FoodCiti: Growing local food economies

Lens on Practice

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The Project Brief The purpose of this project is for you to discover the broad range of what contemporary design practice can be, and to explore an approach to practice that interests you. In order to do this you will identify examples of contemporary design practice which you find inspiring.

From your cases, you will then think about the common - or individually distinctive – aspects of those practices that you would like to apply and use these to propose what your own ‘lens’ for this project might be.

You will create your own project brief based on using your lens and one of two themes we will give you, (if you have a clear idea of another topic you wish to work with you can ask for permission to do so but this will only be given if your topic appears well defined).

For the brief you will need to choose a context, stakeholder audience and opportunity, and develop your own process, including appropriate contextual and stakeholder research, exploration and development methods, and suitable formats for communication and delivery, presenting a design outcome in response to your brief at the end of the project.

A self-initiated project, looking at food system changes in Glasgow by Gabby Morris

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Lens on Practice Brief Using my Lens, I chose the theme Being Human and decided to focus on Food the most basic human need.

I developed a brief that was localised to Glasgow and could give me wide enough scope to find a design opportunity within the food system.

---This project will look at designing a proposed future for the food system with a focus on social and economic change within Glasgow. Working with stakeholders to understand the different interconnected aspects of the food system; (food, economy, environment and politics) and designing an evolving solution or service for how they can work better for several aspects of society including but not limited to people in food poverty.

Lens on Practice From my research into design practices nected/interwoven parts of people and/or that I found inspiring; I found common planet themes in their work and the reasons why I liked them.

I noted three themes which were particularly important to me and created criteria to focus my lens on practice: Criteria 1: The project must be based on a foundation of participatory/co-design where the final users are involved in the design process Criteria 2: The project must have a realistic speculative, futures based outcome that provokes ideas and sparks change around the final topic Criteria 3: The project much look to solve a wicked problem, thinking about intercon-

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Understanding and Empathising

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Co-designing with users

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Refining the designs

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A service is launched

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Reflecting back

Understanding and Empathising Desk Research, Fieldwork and Initial Interviews.

Gaining knowledge from users, understanding the landscape of Glasgow’s Food System and synthesising findings.

Initial Desk Research Before diving into redesigning the food system and interviewing experts in food, I wanted to gain a better understanding of the full landscape, specifically in Glasgow.

I documented as much as I could on the topic, taking information from lots of secondary sources of information.

For the first few days of this project, before my interviews I tackled desk research by reading books about the topic, watching Ted Talks, listening to talks from people like Anna Taylor from the Food Thinkers Foundation, Carolyn Steel Author of Sitopia - about food system design and I even attended city events on zoom around food.

lot of my understanding, I spent time analysing the topics in this document and understanding more about the issues in Glasgow and some of the specific changes outlined in the food plan.

I tried to gather as much information from Glasgow’s Food Community online as I could so that I could prepare my questions for the interviews I had scheduled.

I mapped all the information I gathered and already started to see key topics around food waste, food poverty, people’s choice, food knowledge and farming practices.

The City Food plan for Glasgow was published online in December 2020 for public consultation, this formed a

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15 interviews were conducted over 3 days, with a range of different people from Glasgow’s food scene and Scottish farming. I spoke with experts in Food, people conducting food research, community groups involved in food practices in Glasgow, charity workers, members of foodbanks, people who ran foodbanks and agronomists looking after farmers and the soil.

Each interview was done via zoom and was a semi-structured interview with some questions and a conversational style, the interviews were around 60 minutes long.

Stills from some of my interviews

Interviews

The interviews helped to define behaviours, values, pain points and potential design opportunities within the food system.

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Some of the post-it notes from my interviews with key statements from participants

Survey results - I developed them into charts

Survey I developed a survey that was sent out to respondents (randomly through social media, friends and family). The survey was created because I wanted to have insights into ordinary people’s understanding of food, their behaviours when buying food and their value of the food system.

I structured the survey using some of the information from my interviews, some of the key topics from my desk research and gaps that I identified in system knowledge.

