for mobile online shopping websites; • third, a shift from C2C dominated websites such as Taobao to B2C retail websites such as 360Buy, M18, Joyo and Dangdang. Dara from the CNNIC’s report shows how in future the number of chinese people purchasing online is going to increase.
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According to iResearch, the most popular products purchased online are clothing, books, DVDs and CDs (March 2009.) Also, items that were once solely purchased in store such as cosmetics and home appliances are now being purchased over the internet. Data from Taobao has shown that in 2010, while women bought more items, men made up 54% of online shoppers and were bigger spenders purchasing items such as electronics or appliances while women purchased clothing and food. Even within the same category, clothing, men on average spent more on purchases. According to CNNIC’s June 2010 report, online payment web applications have the fastest growth rate in China with a utilization rate of 30.5%. The reasons for this growth are mainly due to an increase in web shopping as well as an increase in companies offering its clients the option to pay online. Online transactions have been a hurdle to the expansion of eCommerce in China. According to China Internet Network Information Center, in spite of the substantial development of online business transactions in China, low trust in online transactions is still one of the obstacles to the development of business applications (2008). Historically, Chinese consumers have chosen cash as their preferred method of payment but increasing debit cards and credit cards have gained popularity. There are a number of effective payment methods such as cash-on-delivery, bank transfers and online gateways which are accepted by the Chinese consumer. Infact there are services as Alipay, which works exactly as paypal, which allow to directly purchase from the private website, or services as Taobao, which works as ebay, providing businesses with a platform where to upload goods to sell. According to Mec, a social media agency, the latest statistcis from Tmall show that more than 1.3 million senior natizens aged over 50 shop online. This means that nearly 4 out of every 100 senior natizens are e-shoppers. Chinese people are getting more and more inside the net system, from chatting to purchasing they can do whatever whey need just using their devices, at home, while working, or even while being out with their friends.
More than 1.3 million senior natizens aged over 50 shop online
CHAPTER 4
CONCLUSIONS
China is growing faster than any other countries in the world. Every year the population percentage reaches incredible numbers. Even more impressive is the growing of networks users. Chinese people are getting so addicted to the on-line being that they seems to identify their life inside the social network.
CHAPTER 5
EATING IN CHINA
“Ni che fan le?� This is the usual question a Chinese will ask to know if you are doing good. China is Chinese food. Every dish you can order have a strong and ancient story behind. However due to the globalization, eating in China, as everywhere in the world, does not always mean eating local and typical food. More, it does not always mean eating safety. This chapter will talk about the real Chinese food and how in city as Shanghai people has started to collaborate to limit the globalization and the food poisoning.
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5.1 Multicultural, strange taste, all over China You may not travel just for the sake of traveling. If you go to China, you will find that the abundant, delicious food gives an almost artistic impression and becomes an integral part of your travel experience. Chinese cuisine has a very high reputation worldwide and represents the magnificent culture of the nation’s almost five-thousand-year old glorious history. The country’s very varied cuisine is considered as one of the top three in the world. The staple food in China is usually rice and wheat. Millet, corn, buckwheat, potato, sweet potato and many kinds of legumes are also common. Apart from rice, wheaten food like steamed bread, noodles, deep-fried twisted dough sticks, steamed stuffed buns, as well as various gruels, cakes and snacks with special local flavors always make the dining table rich and colorful to bring you extraordinary treats. The local flavors and superb cooking form the present world-famous Eight Cuisines from the eight provinces of Shandong, Sichuan, Guangdong, Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Fujian, Hunan and Anhui, each of which has its own characteristics. Including the typical Beijing Cuisine and Shanghai Cuisine. Chinese food can be find everywhere and at any time. In fact, most of the time the real food is better eaten on the street in those little restaurant you are might not that willing to get in. On the contrary is in these places where you can find delicious and special dishes. However, eating in China can be a diner’s delight, or a hellish game of chance. For the affluent, it’s mostly the former, since money buys ways around the risks, organic food, imported food, food sourced from boutique farms that use the best international practices, and charge a premium to those enjoying the fruits of their labor. And then there’s everyone else. Most Chinese people buy what they can afford, and take their chances that the food they buy hasn’t been illegally adulterated, that the milk they bring home is safe to give their children. Billions of meals are eaten each day in China, and most are just fine, give or take a little excessive pesticide used on crops, antibiotics used on chickens and pigs, and polluted ground water watering them all. Chinese, on average, now eat four times more meat per person than they did 30 years ago.
Eating in China can be a diner’s delight, or a hellish game of chance
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image 25: photo, Angelica Fontana, Hangzhou food museum, 2013
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Aside from a spike in heart disease and obesity, and the challenges of producing all that meat (China is largely selfsufficient in pork despite being chronically short of land and water) that seems to many people to be a pretty great thing. But then when you complain to the waiter that your beef soup was supposed to be a pork soup and he says this is pork, well than you understand the stage you are. Pork is made to taste like beef, due to a carcinogenic chemical brushed on it, watermelons explode, after being injected with a chemical to make them grow faster and bigger, and rotten fruit is pickled and treated with chemicals to make it look fresh on supermarket shelves. And, of course, the most infamous case, in 2008, about milk and infant formula which were doctored with the chemical melamine, that looks in tests like protein. That allowed middlemen to water down milk and still pass the protein tests. It also made at least 300,000 people ill, and killed at least six infants. That would be bad enough, except it turns out the government knew this was a problem months before it acted to stop it. After that a lots change. More people started to address the safety problem and the government was forced to take it under control Food safety blogger Wu Heng has ridden this wave. He starting his blog in his graduate school dorm room in Shanghai in January, and was getting millions of hits by May. He and about 30 volunteers post stories on food safety scandals around the country, and what the government should have done. “I think the government does know food safety issues are important, but they’re giving other things a higher priority, like fast economic growth and creating jobs,” he says. “But this can’t continue. People are losing trust in the government.”
You can’t test your way to safety. Given the global economy and the way that food is traded and shipped all around the world, you’re never going to have enough inspectors, you’re never going to have enough labs to do the job. It’s just unrealistic.1 The alternative? Build a system that’s prevention-based, where to enhance the usage of local resources.
Wu Heng, Throw it out the window, blog 2010 1
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image 26: photo, Salvatore Difrancesco, Beijing, 2013
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5.2 Agriculture in China
There are around 1 million villages in China, about one third of the world’s total. Each village has an average of 916 people. The rural population has declined from 82 percent in 1970 to 74 percent in 1990 to 64 percent in 2001 to 56 percent in 2007 and is expected to drop below 40 percent by 2030. Land essentially belongs to local government, a holdover from the commune era. There is a wide gap between the wealth of the impoverished countryside and the blooming cities, with the income of rural residents less than a third of that of urban residents. The annual per capita disposable income of or rural residents was 2,762 RMB (around $300) in 2006 compared to 8,799 RMB for urban dwellers. For every 100 household in the countryside there are 89 color televisions, 22 refrigerators and 62 cell phones. By contrast, for 100 every household in the cities there are 137 color televisions, 92 refrigerators and 153 cell phones. (CNNIC) According to this, the last century was signed by a migration from the countryside to the city. As clear from graph.14, the young generation started to move to the urban area from the middle 20th century.
As result, in the rural area, there are mostly old people left. Those are still farmers, who are trying to keep the memory of the traditions.
Graph.14: The graph shows, in percentage, the swift from rural people to citizens, CNNIC, 2010
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image 27: photo, Angelica Fontana, rice farm, Anhui, 2012
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A typical village farmer grows rice, corn, chilies and vegetables on a half-acre of land, and maybe keeps some chickens and pigs. Small Farmers produce enough to eat but not much to sell. There are inadequate basic public services such as education, health and applications of new technologies. Typical rural families live in simple wooden houses, use outhouses and cook in shacks over open hearths. Many villagers now have televisions and even washing machines, refrigerators and DVD players, but many villages only have electricity during the night, as rural industries need the power during the day. Landline phones are still rare. Cell phones are becoming more common. In villages outside Shanghai you can find people with stylish haircuts and expensive suits that live in houses with coal grills and plastic tables. In China, until the mid 20th century traditional organic agriculture was prevalent. In remote areas where farmers are too poor to afford agrochemicals, it survives still now. However, during the past 60 years most agricultural areas have undergone fundamental changes. Since the 1970s, the so called “Green Revolution”, which describes agricultural mechanization, improved irrigation, introduction of hybrid crop varieties and an increasing input of agrochemicals, has brought an amazing increase in agricultural productivity, much needed to feed the country’s large population. Today, China is the major user of chemical fertilizers in the world. On less than 1/10 of the world’s arable land Chinese farmers apply about one third of the worldwide production of nitrogen fertilizers. Within only five years the total domestic production of chemical fertilizers increased from 37.9 million tons (2002) to more than 52 million tons (2007). In the same period consumption increased from 43.3 million tons to 51 million tons (Greenpeace China 2009). The country is not only the largest consumer of chemical fertilizers, but also applies the most pesticides. Agrochemicals are moreover causing severe health issues. Hundred thousands of people are poisoned by pesticides and thousands of cases of food poisoning are reported every year. As said in the previous chapter, in 2008, the tainted milk scandal caused a nationwide crisis when reportedly more than 300,000 children fell ill after consumption of milk powder contaminated with melamine. China as a country with the size of an entire continent and different climate zones is able to offer a large variety of agricultural products.
China´s environmental crisis, concerns about low quality or even fake organic products and food safety scandals make it difficult to build up consumers’ trust for organic food made in China.
