Semester 2 The theme for semester 2 was “The Future of the Supermarket”, which was a continuation of our research from the previous semester. To think of the supermarket in the future, was to think of what the world would be like. Climate emergency, refugees (both climate and war), food shortages, socioeconomical issues were just some of the subject matters that needed to be taken into consideration for this project. To deal with the idea of a growing population, with not as many resources, my concept was a parallel timeline of “What if the Irish Famine never happened?”. Through researching the famine and situations of it never happening, it is estimated that the population would be around 30 million on the island of Ireland today, which is a stark contrast to the current population of 6.8 million. With this number in mind, I was able to estimate to population of Belfast, and how, if the population was much larger, would these residents be living. The concept is mainly a utopic idea of everyone working together to grow crops to harvest for themselves, as well as sharing them with the other regions of Belfast. Each area of the city was divided up into different farming areas, North being the fishing sector, South being dairy / meat production and East and West being the fruit and vegetable production. A large growing centre was designed to go over the River Lagan, with tropical growing pods, for the crops that can’t be grown in the British climate.
View of one of the tropical growing pods on the River Lagan