The survey was targeted at people who do their household shop and making food decisions for their household. I wanted to gain access to the mindsets of these purchasers. In the interviews it was clear from everyone who was involved in food that the key to change was ordinary people so I felt it was valuable to understand their thought-processes when

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Survey questions created using Survey Planet

making food purchases.

The questions were created so that people had to reflect on the food system; not just the food we eat but food waste, packaging, supermarket power and food poverty - all key parts I had identified so far.

Survey Results 80 people responded to my survey, mainly women and limited mainly to people who did the food shopping for their household.

Some of the responses can be seen above.

It was clear from my survey results that most people didn’t think about the food system. Unlike the people I interviewed who work or are connected to the food system, the survey respondents didn’t consider much beyond price, brand and nutrition when making their food choices.

However, when prompted to respond to questions about how they felt on food system topics like “should everyone have a right to food” and how that impacted their food choice, people made considered decisions, that did not always match their initial reasons for their food choices.

These survey results helped to develop a further set of values and behaviours around the food system, that I used in my system mapping later in the project.

It also matched with my interviewees opinions that people’s decisions are often not from a place of food education but their choices have impact on the food system.

More survey responses can be found here --> https://miro.com/app/board/o9J_ lSCrszA=/?moveToWidget=3074457355550135397&cot=14

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M&S put a lot of focus on words like “Fresh” “Market” “Greengrocers” “Picked”

Supermarket Field Study A key part of the food system in Glasgow is the supermarkets. Lots of my interviewees spoke our supermarkets in our interviews; talking about the power of the supermarket, the buying role they have in farming and their role in food waste.

Most of the responses about supermarkets were negative from the people I interviewed, however my survey results showed that average shoppers use between 5-7 different supermarkets in their household shop.

I could not get any supermarkets to be interviewed, so I decided to conduct a small fieldwork study, looking at how supermarkets sell their food to consumers.

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The most obvious finding, was their use of “local” “greengrocer” “market” language that is used, suggesting these products are from small local farms, when most of

Local produce from Senegal

the products came from abroad.

It was interesting to me that supermarkets used this language, paired with survey respondents saying they don’t research their food in terms of location or growing, it means that supermarkets often get away with misleading information about food.

Particularly the people I interviewed from the farming community said that supermarket food is hardly ever local or fresh - something that doesn’t match their packaging, branding or advertising.

Morrisons new branding in new stores focuses on local food makers

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In order to bring a lot of this information This helped me to connect the dots together, I started to collect it together into with what the food system appears different types of information. to be versus what is happening socially, economically, politically and It was clear at this point that different environmentally. values and beliefs were emerging along with pain points and conflicting ideas on I wanted to also map the different the solutions. I started to synthesise my perceptions that people had about the research into key topics; Food Poverty, different parts of the sector and the Food Waste, Food Choice and Society people on the outside of it. I created a values. I used these as buckets and simple map for collecting this information. pulled my research post-its into each bucket. Matching information, or linked One of the things that came out of some information was mapped under each of my interviews were perceived beliefs heading. about supermarkets, charities and even the difference between an urban dweller I then applied my sorted information to an and someone from the countryside. I tried Iceberg Model to try find the connections to capture this information, so that I could between my policy research, values and make sense of these underlying biases. behaviours and the underlying system structures.

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Digitall y capturing my Iceberg model

Research Synthesis

Created a system for capturing the biases in the system from my interviews

Adding all my insights to my iceberg

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Personas and Tribes In order to start applying my research to a food system map, I used the data I had collected and synthesised, to develop value cards with the key values and beliefs I had identified so far.

It was clear already that lots of attitudes and beliefs were uncovered during the research phase.

These value cards, were overarching ideas about the food system and helped bring my systems map. I turned them into cards so that they could be easily referred to later in the project, potentially used for co-designs and added to future research synthesis.

I wanted to make sure that the human values were constantly referred to as I continued with this project, it was important that these values would be acknowledged even in the final design phases because ultimately they underpinned the whole system and would be important to any designed change that is adopted.