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In the last ten years, the government worked on promoting the organic food culture. Despite the impressive increase of certified farmland in China, the total number of certified farms and processing companies remains relatively small. Thus China´s environmental crisis, concerns about low quality or even fake organic products and food safety scandals make it difficult to build up consumers’ trust for organic food made in China. China’s organic food development cannot be analyzed without taking into account the fast growing of organic food industries in developed countries during the past decade. This process has led to a shift from organic food as a high-priced specialized food catering for a niche market, to mass-produced food for supermarkets and a growing demand for organic food. Organic consumers in China can be targeted into 8 main groups with different consumption preferences and behaviors. They cover the 90% of organic food consumers; the last 10% is made up of high-level hotels, restaurants and other people who buy organic products irregularly or occasionally. • White collar families (40% consumers) With a high education levels and disposable incomes, people in this group have become increasingly concerned about their own health and some are also interested in environmental protection and conservation. • Families with young children (10% consumers) Due to the one child policy, families look after their only child. They provide him the best of everything, which means even the food. They usually have middle to high incomes, with both husband and wife working. They mainly buy from specialty shops and supermarkets, and have access to a whole range of organic products, but they mostly stop buying those as soon as the child grows up. • Families with health issues (10% consumers) This group includes families with members, often the elderly, who have health problems, such as high levels of blood pressure, cholesterol or blood sugar, or heart disease. They prefer to buy organic products from specialty shops and their main purchases are of natural foods with little processing and functional foods. • Overseas returnees (5% consumers) According to governmental statistics, in the 20 years between 1990 and 2009 about 500,000 young people who studied or worked abroad returned to China. During their stay abroad, they were exposed to western lifestyles, including knowledge of organic food.
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• Business people from Chinese Taipei and Hong Kong (5% consumers) According to statistics, there were about 1 million people from Chinese Taipei and Hong Kong working in Mainland China in 2009. This group is well aware about food scandals and they are keen to buy safe food products. • Government officials (10% consumers) There are about 10.5 million government officials in various levels of administrative and party offices. In addition to the salary those officials receive a bonus, which, during the last years, has been as organic food. • Young people (3% consumers) With China’s rapid globalization, many Chinese have been exposed to new ideas and concepts, including healthy and environmentally friendly lifestyles. • Foreigners living in China (7% consumers) This group of consumers is mainly from Europe, North America, Japan and the Republic of Korea. This group of people usually has high incomes and is able to afford organic food.
There is still a lot of confusion even between the explained targets. One of the most common misunderstandings is concerning the difference between green and organic food. Truly in green food, chemical and pesticides can be used to improve soil quality, while in the organic culture none of these have been applied for at least two years for an annual crop and three for perennials. Moreover, farms and processing plants in green culture are controlled every three years, but for the organic, the inspection is every month. The problem with the organic food is related to his costs. Due to the need of a well structured secure system to control the food produced in organic farms, products’ price is raising a lot compared to those in the market. In the overall consumption behavior, people are not enough moved in the direction of a healthy purchase. They know they have better to, but in the daily life they act in the opposite way, looking at the price and the quantity before the quality.
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image 28: photo, Salvatore Difrancesco,Dali, 2013
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5.3 R-urban realities
The seeds of an agricultural revolution are taking root in cities around the world, a movement that boosters say will change the way that urbanites get their produce and solve some of the world’s biggest environmental problems along the way. It’s called vertical farming, and it’s based on one simple principle: Instead of trucking food from farms into cities, grow it as close to home as possible, in urban greenhouses that stretch upward instead of sprawling outward. These new urban farms, in Shanghai provide an oasis, and make it easy for corporations to benefit from outdoor creative urban farming activities. Looking further, proponents say urban farming could bring even bigger and more sweeping changes. Farming indoors could reduce the use of pesticides and herbicides, which pollute the environment in agricultural runoff. Preserving or reclaiming more natural ecosystems like forests could help slow climate change. And the more food we produce indoors, the less susceptible we are to environmental crises that disrupt crops and send prices skyrocketing. Still, many agricultural experts aren’t sold on the idea of vertical farming. The core argument against it is the following: Conventional farms are the simplest and most efficient places to produce food. Growing food indoors, using artificial lights and other special equipment, means more effort and expense, and cancels out any benefits of being close to customers, critics say. In Shanghai as in most of other metropolis, Urban farming projects of all shapes and kinds take their place in the market, pointing out that city agriculture is no longer the province of only nonprofit organizations, school groups and renegade gardeners but it is also a place for serious businesses. • Sky-farms, represent a contemporary contribution to urban life that reconstructs the identity of living public spaces through design while safeguarding tradition through health and natural balance. Skyfarms, is an innovative platform of experimental urban farming which encourage the paradigm shift from the conventional food model, which is rural, disconnected and monoculture, to an alternative contemporary approach, which is urban, connected and distributed.
Vertical farm, the seed of the agricultural revolution?
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image 29: photo, Angelica Fontana, sky-farm, Anken Green, Shanghai, 2012
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The Waterhouse Hotel, that is a roof top farm that serves only the café at the Waterhouse Hotel. It has not been developed into a Sky-farm and it is not envisioned that it will be used as a public space with public activities; as the farm itself is used as an outdoor restaurant and provides green aesthetic environment for activities. Jiashan market is a very convenient down town hub, located in the very heart of the “French Concession”; the head quarters of expatriate and middle class Chinese social life. It has many restaurants, services and shops, supported by organized and frequent community activities, with a vivid daily market in the lane and a bimonthly creativity market with DIY products, home chefs and artisans. Restaurants occupy 50% of the space, 25% is rented for housing and the rest is occupied by creative businesses. • Aquaculture is the cultivation and rearing of aquatic plants and animals in a fully or semi controlled environment. Many species are produced around the world by means of aquaculture including both freshwater and saltwater fish, crustaceans, and mollusks, along with plants such as seaweed. By 2009 aquaculture was provided more than 50 percent of all world fisheries production and is showing a growing tendency. According to the Fisheries and Aquaculture Department of the UN aquaculture is needed to ease the stress on the world’s oceans that are in dire circumstances, whereas demand and consumption for seafood. Aquaculture has the potential to be a powerful tool to reconcile this paradox.
• Hydroponic is a method of growing plants using a mineral nutrient solution in water, without soil. In traditional agricultural methods soil is used as the medium whereby nutrients are dissolved in water, which can then be taken up by the plant roots, although the soil itself is not necessary. If nutrients are added to the water in which the plants are grown, then the soil medium is not needed. Hydroponic methods have a very old history, they have been used for centuries and are quite simple to employ. The hanging gardens of Babylon, the floating gardens of the Aztecs in Mexico are all precursors to modern day hydroponic cultures, just as the ancient Chinese systems where farm wastes were commonly added as feed to fish cultured in flooded rice paddies. There are many great advantages of hydroponics; the most important is the ability to grow plants in areas where soil is not favorable for in-ground agriculture.
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image 30: photo, Angelica Fontana, aquaphonic, Shanghai, 2013
CHAPTER 5
CONCLUSIONS
As in most of the megalopolis in the world, one can plan to try different food from different countries each day of the week, without even eat his own. In Shanghai the government had to sign a law to define the distance needed between two stores from the same chain, to stop the growth of the thousands of international fast food. Some organizations tried to move on, setting up events and workshops to move citizens to re-discover the treasure of agriculture.
CHAPTER 6
DESIGN
HARVEST
This chapter will introduce the field research of my thesis. During my internship experience, I had the chance to meet the rural side of Shanghai, Chongming Island. Working with Tektao Urban design, on the project Design Harvest, I developed a deep analysis on the gap between the rural and the urban realities.
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6.1 Chongming Island
Chongming, 崇明 (literally “land above water but the wide luminous flat plants”) is an Island, part of the municipality of Shanghai since 1958. It is part of the Chongming County which includes even Changxing Island and Hengsha Island and it all covers an area of 1,411km2. It is formed by the sediment deposit washed down from the upstream of Yangtze River. Since the flow rate of Yangtze at the mouth where it enters East China Sea is slow, more and more sediment is being washed down and deposited here, it is a continuously growing county. QIDONG
Chongming Island
Jiading
Zhabei Putuo Changning Jiangsu Qingpu
Songjaing
Changxing Island
Baoshan
Xuhui
Hongkou Yangpu Huangpu
Hengha Island
SHANGHAI
Jiangan Luwan
Minhang
Nanhui
Chongming Island, called “the door of Changjiang” and “Yingzhou” in the East China Sea, is the third largest island in China after Taiwan Island and Hainan Island with a land area of 1,267km2 with the length of 76 km from east to west and a width of 13-18 km from south to north. Changxing Island lies at the south water channel of the Yangtze River outside the Wusongkou and covers a land area of 88 km2. Hengsha Island, with a land area of 56 km2, is the east-most island of the Changjiang estuary. Chongming Island, Changxing Island and Hengsha Island, forming the shape of triangle, constitute the now Chongming County of Shanghai, with 16 towns and 2 townships.
