Students and Service Design Help Food Up Front

A couple of weeks ago Silvia Grimaldi from the London College of Communication told me about a great service design student project. Her students have joined forces with Food Up to find new ways to encourage young people to grow food at home.

Food Up Front is an organisation which supports people to put their balconies, gardens and windowsills to good use by growing their own food. Seb Mayfield from Food Up said he intially didn’t understand what designers could do for Food Up Front but was open to new ways of looking at his service offering.

Project background

The brief given to the students was to create something that would motivate young people to change their behaviour and attitude towards growing their own food.

Jonas Piet from Engine Service Design supervised the project. The group began by interviewing a range of young people who represented the target audience. Two personas were created which covered the broad range of customers from 16 year old school students living at home with their parents to 24 year old young professionals living alone.

The group then broke into 3 teams to develop their ideas. The result is three brilliant ideas that have filled Seb Mayfield with so much confidence that he’s keen to carry forward all three!

The Food Front

By Nikki Scott, Joel Longbone, Tom Maxwell

The Food Front is an entrepreneurial scheme for young people. The scheme supports young people of grow and sell their own fruit and vegetables, become an active part of their local community and gain real business experience. Alongside the scheme, a local representative will work alongside schools to introduce the scheme into the curriculum or into after school programs. The rep provides guidance and support and encourages The Food Front members to take the campaign to their local community.

Delayed Satisfaction

By Francisca Veloso, Jesus Selma and Argir Ziovsky

Delayed Satisfaction is a product which encourages customers to delight in the delayed satisfaction of growing their own food then invite their friends over share the fruits of their labour. Each pack contains two types of seeds which cleverly relates to a social occassion (the “Tea at 5” pack contains camomile and blueberry seeds). The pack also contains two pots, soil and recipes (blueberry muffins…mmmmm). The brief is to capture a younger audience so this product offers invovlement, interaction and education about growing food at home.

Know What You Grow

By Dmitry Uljanovs, Jelena Vorosilova, Karen Fok, Simone Marrett, Bex Hoy-Priest an Ritchie Hassan.

A fun and innovative idea, Know What You Grow is centred on a game concept to help motivate and excite young people. Starter Packs are sold at retail stores popular with young people. The packs contain everything the customer needs including three types of unnamed seeds and three serial numbers. Customers take the pack home then plant and care for the seeds. Once the plants are mature, customers log on to a website and try to identify their plants. If their serial numbers match their plants, the customer “wins” and receives gift vouchers for their favourite retail stores.

Great work, guys

I’m really impressed by the ideas generated by the students. It’s great to see students learning how design thinking can be used to analyse existing situations and result in new and innovative solutions. Great work, guys. Congratulations to everyone involved. More information about the project is available here.