Alongside the value cards I developed personas as tribes. 6 key grouped personas that took information from all sorts of people, their wants, values and barriers were ultimately grouped together to create key tribes that could be used in any systems map.

The personas were valuable to again refer back to how people would feel in the current scenarios and future designs, paired with the values it meant that people’s role was not lost in the design process.

More Value cards can be found here ---> https://miro.com/app/board/o9J_ lSCrszA=/?moveToWidget=3074457355687517302&cot=14

Sample value cards created

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Two of the 6 Tribe personas created more can be seen here -->

https://miro.com/app/board/o9J_ lSCrszA=/?moveToWidget=3074457355550135310&cot=14

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An early iteration of my mapped food system - with insights, organisations and values

Value and System Mapping From all the research, I had developed a basic Glasgow Food System map with my understanding of the connections, the first iteration I applied some key insights, organisations and quotes from interviews.

This enabled me to start seeing where my research was clustered and where design opportunities might emerge.

banks to continue. Or local supermarkets such as Locavore in Glasgow enabling small producers to flourish.

Once I developed my personas, value cards, organisation cards and key influence icons I decided to create a systems map with all the interlinking connections.

The powerful players in the system was quite visible from the mapping and it was obvious the role that supermarkets had.

By adding in this information, I could easily start to see links between my food topics, food organisations and people.

Likewise, I could see the influences such as Government policy, Media intervention and even the enablers within the system i.e. supermarket food waste enabling food

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Probably the biggest key at this point was the barriers within the system i.e.

Supermarkets as a barrier to real prices for farmed products.

I developed different icons for the map so influcenes like the Media or connections like partnerships could be easily identified between parties within the system. The food system has lots of links and outside pressure.

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Systems Value Map -- more detail can be seen here https://miro.com/app/board/o9J_lSCrszA=/?moveToWidget=3074457357228711868&cot=14

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Affinity Mapping Considering all the research and the systems map; it was clear that there were multiple design opportunities. he large, complex overview meant that there were several sections that could be looked at.

At lot of the pain points within the food system are policy changes, or as a direct results of Government legislation. In other areas of the food system, there are lots of businesses tackling issues. Glasgow is a crowded market in terms of food charities, people dealing with food waste, foodbank provision and even growing projects.

At this point in the project I identified that a key part that underpinned all my research and the system as a whole were people. People’s food choices are in direct relation to all the positives and negatives in the system.

I referred back to the system map, the values, the personas and the tensions points. Looking at the system through people I identified more buckets that research insights, designs and values could be sorted into.

These buckets were specific to people’s role in the food system, not experts but the people who did my survey, the people who buy their household shopping.

One of my affinity maps for my design opportunities. More can be found here --> https://miro.com/app/board/o9J_lSCrszA=/?moveToWidget=3074457357228712047&cot=14

It is also not specifically looked at by other organisations in Glasgow, but underpins so much of the work they do. There was a design opportunity gap in this system.

I started a second affinity map and grouped together all my research under Awareness, Activism, Value and Collaboration. Constantly referring back to the key insights my interviewers initially talked about the pain points in the system.

It was at this point I realised that individual awareness around the food system is key to everything else falling into place. One of my insights early on was “People have the power to make change” and it was clear from the rest of my research stages that this was fundamental.

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Mind-mapping ways to help people in the system

Initial Design Opportunities With people and my buckets in mind, I started to think about the way people could “become aware” “become activists” “understand value” and “collaborate on food”. I started mind-mapping ideas and pulling together draft design outcome ideas.

I realised that a lot of my ideas and opportunities linked up and the key nexus of my opportunity was empowering people to become aware, I decided to focus on this awareness part. Thinking back to my initial survey results and people’s lack of understanding or awareness but their opinion made me think this was the right decision and a key insight from my interviewers as well.

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I set myself a final design statement for the second half of my project around empowering people in Glasgow.