Map 1: Chongming and Shanghai county
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image 31: photo, Angelica Fontana, Chongming (Shanghai), 2012
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Chengqiao Town, where the County government is located, is the political, economic and cultural center of the County. The three Islands have a registered population of 688,000 people. Traditionally the communication between Shanghai and Chongming has been by ferryboat, which is extremely time consuming and weather dependent. Foggy weather presents the greatest challenge to the safe transportation of both passengers and vehicles and it doesn’t encourage people to get there. Chongming would become an isolated island at any time. With the tunnel and bridge system opening, by 2009, a ride to cross the tunnel and bridge takes only 20 minutes, reducing the total travel time by as much as three quarters of the travel time by ferry. The island has a history spanning more then 1300 years; it is born from two little islands emerged in 618 AD, Xisha and Dongsha, that kept on growing until they merged becoming Chongming Island. In 696 there were already people living on the island. From 1958 it is included inside the Shanghai municipality. Due to the increase of the demographic amount in Shanghai, the agricultural production in the Island has suffered a lot for the pressure on natural and economic resources. To maintain the overall environment quality on the island and the development of the rural economy and the increase in the income of the rural households, the municipality has named Chongming an Ecoagriculture and Eco-tourism island. Moreover, recently the municipality settled down a protocol for the urban planning which will prevent the overbuilding activity among the Island. From the natural point of view the island has a lot to offer, with different national park, wetland and forestry. Truly the Island has been always considered the countryside of Shanghai.
But today, farming is not seeing as an attractive activity for Chongming youth, that decides to move to the big city to find a more remunerative and less manual job. What is nowadays known is that Chongming is the place where 90% of the taxi drivers in Shanghai come from.
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Leisure strategy
Agricultural strategy
Urban strategy
New infrastructure
Towns and roads
Structure and canals
Map 2: Chongming main activities and structure
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6.2 Design Harvest: the roots
Since 2009, Studio Tektao with the collaboration of the Design Department of Tongji University, have been carrying on a research project focusing on the problem of the urbanization of the per urban countryside. The aim was to build a prototype in China, and search for a feasible solution to the sustainable development of the rural area. The strategy that underlines the project has been (partially) to trigger the development of the local community implementing a set of initiatives both in Chongming and in Shanghai, based on sustainable tourism and agriculture and exploiting the proximity between the city and the island as a source of mutual advantage. The idea has been to move the area to become interesting for real estate by designing and promoting new economies based on the local resources and its proximity with the huge metropolitan area. The focus of the field research took place in the central part of the Island, in the north of Shuxin town, in Xianqiao village. The village has been established in 1976, through the merge of Chung Feng and Guan Ming villages. In 2007 was included in the plan of construction of Chongming County pilot villages of rural areas.
-
XIANQIAO VILLAGE
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Map 3: Mapping Xianqiao Village
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image 32: photo, Tektao, Chongming (Shanghai), 2011
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Now there are 745 families and a population of 1683 people. As happens in other rural realities, most of the youngest moved to the city to both study and find profitable and rewarding job that the village, probably, cannot offer. As a result the majority of the population left are elderly people, who all know each other. This makes the country more like a community, than to a real village, where everyone lives in a complete harmony. Every family grows vegetables in the front of their houses, in small land, most of the time for own usage. Children and spouses working or studying in Shanghai, usually get back to their villages during National festivals. The houses architecture is double, traditional Chinese-style house stands close to the new one, built following the style of their dreamt huge American houses. Traditional style houses and structure are scattered around those new and their function is mostly as storage for hay used in kitchen stoves. However, due to the migration to the city, most of the houses are either empty or occupied by one or two people. Habitants’ lifestyle is almost based on the daily duties, mostly farming and local crafts work, and house keeping. Some have jobs in bigger towns and they usually leave quite early in the morning and get back to their home quite late. The common activities stand around the community center, where they meet every evening around 7 pm to dance and do exercise and the tea house. The first set of design initiatives conducted on the island was about investigation. Different groups of young designers from Tongji University and Studio Tao started to enter the context. By talking with people and following them in their daily life. It came out that, truly, local initiatives were going on within the rural area as well as there where no sensitivity or awareness among citizens about the potentiality of the Island. Tao studio summarized the brief in one vision: YINGYANG theory, complementary and interdependent. Rural and urban areas could interact together increasing the quality of people’s life though maintaining their own characteristics (landscape, lifestyle, natural resources). In order to realize this vision, the team decided to focus the research in to three main topics: agricultural; tourism; innovation and research. In 2010, three local workshops have been organized to involve and integrate more people from the island with students and professionals from Tongji and Politecnico di Milano. The three topics were: the rural public space; the rural kitchen; the creative economy.
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Five teams were seeking seeds in the assigned fields and they designed product-service-systems. The shared vision elaborated was about a r-urban area where products from the island could feed the city and offer citizens with opportunities for farming and natural related activities. The workshop fully considered the local potentials as the major motivation and used service system method to visualize it and transform into attractive products or services to urban consumers. • Bioming (Biological Chogmning), vision has been to both provide customers with a truly experience of the organic and local product (fruits and vegetables) and helping local communities to grow. The idea was to create a genuine biological product from Chongming and sell those to Element Fresh, a healthy food chain of restaurants spread all over Shanghai. • PHD (Ping Heng Dao) was based on the idea that the healthy is not just a way of eating, but even a way of living, and it helps us rediscovering the Ying and Yang forces. In this context, Xianqiao village becomes the land of balance. Customers could be addressed by a traditional specialists prescribes a tailored menu and the expert cooking stuff would prepare the perfect mean and provide basis of traditional Chinese diet and balanced lifestyle. • H+ (Healthy Plus) mission was to involve both rural and urban residents collaborating with gym and fitness center to offer product and services to them, which would guide people to live in a more healthy way. To citizens there would be offered experiences of healthy lifestyle in the countryside, to rural people, health clubs and equipments. The common vision elaborated was about a r-urban area where products from the island could feed the city and offer citizens with opportunities for farming and natural related activities. The approach has been to work on the social body, based on the understanding of the social and economic system, as acupuncture gives influence to the human body by giving moderate stimulation. In such an “acupuncture therapy”, there is an internal network of the body which functions are inhibited with a minor pressure. In the same sense, a small project intervention can impact the fluidity of societal system core the development of creative businesses derived from the initiatives of the people themselves (Pauli, 1996) These projects were starting as to enable a powerful cooperative network that inspire and facilitate the urban and rural settings, so as to provide an impact on the social system of the whole region.
A small project intervention can impact the fluidity of societal system core the development of creative businesses derived from the initiatives of the people themselves
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The idea that came out has been to design a series of related project hubs both in the city and in villages and shape a cooperative network, which finally become a mutually complementary urban-rural system. The key was not just to provide products and services for the cities, but, more important, to incubate and showcase new economy, boot local employment and attract urban intelligence, capital and resources to create business venture in the countryside. To better understand the perspective of both rural and urban citizens, a series of workshops, focus groups, and co-designing sessions in the field have been carried out. The first design strategy had his aim on supporting the local craftsmanship and finding a way to bring local products to the city. The research explored ways to preserve and input values to the local production of crafts, starting from a direct interaction with the people in the villages and acting to reconstruct the social cohesion around a stronger local identity. Local people were involved into the design of a series of small objects that become the visible link between the rural and the urban communities. The process of weaving, as an example, symbolically refers to the building of a relationship. First, the team applied the concept to a house basket conceived for urban gardening that allows direct transfer of soil bags from one basket to a bigger basket. Then, to a bamboo pot for steaming rice, with a minimum use of resources. In order to gain an internal sight of the life in Xianqiao village, the Tao research team decided to rent two open fields in the island, around which the community initiatives were organized. The team specifically chose to cultivate rice, as it is one of the most common crops on the island, in terms of diffusion and people’s experience. The idea was to follow the whole process from the seed to harvest and to involve people to collaborate on that. An agreement with a local farmer, Lao Jia, has been signed, so to be supported and taught about the natural way of farming. Lao Jia is a promoter of the organic farming. Without using any fertilizers or chemicals, he tries to plant with an ancient agriculture philosophy of returning the land to nature. DESIGN Harvests team designed the package, the advertisement and the website and established the online shop in Taobao.
The key was not just to provide products and services for the cities, but, more important, to incubate and showcase new economy, boot local employment and attract urban intelligence, capital and resources to create business venture in the countryside.
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To promote the project the first Eco Global Party Chongming was held in Shuxin Town on 27th November. Over 400 participants from Shanghai and 200 villagers from Xianqiao village and neighboring village together with ten organic farm hosts joined in the event. Interactive and communication sessions has been organized, with a sustainable product market, exhibitions, bicycle riding, tree planting and rock concerts. By the end of 2011, the research moved on to the way to create a network between the rural and the urban communities. The participation to local markets turned out to be helpful but not regular enough to generate a strong connection. One significant direction of the research has been the exploration of which role ICT can have in contributing to the quality and the experience of bridging city and countryside. The use of social network platform and online services is massive in Chinese population, even if often there is not an appropriate system design and a significant architecture of information. With the collaboration of Tongji University and Nokia, a solution to connect rural and urban communities of China in a mobile marketplace has been designed. The concept was about to build a virtual market, at the design stage, where local farmers and city people could exchange products and experiences. The design process began with a desk research on Mobile and technology market in China. It moved then on the Ethnographic field research, to understand rural people needs, behavior and expectations and to compare it with local urban users, development of ethnographic tools. Then a territorial research, mapping the island and the communication streams within the city. To develop the concept students from different universities were involved into workshops. The main design challenge in the project have been represented by the user interaction, that has to be designed specifically for each one of the two target groups. TianTian turned to be a product-service system that includes a device to be used by the farmer and online/mobile platforms developed for the urban users. The device allows the farmer to update his profile information on the database without having to use computers or complex electronic devices. A set of card sticks, each one representing a different product is provided with the device. When a product is ready to be picked, the farmer inserts the card stick in the device, and selects the quantity available. The device sends the information to the TianTian website, and the farmer’s profile is updated.
The research moved on to the way to create a network between the rural and the urban side. TianTian turned to be a product-service system that includes a device to be used by the farmer and online/ mobile platforms developed for the urban users.
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Urban users can use their mobile or computer to explore what is available on TianTian. They can see the profile of farmers and get more information on their farms, production methods and the products they offer. When an order is placed on the platform, the quantity available displayed on the farmer’s device is automatically updated. The delivery is organized every week by the local community. The day before, the farmer receives a ticket with the list of products to prepare. This basic interaction can lead to further actions of territorial exploration, personal relations and involvement in the local food network, facilitated by TianTian platform. As soon as DESIGN Harvests moved from being solely a research project to be more practice and design oriented, it became clear that a redesign of the logo was necessary. Design Harvests’ logo is a network that connects different geographical, cultural and disciplinary areas. The most important connection is between the rural and the urban context, defined by the two different colors, or color tones. The open attitude towards other opportunities, realities, and possible applications is represented by the dot. By 2012, the project moved in the direction of the field direct experience. With the help of local community, DESIGN Harvests team renovated a spare house on the east end of Xianqiao Village with four rooms, and named it after “Tian Geng”, means “lane in the field”. “Tian Geng” is a multi-function space, which provides the tourists and workers with the accommodation, canteen, public life and communication space. During the initiation phase, DESIGN Harvests team launched a two weeks’ Workshop based on this project, in cooperation with Tongji University, Jiangnan University, Universitat Politecnica de Valencia, Escuela de Arte Superior de Diseno de Valencia, Politecnico di Milano and Queensland University of Technology. The students were divided into several groups in kitchen, bathroom, lighting, direction system and outdoor landscape. Within the ten days, the students not only make schemes based on the context of the project, but also implemented parts of the concept. In November 2012, the designers from TEKTAO finalized the design and implementation. At the same time, several PSSDs ideas has been developed for “Tian Geng”.
With the help of local community, DESIGN Harvests team renovated a spare house on the east end of Xianqiao Village with four rooms, and named it after “Tian Geng”, means “lane in the field”. It provides the tourists and workers with the accommodation, canteen, public life and communication space.
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A second part of the project prototype involved the urban segment of the user group, and the way to organize the project communication and the product distribution in the city. Some local associations and commercial activities started showing interest in sustaining and redistributing the immaterial value that was coming with Design Harvest production. The rice has been the first product lunched in the city market. It started to being distributed within farmers markets around the city, in public events in which citizens gather together in the places of production, and in some restaurants that were supporting local production and sustainable approaches to urban development. The distribution of the rice therefore, took the role for the dissemination of the knowledge produced. In April 2012, together with GoodToChina, Design Harvest team designed an interactive “Explore Urban Farming� exhibition that took part at the Shanghai Eco Design Fair, the biggest event on sustainability in town. The research activity is focusing, therefore, on the implementation of networking strategies, aimed to implement and improve the urban gardens network, to facilitate the process of knowledge sharing among different actors in the sustainable food system, and generate more awareness and information for the local urban community.
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6.3 Field research
In September 2012, I started to work at Tektao Studio, for Design Harvest project. To better gain an overview of the project feature and to experience Chongming, I had the chance to tutor for the workshop “ Design for Safety Food, Production and Distribution Network. 20 Danish students from Kolding Design Skolen and 6 Chines students from Tongji worked together for a month developing different project. We spent 3 days in Xianqiao village, living in local houses and having a deep immersion in peoples’ life. The outcome of the workshop has bee quite interesting. Students were developing concepts about, plot renting, food safety, urban gardens, and waste control. I found some topics really interesting and innovative, so that I decided to develop my research thesis starting from Design Harvest project. At the very beginning I didn’t know where my research would have brought me. First I wanted to learn more about Design Harvest, and the way the team have been carried out the project. After being introduced to the project through the workshop, I was assigned to work on the interior design of Tiangen Innovation Hub. The main purpose of the place was to lead citizens to a direct experience of the local life providing them with different services from the leisure time, to the working, to hospitality, eating, mobility and more. As I was trying to gain different insight from Tektao research team member, to be able to understand better the target they were reffered to and the opportunities, as I was facing problems and gaps. Day by day I was discovering something new, which of course was not clearly explained in the project book, where I found all the historical background (summarized in the previous paragraph). I started to questioning who were actually the people interested on going to Chongming, if they were really matching the target they signed and more.
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I wanted to have a feedback from the service consumers. I needed to understand was the perspective from customers (already or possible) and volunteers. From the 2011 Design Harvest Report, the target has been found in Academia, who wants to find a place and a chance to develop innovation researches and practices; Companies and Entrepreneurs to enhance business opportunities and being inspired by a different environment. City people, meanwhile, want to relax, have fun, and experience a wonderland away from intensive urban life. Based on this, I decided to prepare a questionnaire format (appendix 1), which has been sent online to the volunteers, which have been supporting the project, and to friends, and used for face-to-face interviews. The aim has been to understand their eating habits, how much did they know about “organic food� and which were their knowledge about Design Harvest Project. Due to the language gap I was helped by a Tektao colleague, to interact with people and to translate the surveys. The outcome was not useful, to be honest. People were not taking the questionnaire in account and they were answering what we were expecting them to say, not what they really thought. An interesting data we collected was about the communication channel through which Design Harvest has been managing to reach its customers until now. 70% of the interviewees know Design Harvest from the Weibo channel.
image 33: photo, Angelica Fontana interview in Hongkou district, 2012
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So, I moved on and I decided to change completely the focus of the research. I prepare another questionnaire to send to a group of entrepreneurs, I was part of. This time, the outcome of the interviews was quite useful. As I was expecting none of the 35 interviewee have never known about Design Harvest, and Chongmig. even if they were mostly Chinese and they would have liked to visit it. What was interesting for me, was to understand where they were used to purchase and why. As expected the main motivation was their friends advice. As, in the research of the online market, they were used to share with their friends informations about where to go eat or purchasing food.
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Most of the people interviewed were students, office stuff and workers. While filtering data, I got interested on the eating habits. In fact 66% of the people, when they have a meal out, they prefer to go for a table service restaurants, but out of them, only 28% choose food because of the healthy and trusted value. On the contrary 18% choose the buffet or the self-service, because they can personalize the plate knowing the ingredients. However when, with the help of my Chinese colleagues, we went for face-to-face interviews, the majority was dreaming a green world, with more awareness of the food they eat, and more transparency from the production to the delivery. Comparing those with online data and references, it is quite understandable how the context can modify people’s behavior. They have the dream for that, but they just decide to get used on the existing market situation both for the habits and the cost the change might bring. The second field of my research moved from Shanghai to Chongming. I wanted to hear from local people, which were their thought about the situation in the island and Design Harvest project.
image 34: photo, Angelica Fontana probes toolkit 2013
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image 35: photo, Angelica Fontana Chongming life, 2013
From the 2011 report, from the Design Harvest, Local community wanted to gain a way to make rural resources valuable, to be active in their rural daily life, to sustain their healthcare, to be provided with job opportunities. We delivered 10 probes kit to different targeted people. Trying to cover every kind of target, from the children to the retired person, the aim was to gain a deeper insight into their daily routine. From the outcomes of the interviews, I found out that people in the rural communities are well organized in their life and have a pretty busy schedule. They all see the potentiality of the Island and they are all happy for the government recent law agreement, to stop building new center in the Island. Local people have the dream to have Shanghai facilities, and opportunities, in the Island, while keeping their traditions and “slow� lifestyle.
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6.4 Co-designing and workshops
In the second phase of my design process I collected all the material from the desk and on the field research, in order to frame different key area of study. Looking at the system map what I understood was that a lots of concept ideas have been generated in the last few years, but few of them have a real application and outcome. By picturing the offering map, I tried to analyze which topic could have open up more opportunities to work on. Due to the just completed hub in the Island, which was seeking for a well-designed service behind, I found out the hospitality theme one of the most practical one. Moreover, according to the original concept of renting plots in the field, to address people to a personal experience of the rural life and to grow their own fresh food, I choose the creative agriculture as the second key theme. Finally, last by not the least I wanted to investigate into the communication system. In fact, from the interviews we made, what came out was that most of the people knew the project through on-line services and mouth-to-mouth communication. At the beginning of March with 6 people from Tektao research team, and 4 external both Design Harvest volunteers and customers, I drove a two days co-design workshop, trying to develop hundreds of ideas about the main key frames. We firstly tried to ask different questions such as: how might we connect urban and rural areas through plot renting? How might we create a valuable knowledge about food production? How might we develop branding and communication systems to reach the final user? Moreover, how do we provide a whole experience of living in the Island? From the workshop outcomes, possibilities to involve and address people to enjoy the home-stay in Tiangen, have been found on the designing of experience packages. Truly a lot of ideas generated were almost similar to those, which came out from the past researches, however we tried to narrow down and add values. Targeted people have been categorized into private, entrepreneurs and education realities. Few scenarios have been created to better define the user experience.