A quick sketchbook idea around collective food consumption and rating towers See more of my initial concept developments here --> https://miro.com/app/board/o9J_ lSCrszA=/?moveToWidget=3074457357862137325&cot=14

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Empowering people of Glasgow to understand their role and power in the local food system 30

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Co-designing with users Feedback loop with users and experts of the system. Understanding more of their experiences and getting their thoughts, opinions and ideas on the design opportunities identified.

Welcome screen for co-design participants

Co-design Creation I wanted to use the co-design sessions as a feedback loop on what I had learnt, the insights I had gained and to test more about the food system. Furthermore they were a way for participants to help shape the design of the “empowerment” opportunities I had identified.

Co-designs can be found here --> https://miro.com/app/board/o9J_ lMvSLlY=/

The co-design sessions were activity based, they could be accessed asynchronously or on zoom with me.

Each section enabled users to give their own opinions, values and insights. I tried to create tools that matched some of my previous research tools - I created a prefilled iceberg model for instance.

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Some key insights from co-designs, synthesised.More of the codesign synthesis can be found here https://miro.com/app/board/ o9J_lSCrszA=/?moveToWidget=3074457356893166482&cot=14

Co-design Sessions I had 8 co-design participants, 2 from previous interviews and 6 new people, some of my co-design participants were novices to the food system apart from being users of it. I ran some of the codesign sessions with multiple people.

Users were sent a pack with 2 personas before the session and information on how certain design tools like the Iceberg model worked. During the co-design session they were asked to think like a person that was different to their own and navigate prompts and provocations based on that persona.

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Co-design Outcomes The outcome of the co-design sessions were positive, reinforcing some of the initial values people had around price, convenience and the need to not be exposed to the complex food system.

Again, I synthesised the data into key buckets and grouped all the participants information together to find the design points and gaps.

One of the things that really stood out was the need for something to be easy and enjoyable for people to feel they could get behind it. A few of the participants said they found the food system too difficult to make choices in and this overwhelming sense of doom led them to just not being engaged in “doing better”. In order to be empowered it needed to be easy and accessible and fun!

This was a useful insight going forward with the designs.

The co-design sessions also helped shape the design outcomes, participants really liked the idea of a rating system and having both a physical element and an app as part of the final service.

Furthermore, participants felt it would be good to have a collective sense of effort, often feeling that individual pressure is really hard to live up to.

Another key insight was people’s lack of interest in complex impacts like climate change or the environment, they wanted to see and valued impacts locally.

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A quick post co-design synthesis design idea. I started pairing up services that could helped achieve an easier, enjoyable and collective sense of empowerment in Glasgow. This service refers back to some of the initial research I did on Economic impact in Glasgow.

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Refining the design Using research and co-design to develop final design ideas, looking at ways to empower citizens in Glasgow.

Initial design sketches -- a physical scanning system for citizens

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A citizen food kit - everything delivered to users with information on the service

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An app to purchase all your shopping based on your food system value

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Developing my service blueprint, focusing on the user experience and reaction to the service

Journey Mapping Eventually, after different design concept creations I decided to go with a service built on three layers: 1. A citizen food kit 2. A rating app 3. A food business rating service The idea behind this would be a food empowerment service, that focused on giving businesses ratings based on their social and economic impact to Glasgow.

A rating app for citizens to find places with different ratings for easy choice

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Using the LM3 research that I undertook at the start of the project and linking it to the insights, I felt this would be a good trio for citizens in Glasgow.

The next part of my design was mapping

this service and how users would interact with it. In order for this to be a provocation, and a speculative design I decided to focus on ways I could expose the (un)intended consequences that this service would bring up.

I picked two of my initial personas and refereed back to my value cards, I then placed them in parts of the city - the West End and the East End of Glasgow. I knew from my research that the East End was a food desert and this would bring up some issues in terms of ratings.

Using these personas, I developed a Service Blueprint (see appendix 5) in order to fully understand my service and what my future designs needed to include.

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I used my Service Blueprint to capture my persona’s reactions

A service is launched The final development of FoodCiti, a food empowerment service in Glasgow.

Getting feedback from focus groups and presenting my Lens on Practice outcomes.