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First families have a keen interest on healthy and safe lifestyle. Due to the one-child policy, in fact, parents invest a lot on their child and want the best for them, in term of education, self-awareness and even self-care. Moreover they have less time to spend together, due to the busy life of all them. The rural escape in Chongming, is than, for them a possibility to spend qualitative time together, enjoy a different landscape compared to the megalopolis, getting knowing about the agriculture lifestyle and techniques. The second scenario, involve business companies. In fact, it has been proved that while working hard on a project, the environment you are surrounded with can completely drive the outcome. Tiangen business package can provide companies and entrepreneurs with the right space to be get away from the city constrains, being inspired and succeeded in the nature environment. Finally, educational systems represent an interesting target. Truly lots of schools have now introduced urban gardens outside their buildings, but still they want to provide their students with a real rural experience. So that, we can offer the education package, which can include workshops in the green house, journey in the fields while providing a homey space where to sleep.
image 36: photo, Angelica Fontana Chongming life, 2013
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Once, within the research team we created many desirable solutions, I started to move from the conceptual to the action stage of implementation. Delivering solutions involves creating low- investment, low-cost ways of trying ideas in a real-world context. I tried to step away from the used methodology and I went seeking for different scenario. In fact at some point of the process there is the need to reformulating the way our brain is used to working. Looping the same ideas, creativity is “out of shape” and we provoke a “crisis”. Active creativity can sight new opportunities and ideas that stand out and are long-lasting (VDR research). According to the research done, I focused the attention on the motivation by which Design Harvest potential customer should go to Chongming. Moreover I went through the offer ,the current system provides and I compared to those from the existing services in the town. I found out that people, with luck of time and with all the choices they are provided with in the city, are less motivated to move to Chongming, beside exclusive times. Moreover those products Design Harvest sold on-line are quite expensive compared to the market, and they don’t have certifications. Beside friends and volunteers, customers, who do not know about the project, are less willing to purchase on-line products with no healthy validation and no traceability. The strength of most of the urban farming places in the town, is the possibility to directly talk with people, show the process, make them try and experience even before choosing to purchase. The main capabilities designers have is to create a bench of opportunities to sell dreams, and to lead people to find their own one. To better understand the target needs, I designed a small toolkit to prototype during the Eco-Design Fair, in April. The aim was to gain people’s dream, in general talking and to communicate and spread the information about Design Harvest project. In a bamboo chest, full of rice, people were asked to seed a piece of paper after they wrote one special dream. As reward they were provided with a small canvas bag where inside there was a seed (a bean seed from Chongming Island), to represent the seed of their dream, they were asked to plant in their home, to make it grow. In the bag there was even a paper, they had to give as a present to anyone they fund in the fair, as to pay the dream forward.
People, from all the target sectors with luck of time and with all the choices they are provided with in the city, are less motivated to move to Chongming, beside for exclusive time.
Design Harvest’s products, sell on-line, are quite expensive compared to the market, and they don’t have certifications.
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Half of the people who left their message, were dreaming about having their China back. They seems to want back their traditions, and the purity life, having their kids growing in a safe “green� world and meanwhile seeing their country developed so to have a good lifestyle. This test helped me a lot understanding consumers (in Shanghai) needs and wishes. Actually was not the tool itself, but the way it lead me to interact with visitors. In fact by explaining the usage of Seed your Dream, I found out people interested on knowing more about Design Harvest. I had the chance to gain more detailed feedbacks about the existing service.
image 37: photo, Tianshi, Eco-design fair Shanghai, 2013
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6.5 Design Harvest: Questioning and re-briefing After six months researching on the field, interviewing people in Shanghai and Chongming, trying to gain insight from Tektao team to understand their needs and limits, I was not able to frame the context and find solutions. While I was completely lost in the process, I found out I was asking the wrong question. Since that time, I have been carrying on a research based on what I have been told by Tektao. Their main aim was to sell their products and earn money to cover the expenses they had collected to build Tiangen and rent the land. During my research I was looking at outcomes with this point of view, for the producer side, without being able to see consumers’ real needs and wishes. At this time I faced the turning point of my thesis research. First, I started to questioning which could have been the motivation for consumers to buy Design Harvest products. These products are not certified organic, and so they can not be sold in stores and supermarkets, but only during farmers’ market and events. The second key point of my review was about the target. Who could have been the main consumers. Design Harvest main original target was a high class of entrepreneur, Chinese and foreigner who would have liked to escape to Chongming to both find a relaxing and place and a creative environment where to be more concentrate on their work. Third, the role of Design Harvest. I found out I was considering Design Harvest as a farm house, forgetting that, before being involved in the farming business, the team is made by designers and architects who have their job to carry on meanwhile. Of course they have partners and supporters, but they are lack of a well designed system to coordinate all the people involved. From this main considerations I decided to step away from Tektao process and re-brief my research. How might provide consumers with access
to real food? How might we involve them in the process through their experience with the product?
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image 38: photo, Angelica Fontana, Tektao, Shanghai 2013
CHAPTER 6
CONCLUSIONS
Overall the main goal of Design Harvest is to address an exchange between rural and urban realities. In few words, they want to provide citizens with the accessibility to a better eating habits and farmers with a marketplace. However the problem lies in the lack of customers. There is an evident misleading of the target needs and behavior and a complex accessibility to products and services.
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CHAPTER 7
ACTION
PLAN
This chapter will explain the reason of the turning point of my thesis. From now on, the project has been developed in Italy. This helped me a lot, to change my perspective about the problem and to find real opportunities where to start to work on. I have being able to zoom out from the situation, and to analyze the real needs from both Design Harvest and consumers, to find a win-win solution
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7.1 Nudging Active Actions
The research phase provided me with the necessary information to fully understand the current situation and move forward into the creative production. Starting from the main question I framed the context to re-brief my thesis direction. First I fixed the methodology. I decided to review all my past six months-research using a different approach. In fact thanks to the Design Camp I attended in Kolding Design School, in Denmark, I had the chance to learn about a design method called Nudge. This experience has been a eyeopening working with design method in depth. I learn how better use a lot of methods I already knew and how necessary it is to re-frame a certain problem and rather than thinking how can I solve the problem, to think why the problem exists. Sometimes it is simple as it. So, I re-framed the problem. First, I went asking Tektao management team which was the gap, according to each of them, in Design Harvest Design Harvest . For them the problem was about money. The project was completely going in negative, expenses were higher than profit and they were not able to cover costs of the plot maintenance and production. According to them making money was the goal. According to me this was just a small part of a different problem. In the following page I graphically summed the process I went through to understand the problems, needs and insights from both, the consumer and the provider. In the following paragraphs I deeply reported the analysis of the two part of my study: Design harvest and the consumers’ behavior
How might provide consumers with access to real food? How might we involve them in the process through their experience with the product?
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7.2 Design Harvest analysis
Design Harvest goal has been to bringing the city and the countryside through heritage, knowledge and resources exchange. They have started to push alternative sustainable proposal for contemporary urban sprawl, in bottom-up way to integrate urban and rural. They have been involving the local community in Chongming in the design actions, to reconstruct the village identity. the main aim was to bring benefit for both proactive citizens, looking for local immaterial values (as food, crafts), and local farmers with their heritage. In the previous business outlines their goals were identified into the creation of a small scale valuable market space based on trust, a culture of local among the city community of consumers and the envision of a proactive idea of market in which consumers become users. Since 2009, the project has been developed a lot. At the moment of my research (2012-13), Their map of offering include a knowledge production and a material production. In terms of knowledge production they organize activities in the city, followed by senior research members of the team, which include, international academic network events, conferences and journal publications and the selling of Design Harvest book. In terms of material production they reached a space in the city with the farmers’ market, where they sell local products (seeds, rice, honey,...) and crafts (bamboo). Moreover they offer the housing service in Chongming, the renting of the a part of the land to grow oneself food, and the harvesting workshop. As stated in the business model, they identified the current constrains into the economic self-independence, in the better organization among researches and management and in the lack of material strategy. They recognized future implementations in the increasing of participation by fellows, in the efficiency of market distribution and in the capacity to find next funding and partnerships. These last key-points are the starting point of my process towards the problem solving.
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Design Harvest need, at the moment, is to earn money. Money comes from different service offers, in Chongming, from the housing, renting and harvesting, in Shanghai, from the purchasing. Since now, the strategy has been to attract people to go to Chongming, however the problem lies in the motivation for people to move from Shanghai (where they can easily find different farming activities), and spending 3 hours to go to the Island and be back. The communication is quite weak and the amount of people interested is not enough. My vision is to move the strategy from the Chongming physical focus to the Chonming value. In fact the Island, it self, with its environment is not that appealing and compared to its competitors offer, is not valuable. In stead, its products can be the key. As said products from Chongming are now sold in farmers’ market. Another channel is the e-commerce . Since few years, Design harvest has its own page in Taobao. This service offers a window for product sellers. Yet, there are few problems with this systems. In the chart here below is possible to see the advantages and disadvantages.
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7.3 Consumers behavior analysis
Being able to understand consumer needs is one of the crucial and core point of a project. I find out that during my research in Shanghai I was failed on trying to adapt the offer to the preselected target. That was completely the wrong approach and was even one of the biggest mistake that brought me to the incomplete direction. No matter product or service is going to be designed, the consumer is the first focus of the research. The focus of my analysis on the consumers take its roots in few questions I asked my self. Why do you buy the things you do? How did you decide to go to the college you’re attending? Where do like to shop and when? Do your friends shop at the same places or different places? Consumer behavior while purchasing healthy food is the target of my thesis analysis. On considering the many reasons why (personal, situational, psychological, and social) people shop for products, buy and use them, and then dispose of them, Companies spend billions of dollars annually studying what makes consumers “tick.” According to MIT research 2012, consumers go through distinct buying phases when they purchases products: (1) realizing the need or want something, (2) searching for information about the item, (3) evaluating different products, (4) choosing a product and purchasing it, (5) using and evaluating the product after the purchase, and (6) disposing of the product. However there is also a bench of psychological factors that plays a quite important on the consumers’ behavior. To better gain the consumers behavior I decided to analyze some people’s attitudes through those I was used to deal with in Shanghai. Chelcy, my flatmate. We used to live together for 2 months. She is Taiwanese and she moved to Shanghai for working. We were living in the south of the city, in a quite new compound but the problem with that area was that there were not that much night food services. There were no family mart or 24hours store for kilometers and to a have a proper meal we had to walk few blocks down to the city center.
The target of my thesis analysis is the behavior of consumers while purchasing local food
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The both of us were quite interested on each other food culture. I love Asian food but it’s always hard to understand which spices or sauces they used to cook with. Apparently that was the same for her. We spent many times in fresh markets searching for ingredients we needed to both prepare European and Asian dishes to teach each other cooking secrets. As most of Asian people, she used to post online every new dishes she learnt and she was literally waiting for others’ feedbacks.
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Akatsuki, was one of my colleagues, studying with me in Tongji University. He is Japanese and now, he moved to Finland due to an exchange program with Aalto University. He was really social and interested in knowing new people. As most of the Asians, he loved his food and he was the one organizing every month a cooking exchange competition in our class. This was a really interesting event, people were really involved in this. Few days ago, he posted on Facebook a photo album of a new event he organized in Finland. He was writing how happy he was, people were appreciating and sharing his idea. PAOLO
Paolo is an Italian designer, I met in Shanghai. He is working with a contract in a Chinese company. He doesn’t have that much time for purchasing so, he usually go out eating. He likes Chinese food but he is not always feeling safe to eat out in cheap places. During the weekend he usually invites his friends for dinner. He says he does not buy in organic places because he is not really trusting labels in china and costs are too high. Finally I tried to sum some of this insights into three main consumers’ behavior categories, in terms of purchasing spins: The motivation is the inward drive we have to get what we need. In the mid-1900s, Abraham Maslow, an American psychologist, developed the “Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs”.
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Maslow theorized that people have to fulfill their basic needs— like the need for food, water, and sleep—before they can begin fulfilling higher-level needs. Have you ever gone shopping when you were tired or hungry? Even if you were shopping for something that would make you envy of your friends (maybe a new car) you probably wanted to sleep or eat even worse. Needs arise at different points in time in a person’s life. For example, during grade school and high school, your social needs probably rose to the forefront. You wanted to have friends and get a date. Perhaps this prompted you to buy certain types of clothing or electronic devices. If you’re lucky, at some point you will realize Maslow’s state of self-actualization: You will believe you have become the person in life that you feel you were meant to be. The Perception is how you interpret the world around you and make sense of it in your brain. You do so via stimuli that affect your different senses—sight, hearing, touch, smell, and taste. How you combine these senses also makes a difference. Using different types of stimuli, marketing professionals try to make consumers more perceptive to their products whether you need them or not. The Social inclusion is the context where the consumer feels part of a group. Consumers in the same social class exhibit similar purchasing behavior. Have you ever been surprised to find out that someone you knew who was wealthy drove a beat-up old car or wore old clothes and shoes? If so, it was because the person, given his or her social class, was behaving “out of the norm” in terms of what you thought his or her purchasing behavior should be. Culture prescribes the way in which you should live and affects the things you purchase. A subculture is a group of people within a culture who are different from the dominant culture but have something in common with one another— common interests, vocations or jobs, religions, ethnic backgrounds, sexual orientations, and so forth. To some degree, consumers in the same social class exhibit similar purchasing behavior. Most market researchers consider a person’s family to be one of the biggest determiners of buying behavior. Reference groups are groups that a consumer identifies with and wants to join.
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7.4 Scenario building and analysis
The development of the scenario of the action plan, has been guided by the research outputs and the P.O.I.N.T analysis that is applicable on the specific topic of the food culture, the collaborative consumption and its social impact. As in the graph.15, the first polarity considers the two main approaches related to tradition culture and food safety. This two key-points refer to the analysis of the tradition sharing and food-storytelling power, and to the movement of healthy awareness. The horizontal polars, act on sustaining the previous, by placing the 21th century situation. In fact in this line the collaborative consumption plays an important role on providing the channel to share the traditional culture. At the other polar, the social inclusion refers to people, who are the spin off. In the graph all the cases I analyzed during my research take their places and proves how this scenario can find its real application. The evaluation of each case in the scenario goes through different aspects, including the level of participation (of the people involved), the level of awareness raised (about the quality ), the preservation value ( about the culture ), the networking value (the capacity of creating connections), the level of flexibility (how much the scenario can adapt and decline itself in order to create a multi-offer), and the level of feasibility (according to the complexity of the scenario realization). The very core of the matrix represent the cases that can reach the maximum level of the listed aspects. Dropis, is a perfect mix of how the collaborative consumption can push on and preserve with the social inclusion, while Gnammo plays the role of the tangible networking channel which perfectly meets the need of traditions keeping awareness. Share my Harvest concept finds is own place in this scenario of collaborative, social and safety inclusion. Its feasibility lies in the online network.
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Graph 15: The scenario of my concept development is framed in the link between the social inclusion and the collaborative consumption with the aim to share culture and tradition of safety food
CHAPTER 7
CONCLUSIONS
WeHARVEST takes his place in a scenario where technology, social media and networks are merged in a profitable way. After the analysis of the problems the project is facing now, the simplest and feasible solution has been seen in the on-line purchase. The guidelines of the project lies in the consumers’ accessibility, experiences and trustiness of “real” food
CHAPTER 8
PRODUCT
SERVICE SYSTEM
In this chapter, all the system of the service is fully explained in all its stages. The customer journey is showed with the real pictures taken during the prototype test, which took place in Shanghai. The people were both driven to explain the stages and left to try the interaction. The results of the prototype can be read in chapter 9.
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8.1 Evaluation of the current system
From the current on-line system’s analysis, as shown in the Map.1, three are the main points which represent a gap and the cause of the problem.
• the communication channel. At the moment, the only information flow is managed through two social networks, Sina Weibo and QQ (chapter 4). This can work as a part of a bigger strategy model. In fact as shown, only the small net of friends and relatives are now linked through this channels. Map.4: this map represent how the existing on-line purchasing system works.
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As seen in the previous analysis, people’s behavior while purchasing is driven by different reasons. Studies has shown that the first spin is given by the social inclusion. This is not only linked to the way society might judge your choices, but also to the way society can influence your choices even before you choose. In better words, this means that, social networks, in the market dimension, are being used as a choices driven tools. However this requires a well designed strategy plan, in order to avoid the creation of a little circle around the siblings which will not open up to the market.
• the payment. This includes both the payment from the customer to Design Harvest, and from Design Harvest to partners, in Chongming. As explained in chapter 4, the on-line payment system in China can be solved in different ways. First of all, there are platforms as Taobao which allowed anyone who wants to sell something, to place it on-line. These platforms could work for small businesses. In fact there is no filter and it not well seen as to be professional. Instead there are systems as Paypal and Alipay, which could be link directly in private websites, and allowed consumers to pay directly there from their accounts. These systems ensure the security of the channel and are secured from frauds. At last, some Chinese banks provides their customers with a key, they can use for on-line payment. The key is their virtual bank account and works exactly as a credit card ensured by the bank itself. Design Harvest has recently bought a web domain, however the website,at the moment, is quite poor and not well organized. It is working more as blog, with news uploads, but it is still not user-friendly.
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8.2 Stakeholders’ map
The active actors involved in the system, at the moment, are represent by Tektao team members who work both in Chongming and in Shanghai, Xihuan partners, farmers who are partners in Design Harvest sells and who provide profit, the delivery company, Zto Express, who ensure customers with a home service. At the moment there is a collaboration with Tongji University, in Shanghai e Xianqiao Village community, in Chongming, which play the role as communication supporters. In the future, the plan is to involve and create partnerships with other institutions and organizations. In Shanghai a collaboration with Rotaract, which is already working in some projects to promote the Island, and in Chongming, a support from the local government , will provide a wide communication net. An important role, in this system, is played by the customer, who becomes an active promoter of the service.
Map.5: the stakeholders’ map describes all the institutions, companies, private corporations and public administrations involved in the service
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8.3 Offering map
The current on-line service offers customers with the Taobao platform, to purchase on-line. This touch-point turned to be not that user-friendly and user purchase-driven. The new strategic model provides consumers with a new platform where to access a wider offer. In the map.3, all the feasible offering stages are placed according to the service time. The service offers the platform where to choose between fresh food boxes, which could be customized and shared between friends. As many of his friends follow his purchase and purchase too, as much money he can gains. The main aim of the strategy is to offer the possibility to access to “real� local food, as well as experience a different way to purchase, and to create a network which comes as consequences. Map.6: the offering map shows what the customer is provided with, during the service time.
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8.4 The new system
In the new system the main action role is delivered to the consumer. According to this the range of social networks included is increasing, facebook, weixing and twitter breaks the Chinese circle and include foreigners. Moreover the communication system is managed through these channels. Consumers can share directly their own harvests without needed to get through Taobao system. The payment problem is solved inside the website too. An agreement with paypal, alipay and Chinese banks cutted out the need of a different platform where to complete the service journey.
Map.7: this map represent how the existing on-line purchasing system works, considering Considering consumer A’s service action journey already finished.