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Initial logo sketches

Brand Development After lots of deliberation around the service name, I eventually went to FoodCiti

Food + Citizen + City It fitted the brief of focusing on food citizens within Glasgow. I then focused my attention on the branding, after trailing a few different options, I went for a subtle map look.

I noticed that throughout a lot of my design ideas and research, I was using mishapen circles and lines to convey places. This eventually became good option for the FoodCiti logo.

Lots of food social enterprises,

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organisations and charities use Green and Yellow branding, I decided to try and differentiate as FoodCiti isn’t a service just about eating or growing. After looking at different brands and analysing the colours and typography I developed the final FoodCiti Branding.

You can find more brand development here --> https://miro.com/app/board/o9J_ lSCrszA=/?moveToWidget=3074457357249200384&cot=14

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FOODCITI Final FoodCiti Logo

FoodCiti Logomark applied to a prototype Food Kit

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Screenshot from my presentation, showing the three main features of the FoodCiti service

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GLASGOW FOODCITI MAP Featuring 2021 ratings

1st Edition

Paper prototypes of my FoodCiti rating guide

Final Prototypes The last part of bringing the project together was developing the physical and digital prototypes so that I could deliver a realistic speculative project.

I decided to make all the physical Citizen Food Kit and develop some of my prototyped app screens. I created enough touchpoints that the speculative proposal could feel real to viewers of my presentation the following week.

FOODCITI

This scheme is operated in partnership with your local authority, Glasgow City Council . For more information please go to www.foodciti.glasgow

Digital design for my FoodCiti map cover

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FoodCiti Map prototype and App Download Card FoodCiti rating guide final prototypes

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FoodCiti app designs

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Final app mockup

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Focus Group Feedback After developing some of my prototypes, as part of my final feedback loop I brought a few people from the process together for a short 15 minute focus group session to discuss the designs and the outcome.

Most of the feedback was positive and the constructive comments were really useful in mapping my unintended consequences from the service, it helped shape the impact provocation that I wanted to bring to the table as part of my speculative presentation.

Having this final focus group was really useful and helped sense check a lot of the design decisions.

Business Rating Poster - final design mockups

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Final foodciti advertisement

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Reflecting back

Final Thoughts

Considering the project journey, the process and the outcome. Thinking about what went well, what I would change and what this means for my practice.

This was a challenging and complex topic to choose for my Lens on Practice. There were many design opportunities and in some ways this supported my practice development but in others made the process harder. However, this project taught me a lot about my own practice, what I like to do as a designer and some of the shortcomings I have in my process.

I have been able to document what I enjoyed an what worked well, but likewise what needs to be worked on and the gaps or pain points in my own designing.

Knowledge Gaps

This was an exciting project, allowing me to delve into brief writing, following my own process and choosing a topic that interested me. Reflecting on my process, I realised at points that my understanding between methods and theories such as Service Design and Systems Thinking were limited.

In theory, I understood the practice, but struggled with how to apply some of the tools or what to do at different points running a service design project. There were moments in my project where I thought I was undertaking a particular process or a particular method but that was not the case. With the support of my tutor, Zoe, I was able to learn more about what tools to use and when to use them and how to describe the reasons for choosing them.

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knowledge of how to effectively run a co-design session, especially online. Most of my understanding has been gained from theory. The other from my previous NHS project, the flaw here is that we codesigned again as a group of novices.

Going forward, I would like to more work on co-design and try to involve myself in more co-design sessions to see ways they are carried out and to learn from more people who use this method in their practice.

Additionally, co-designing online due to Covid-19 is challenging and novel even in industry. I struggled to find good examples of online sessions, which would have been useful when developing my own. I would like to be able to run a codesign project in person, with multiple people and more physical artefacts and prompts. I ran two sessions with multiple people online, but I struggled to maintain the energy and momentum, which I believe would be easier in person. It was harder to get people on zoom to engage with eachother. I do feel that this struggle would have been easier in person and would have had richer outcomes.

Designing in person

Co-designing

My participants were really supportive of my project and I tried to engage with a broad spectrum of people within the food system and ordinary people who use the system but have no knowledge of its workings. It was difficult however to access people in different sectors of society.