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8.5 Main actions interactive blueprint
The blueprint is a key tools to understand the interaction between the actors involved in the service. The interaction, shown in map.5, is structured in relation to the key actions of the service. As represented, during the service time, the customers their-selves play a key role on spreading the communication about the offer and ensure the attractiveness of the service. As their revenue grows, as they support the system activity. In fact the strategy works on the link between the actractivity of the service experience in terms of revenue stream and social inclusion.
Map.8: this map shows how the service works through the interaction of the main actors during the key actions
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8.6 Main actions touchpoints
In the system, the touch-points represent the key interaction of the service interface, which is the bridge between the consumer and the organization. For the company these touch--points represent the tool to verify the usability, desirability, feasibility and effectiveness of the service provided. For the user of the service the accessibility of the touch-points needs to be easy , fast and well-understandable. Moreover it should be integrated inside its own life-circle. Mainly, this service is structured among the users daily actions of interacting with the online system of networks. As clear in map.9, the very basis of the system works on the social network level. The support the company provides, is the website. Compared to the old system, where there were three different touchpoints linked to the payment and communication spread, in the new, the official website merge all these, providing customers with a cleared and user friendly platform. Changes have been applied both to the color palette and the interface of the website. The payment page is still linked to taobao, but even provides, mostly foreign customers (who can not use to taobao) with other solutions they can access to.
Map.9: this map is focus on explaining the touch-points of the service during the key actions
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The old website, was working as a blog, where friends where informed about the news. There was just the link to the taobao page. There were no filter between products, services, events and news
The main touchpoint of the service is the website and the first action the redesign of it. While keeping the logo palette color, the structure has taken the most important part of the redesign. In fact the home page needs to be clear, easy to understand and needs to show just the important information to understand the offer and the how it works. Link to the old website, working as the real blog
Double language selection The new website is structured to provide visitors with all the useful information in the home page. Scrolling down with the mouse, they can access to the log in, and the information about the service
International social networks
home page link This page explains all the steps the visitor can follow while joining the service and how the 3x3 game works
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In the log in page, already members can sign in, both from the website and their preferred social network. New members can decide to link their subscription directly to one or more preferred social networks
For purchasing the visitor, can decide to customize a box or to select what other users have already selected.
Switch to the section where to find advices from your friends
Personal history info. Check the last order, check the amount of money left, go to the box Visitors can choose the amount of the products, they need, and see already the related price and, if have, the money they can use from their credit Step by step ordering. The visitor can easily switch from one stage of the other and change his choice
Insurance on the quality and the time table and the delivery of the service provided
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New, in this website, compared to the old one, is the introduction of the payment service. Without needed to use taobao, the user can directly decide how to pay in the website.
Alipay or paypal
Visa or Mastercard
Chinese online banking
The own profile provides the freedom of personalization and the access to all the personal informations Personalized background image Friends from social networks circle who are already part of the community
Personal informations Share your harvest Food preferences
Already published harvests
A new visitor access to the advices from friends. The system filters all the people from his circle who uploaded the last
person information
uploaded harvest and cooking outcomes person he purchased from
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8.7 Customer journey CHELCY
PAOLO
from Taiwan, loves food, she seeks for a food delivery service. She wants to cook a special rice recipe for her friends tomorrow
from Italy, Chelcy weixing friend he loves chinese food but never had the chance to learn how to cook it.
Chelcy finds put about Design Harvest from her weibo page
Chelcy goes to check the website and the service they offer
After she understood how the system works, she signs in, linking her page to facebook and weixing. She is quite curious to try the 3x3 game
She decides to customize a box. She wants to make a special rice recipe from Taiwan. So she picks some vegetables, some rice and some strawberries for the dessert
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Chelcy decides what time she want the box to be delivered
Chelcy decides to pay with her online banking account, in Bank of China. With the bill, she pays even the subscription fee to the website. Now she can attend the 3x3 game!
After she revives the confirmation of the purchase, she decides to upload the recipe she is going to make on her profile
The day after she receives the box she ordered, exactly at the same time she have asked. Now she is ready to cook
When the first dish is ready, she feels so proud, she wants to share with her friends. While trying to share, she receives a message from WeHARVEST, reminding the 3x3 game she subscribed to.
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Chelcy uploads the picture of the dinner she has just settled and she shares it online. To better advice her friends, she choose the picture as her background image of her profile. Her friends will love it. Paolo is spending his spare time reading new on his tablet. He receives the invitation from Chelcy, to have a look on her last purchase. He checks the link to the website
Paolo checks the page Chelcy was suggesting and he finds out she has published the recipe of her delicious Taiwanese rice...
He finds out he can purchase the ingredients she used directly from her page
He pays online using paypal, finally he can purchase without asking his Chinese friends to access to taobao
Chelcy receives a message on her profile. Paolo purchased her harvest. Now she needs to sell other 2 boxes to win and being rewarded
He payed and decides to join the 3x3 game! He shares the box with his friends on facebook
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She finds out Paolo gave her a good feedback for her advice! She feels so happy, and she posts it on weixing!
After one week she receives a new message. 3 friends have purchased her harvest. Now she got rewarded!!
Chelcy is happy! She was able to prepare her Taiwanese rice and she got even rewarded!! She saved money and she ate good!
Paolo is happy! He learn how to make the recipe and he now wants to challenge his own harvest!
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8.8 Business model
The system works in the relationships between the users and the company. As explained in the blueprint, this strategy finds its feasibility in the attractiveness of the service offer. The motivation is the first aspect to analyze when talking about people involvement. During my research I was considering a lot the real applications of the collaborative consumption. “Collaborate”, means participate collaboratively with others. It is even referred to the act of supporting and helping each other. The worldwide known system of mutual collaboration is “pay-it-forward”. Pay it forward movement describes the beneficiary of a good deed repaying to others instead of to the original benefactor. The idea behind is that if someone does 3 things that would drastically change 3 people’s life for the better and then, instead of asking for something material in return, ask them to help these people to do the same way, and it would help the world be a better place. My question is not about the feasibility of this system, instead is the possible integration of this system in a business model. The three system works in different field. Michael E. Raynor and Mumtaz Ahmed, experts in business management, have analyzed data on more than 25,000 companies spanning forty-five years. Their five-year study began with a sophisticated statistical analysis to identify which companies have truly exceptional performance, 344 in all. In collaboration with teams of researchers, Raynor and Ahmed then put a carefully chosen representative sample of twentyseven companies under the microscope to uncover what made the stand-out performers different. They found that exceptional companies, when faced with difficult decisions, follow three rules: FIRST: Better before cheaper. They rarely compete on price. SECOND: Revenue before cost. They drive profits through price and volume, not thrift. THIRD: There are no other rules. Everything else is up for grabs, and they are willing to change anything to remain true to the first two rules.
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During his research Michael E. Raynor, he better developed the three rules, which become a real business research. It represents the most comprehensive research project to date that looks at the factors behind sustained business performance. Starting from this I developed Share my Harvest business merging the three rules as the revenue stream for the company and the pay-it-forward idea as the motivation for the user. The map.7, here below, explains the basic structure of the revenue model. The consumer is moved to share with friends and every three friends he receives his revenue, which is the 100% of costs his first expense. This revenue process goes on in the second stage, every three people, the one he sold the first , he gets the 30% of his revenue.
Here below the applied revenue model considering the producer and the consumer. It has been studied considering the selling of one package of 2kg of rice.
Map.10: the business revenue model, simplified at the point of view of the first user.
The costs are calculated on the selling of one box of rice, which cost for the company is 10 RMB. The selling price is 15 RMB. Following the model and considering the consumer A selling to 3 people and consumer A1 selling to three people more, consumer A revenue is about 4.5 RMB, while the company is earning 10.7 RMB. This is the minimum the company can get. More, considering the 50% of the possibility for consumers to complete the three level sharing and purchasing process, the company can rise his final revenue to 12.50 RMB, which means 2.5 RMB for the company.
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The system works as a win-win solution between the consumer, Design Harvest and tis partners. The consumer can get access to a service which provides him with fresh safety food offers, saving money and building his network of relationships and knowledge sharing. Design Harvest can sell its product, earing less than expected by increasing the number of customers. Moving this in the long terms, the network provides the trustiness of the customers and a growing demand of related services. Partners in Chongming, can get benefit having their products sold and finding a new fresh market channel. (map.11)
Map.11: the matrix represent the interaction in the win-win solution, between consumer, organization and service provider.
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Map.12: the business model canvas CONSUMERS RELATIONSHIP
CONSUMERS SEGMENT
DISTRIBUTION CHANNEL
REVENUE STREAM
CHAPTER 8
CONCLUSIONS
The feasibility of the service works on the revenue stream model strategy. While considering the three rules tests, I came out with a model where once can be rewarded in blocks of three. Three are the people he needs to forward the service to, thirty the percentage of the benefit he gets from these people’s forward. Three the maximum levels of the system, he can get rewarded from.
CHAPTER 9
PROTOTYPE AND FUTURE DEVELOPMENT
This last chapter explains the feasibility of the service. The prototype done in Shanghai, tests the real attractiveness of service experience and the interaction between different users. This opens up the possibility for a future expansion and integration with other services.
194 Part III: WeHARVEST
9.1 Testing the service experience
While I was already in Italy, I organized a test of the service experience, in Shanghai. With the help of Adriano Gariglio , Luca Lanotte, Roberto Salodini and Pico De Lucchi I was able to verify the attractivenesses of the cooking and sharing phase of the system. Two people were involved as the main actors, one Italian male, Paolo and one Taiwanesec female, Chelcy. PAOLO
CHELCY
They were provided with a set of ingredients. They were asked to plan a dinner, for four people. They were free to choose the quantity of the ingredients and how many dishes to prepare. carrots basil tomatoes mushrooms onions eggs rice
195 Part III: WeHARVETS
In addition to this they had to specify which tools to use during the preparation of the dishes. Luca, Adriano and Roberto were observing the stages while Pico was taking pictures. Once per time, they were cooking following their own traditional cooking method. PAOLO
CHELCY
PAOLO
CHELCY
PAOLO
CHELCY
It took two hours for the preparation and they prepared three dishes in total, one Italian style (using all the ingredients beside eggs) and two taiwanese-chinese.
196 Part III: WeHARVEST
When they finished to cook, they were showing and explaining each other their creations and let their friends trying it. The overall test went well and they seem to be interested about the experience. They represent the situation which usually occur in Shanghai, of people from different nationalities meeting and sharing their knowledge and traditions.
197 Part III: WeHARVETS
9.2 Future implementations
The experiment done in Shanghai tested just a little part of the service, but was quite useful to understand the feasibility and attractiveness of the sharing a meal, concept and opened up the possibility of future implementations. Design Harvest, at the moment, provides people with services in Chongming, and the possibility to purchase fresh products. WeHarvest implements this system providing the motivation for people to purchase these products. At the moment the system works in the online fabric, but this strategy aims to gain the trustiness of more customers. The future implementation, involved a personal and real interaction between the consumer and the service. • The experiment in Chongming. The main goal of Design Harvest project, has always been to bring people to rediscover Chongming. After having a number of people using and trusting the service, a future aim would be to set regular events in the Island. • The system could be updated and enter the applications world. The service accessibility can become easier and become the social network platform itself, with the possibility to use different feature, as shake it or look around to make the sharing moment faster. With the sharing system people creates a net of communication forward to friends. • The possibility for the future would be the collaboration with other sharing and networking services, as Eatwith (case study. 11). The idea is to bring people, who don’t know each other, meeting and sharing what most represent each one culture, the food.
CHAPTER 9
CONCLUSIONS
The service finds his feasibility is the business model. Merging the pay it forward system with the three rules, each actors of the system find their win solutions. The maintenance of the service offer, is provided by the revenue given to the consumers for supporting while sharing and by Design Harvest’s profit, reached in the long term due to the growing of the customers’ demand.
CONCLUSION
As stated in the preface. This thesis went through a long process of research, observations and mistakes’ reviews. The journey moved from Milan, where I collected my background skills, Kolding, where I developed a more mature approach to the design research, and Shanghai, where I had to face a controversial and fascinating reality. The outcome of my thesis, does not pretend to be the problem solution, but wants to provide the spin off to unlock the problem, by working directly on the consumers’ behavior level. The project I developed is in the stage of testing. With the prototype I proved the attractiveness of the experience and the behavioral change in the consumer, while the business model is the starting point for the future development of a economic implementation. As represented in the swot below, the strength lies in the strategic focus of the consumers social behavior. Working on the daily attitude, helps to bring the design solution in the target’s life without changing it. Of course, talking about the revenue increase, this needs to be tested in the long time, the strategy behind is able to slock the current situation, where there is no revenue at all.
To conclude, the strategy brings together products and services in a win-win solution system, where the company, the consumer and the local government find their own revenues. Design Harvest, manages to reach a new fresh and motivated target, to sell their products and communicate the offer in Chongmig.
Map.13: the swot analysis
The consumer is able to access to fresh food without spending that much money he was used to, but even being rewarded for doing something he already does. The local government and partners, in Chongming, find their communication channel.
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Bibliography (books) Gunter Pauli, The Blue Economy, 10 Years, 100 Innovations, 100 Million Jobs, Paradigm Publication, 2010
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Leerberg Malene, Lene Wul, Design Responsibility: Potentials and Pitfalls, Designskolen Kolding, 2012
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Meroni Anna, Sangiorgi Daniela, Design for Services, Gower Publishing Limited, 2011
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Portocarrero Emilio, Organic Food Products in China, Market Overview, Egea editrice, 2011
Rob Hopkins, Tamzin Pinkerton, Cibo locale, come produrlo nella tua comunità, Arianna editrice, 2010
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Sakao Tomohiko, Lindahl Mattias, Introduction to Product/ServiceSystem Design, Springer edition, 2009
Sanders, E., Stappers P., Co-creation and the new landscapes of design. CoDesign, Taylor & Francis, March 2008
Stroom Den Haag, Food for the city, a future for the metropolis, NAi Publishers, Rotterdam, 2012
Thackara, J., Manual Design Council, Dott. 07: London, UK, 2007
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tomatoes are bland. And they’re trying to do something about it. Wall Street Journal, October 2012
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Agriculture. Design for distributed and networked urban farming in Shanghai, Cumulus 2012, Helsinki
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Owen Fletcher, The future of Agriculture may be Up, Advocates of ‘vertical farming’ say growing crops in urban high-rises will
eventually be both greener and cheaper Wall Street Journal, October 2012
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Steele LIza G., Scott M. Lynch, The pursuit of Happiness in China: Individualism, Collectivism and Subjective Well-Being during China’s Economic and Social Transformation, Springer, Princeton, 2012
VV.AA, EMUDE - Emerging User Demands
for Sustainable Solutions, European Community, 2006
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Index of images 1: photo, Angelica Fontana, Temporary Design, Hong Kong 2012 22 2: photo, Danish Cancer Society, Kolding, 2011
3: illustration, Dropis, 2012 4: photo, Bitcoin, campaign 2011
5: photo, Arcipelago Scec, campaign 2012
35 47 48 49
6: photo, Angelica Fontana, Eco-village, Shanghai, 2013
51
7: illustration, Jenunino, campaign 2011
8: screenshot, Buycott, website 2012 9: screenshot, Gofundme website, 2012
10: photo, Silvia Robertelli Oui Share fest, 2012
11: photo, Angelica Fontana Green Drinks China event, 2013
52
53 55 56 57
12: photo, Angelica Fontana, Milan 2012
63
15: Zerobriciole, website gallery, 2013
71
13: screenshot, Eatwith, website, 2013
65
14: photo, Philippe Lopez, Shanghai, 2010 69 16: photo, Pauline Cutler, Bubbles Photolibrary , 2006 17: screenshot, Housefed, website, 2013 18: Conmarchebio website, 2012
73 75 79
19: photo, Angelica Fontana Mahota cafè, Shanghai, 2013
83
22: photo, Angelica Fontana, Chongming (Shanghai), 2013
95
20: illustration, Dott, 2006
21: photo, Angelica Fontana, Chongming (Shanghai), 2013
23: photo, Daniel Al Baghdadi, Urban Planning M. (Sh) 2012 24: photo, Angela Mathis, Shanghai, 2013 25: photo, Angelica Fontana, Shanghai, 2013
26: photo, Salvatore Difrancesco, Beijing, 2013
27: photo, Angelica Fontana, rice farm, Anhui, 2012 28: photo, Salvatore Difrancesco, Dali, 2013
29: photo, Angelica Fontana, sky-farm, Shanghai, 2012
30: photo, Angelica Fontana, aquaphonic, Shanghai, 2013
31: photo, Angelica Fontana, Chongming (Shanghai), 2012 32: photo, Tektao, Chongming (Shanghai), 2011
33: photo, Angelica Fontana interview in Hongkou, 2012 34: photo, Angelica Fontana probes toolkit 2013
35: photo, Angelica Fontana Chongming life, 2013
36: photo, Angelica Fontana Tekato workshop, 2013
37: photo, Tianshi, Eco-design fair Shanghai, 2013
38: photo, Angelica Fontana, Tektao, Shanghai 2013
87 90 99
101
111
113 115
119
121
123
129
133
141
144
145
147
149 151
Index of graphs and maps Graph.1: Roberto Verganti, Design Driven Innovation
28
Graph.5: The difference between service and products
31
Graph.2: The consumer experience
Graph.3-4: Service Design Framework,
29 30
Graph.6: Service Design between the client and the organization
32
Graph.9-10: Chinese populations’ life time
97
Graph.7: Dennis Pamlin. The opportunity hook.
Graph.8: Sustainable development framework
35 41
Graph.11: Internet users in different continents
100
Graph.14: The swift from rural people to citizens
114
Map 1: Chongming and Shanghai county
128
Map.4: The existing on-line purchasing system.
172
Graph.12: Internet users in China, from 2005 to 2010
Graph.13: Over 50 Internet users, from 2008 to 2012 Graph 15: The concept scenario
Map 2: Chongming main activities and structure Map 3: Mapping Xianqiao Village Map.5: The stakeholders’ map Map.6: The offering map
Map.7: The new system map
Map.8: Main actions interactive blueprint
100 102
167
131
132 174
175
176 177
Map.9: Main actions touch- points
178
Map.12: The business model canvas
189
Map.10: The business revenue model, simplified Map.11: The stakeholders' matrix Map.13: The swot analysis
187
188 202
APPENDIX
1.Volunteers questionnaire
2.Consumers questionnaire
ANGELICA FONTANA
student number 766478
POLITECNICO DI MILANO Design Faculty Italian tutor Anna Meroni
M.Sc. Product Service System Design accademic year 2012-2013
TONGJI UNIVERSITY College of Design and Innovation Chinese tutor Lou Yongqi