Similarly, co-designing was a key part of my lens and something I know I would like to take forward as part of my practice. I had the same realisation though, when trying to develop co-design sessions for my participants - I have very little

Going forward in my practice and hopefully in my self-initiated project in 4th year, I hope that we have more ability to do work in person. It was hard to really access users of the system, who were not known to me or to organisations in

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food because everything had to be done online. Some people I would have liked to have spoken to were not able or did not have access to the means in order to engage with zoom or Miro. Working online was really useful for interviews and engaging with some people but it would have been a richer research phase if I was able to do more person to person focus groups or interviews.

Research and Social Design

In this lens on practice, I learned a lot about my own process, especially my enjoyment of research and finding patterns from qualitative data. In previous projects, there has not always been the time to do in-depth research phases. In this project I allowed myself a few weeks to really understand the system and understand people within that system.

One of the things I found the most enjoyable in this project was meeting people, hearing their ideas, opinions and values and using that data to find design opportunities.

So often in previous projects I have gone to trends, or data research and secondary sources of information like articles. It was refreshing to have the space to really engage with people and hear their experiences. It cemented for me my passion for working with people and designing for people.

Through this I realised that I want my practice to be about designing solutions to complex problems but from the point of view of people in society. My outcome was about empowering people to understand more, these were insights that came from users, but coupled with my appreciation that if people are supported and engaged, design can be used a tool for change from the ground up.

Accepting my ideas

One of the hardest parts of my process was coming to a conclusion. Faced with stacks and stacks of research, maps, interviews, co-design outcomes and more

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I struggled the most in taking the leap of faith and putting outcomes to paper.

Even when I have design ideas, backed up by insights I struggle to feel confident that they will be good enough and this holds back some of my process. This part of the project became more protracted than it should have been because I stuttered through it. I know that this is something I would like to work on and try to find more confidence and acceptance in my design outcomes. I know that I need to be more accepting of failure in projects as well. I set out to try out this project and potentially “fail forward” but in reality struggled to put that into practice.

Testing Outcomes

One of the things I need to plan more of in my process is testing concepts. I had 2 feedback loops in this project - one in the co-design, which on reflection was too soon to give feedback on concepts. The second was the focus group at the end of the project, which again was too late to change a lot of the designs.

Developing my practice for future projects, and to make my concepts richer, I would try to schedule in more feedback loops with users throughout the design process.

I feel this would be useful for my own idea challenges that I talked about above but would also make the design outcomes more robust.

The focus group at the end was great for showing up some of the unintended consequences of the project and as this was a provocation, it was useful to have them. If this was a design solution, it would have been better though, to have had more of these ideas as part of the design.

unwieldy system of food. There were points in my process where I wasn’t sure what outcome could be designed.

So much of the complexities around food are policies, government legislation and often hidden issues only uncovered through deep research. Lens on Practice was a short project and ultimately my insights led me more towards designing for people and designing a much simpler view of this system.

I think my outcome, is an original take on this problem and focuses on something that really underpins the stability of the system we currently have. Glasgow’s food system is overpopulated with people tackling issues like Food Waste, Food Poverty and Growing projects. I wanted to find something that slotted into this space and I feel that the FoodCiti project does that. It is a positive service that would be a useful addition to the system.

Summing up

This project has been a really useful and insightful project, both into the field of food - which I would like to continue working within - and my own process.

I have learnt a lot about the way I design and the things that I need to improve on.

As well as these insights, I have found enjoyment in methods and tools like Service Design, Co-Design and Research, which I know I would like to take forward in my practice.

The Final Outcome

Considering the complexity of the wicked problem I chose and the length of this project, I am happy with my overall outcome. The outcome is better than I expected when looking at the huge

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Thanks to the following organisations and people for giving up time to help me on this project: Locavore CIC Scottish Food Coalition Nourish Scotland Refuweegee Woodlands Community Group South West Foodbank Agrii Launch Foods Food Thinkers CIC

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