Supermarket 2030: “We want to create space for conversations about widely desired solutions around child obesity through tangible artefacts, which we hope enable actors to be unified under a clearer vision of their preferable future.
Project Sponsor: This is a speculative design project developed in partnership with BiteBack, a charity set up to tackle the childhood obesity issue and sponsored by Jaime Oliver as part of the Global Design Futures (GDF) unit of the MA Service Design at London College of Communication.
Project Outputs: Supermarket 2030 is the result of exploring and questioning people’s perceptions about child obesity and the role of the stakeholders involved. In this speculative project, we aim to present a world in which strict governmental regulations, requested by individuals interviewed, drastically change the way we shop in supermarkets in 2030.
Team members: Ruchika Karnani, Angela Tam, Chutiwan Boonyoiyad, Yi Duan, CongCong Jiang, and myself, Laura Duarte. All UAL MA Service Design students
The Challenge:
BiteBack 2030’s mission is to ensure all young people have opportunities to be healthy no matter where they live, to tackle the oppressive systems and mindsets that enable child obesity, and to halve childhood obesity rates in the UK by 2030.
The goal of this project was to creatively rethink the food, places, spaces, and moments where young people interact with food and are bombarded with a system that encourages unhealthy food choices. Three main food establishment archetypes were selected: Chicken Shops, Fast Food Chains, and Food Shops, three prominent food locales that youth are familiar with and interact with regularly. We selected food shops as the space to explore on this project.
My Role:
As future-thinking was new to all of us, I can say that this project was the true reflection of teamwork. My personality tends to be very organized and make things happen, so as usual, I took on a project management role. My strength is how to bring a team together, build on each other’s ideas, and make things happen. Coming from Colombia, it also allowed me to include the perspectives of the Global South.
Research through design process
Horizon Scanning:
Through a 10-week discovery, our team used speculative design to understand the current context of the urban food landscape and its toll on childhood obesity. We started our journey by horizon scanning for trends, drivers, and weak signals that could influence the future of food and society, analyzing environmental, social, and political factors. Positioning our project within a future scenario that has been researched by the UK government, we chose to explore a future where social responsibility is held over individual responsibility, and society and government create strategies to anticipate and plan for challenges, rather than reacting and mitigating challenges as they come. At first glance, this idea for the future doesn’t seem so bad.
Interviews & Shadowing
The aha moment came when we were interviewing members of the BiteBack youth board. This board was put in place to bring youth perspective and to put the protagonist of their campaign at the center of their strategy by giving THEM a voice. When interviewing them, we were impressed by how vocal they were about the need for more regulation and government intervention. We also noticed how constantly they referred to the need for “healthy options”. So we asked them - What does more regulation really mean? What would this regulation look like? What defines healthy or unhealthy?
We explored first hand how easy it was to buy foods that were classified as healthy. It is extremely difficult to understand what is actually healthy and what is not because what’s healthy for one person may not be healthy for another.
The struggle to evaluate healthiness through the current traffic light method is misleading and can be daunting. Based on this experience, we picked the first two elements of our provocation: (1) debranding of products and (2) rewording of key messages.
Research through design
Through a “research through design” process, we found a pattern of contradictions between the regulations people said they wanted, versus their opinions of the regulations once implemented and shared in the form of tangible archetypes. We brought our experiment to students at the London College of Communication to evaluate the effectiveness of our provocations.
Some people told us they would be very sad if supermarkets were de-branded in the future, even if they might be healthier for it because the experience would be monotonous and ugly.
Some said grocery shopping would become a tedious affair, now having to read each package in order to understand what the product was. In this case, they said they would likely choose the simplest option, and transparent packages that showed the foods’ contents would be most popular.
Some people preferred the glass containers, mentioning a likeness to Muji’s aesthetic, a minimalistic Japanese lifestyle brand with a simple but upscale look and feel.
Finally, some people said that different packaging wouldn’t stop them from buying the foods they wanted, whilst reaching for the white-packaged Doritos. We then used these insights to create a richer, layered experience of the future that would surprise, provoke, and even disturb our potential viewers.
Visualized horizon scanning
Photo series: Public shaming & social regulation
We crafted the future by amplifying aspects of it and iterating our artifacts to incorporate the feedback and insights gathered during our testing sessions. We found better ways to enable conversations about what the future of food could look like and added deviancies to the system to make it more real and plausible.
Photo series: Public shaming & social regulation
Project outputs
Health First : Packaged foods will be simply labelled as whole foods, processed foods, and ultra-processed foods. This classification stems from our discussion of what healthy and unhealthy meant. Through feedback, we knew price was important when choosing foods, so whole foods are cheap while junk food is expensive.
Whole foods are packaged in glass, symbolically and literally hinting that consumers will get what they see. On the other hand, processed and ultra-processed foods are hidden behind monotonous packaging, reflecting the processing that has changed the whole foods into something less recognizable. Ultra-processed foods are only available in smaller serving sizes and are able to take up less shelf space. flipping current retail space design that influences what and how much food we choose to buy.
Planet First: As climate change can no longer be ignored, government regulation will enforce food companies to include carbon footprint information on each food product. Single-use plastic packing will be banned, favouring recyclable or reusable packaging. The Tesco poster hanging on the wall suggests that there will be significant drought seasons due to climate change, and businesses and corporations must do their part to adhere to government regulation and maintain customer loyalty. One’s shopping basket carbon footprint will automatically be printed on his or her receipt, suggesting a quota for how much carbon an individual is contributing to through their food choices
Civic Duty: As a future society that places a strong emphasis on collective responsibility, it will be each individual’s obligation to adhere to societal norms and contribute to the community’s overall health. Government-sanctioned campaigns reprimand citizens against eating ultra-processed foods and compromising public health and resources. A sense of surveillance and public shaming will reside over shoppers’ food choices through the use of transparent shopping bags. Everyone will be able to see your shopping choices, and may judge you for your food choices. Even messaging on the receipt from the grocery store drives this message of social responsibility, thanking customers for choosing to buy healthy foods over ultra-processed foods.
Strong Regulations: Our future relies heavily on an increase in government regulations on private food companies. The products we created have been debranded by government restrictions, only showing relevant and vetted information that will inform consumer choices. The government has expanded its sugar tax to include all ultra-processed foods, while whole and processed foods will comparatively become more affordable. As our future will vehemently battle childhood obesity, the government will restrict minors from buying ultra-processed foods, similar to present protocols surrounding alcohol. This sense of regulation will be further accentuated by the No Junk Food sign peeking out in this photo at the tube. Junk food has become synonymous with vices like smoking that are looked down upon by the general public and controlled by restrictive laws.
Supermarket 2030
We are constantly bombarded by unhealthy food advertising through billboards, media, and attractive packaging. Disguised by a thin veil of feigned self-autonomy, we crave the high sugar, high fat, and high sodium foods we see on shelves. If no serious actions are taken now, over 3 billion people are projected to be overweight or obese by 2030. Many are demanding our governments take more drastic measures to regulate food marketing and to enforce informed healthy food choices. But what does this mean to you? What are you willing to sacrifice? Supermarket 2030 invites you into a future online shopping experience that bans manipulation by food brands and makes visible the true cost of foods on the planet and on our health. Step inside and let us know if your dreams have come true.
Self Reflection & Learning Outcomes
Locally produced first: As a nature lover, I was very happy with the answer we got around the sustainability messages included in our provocation. But I cannot deny as a Colombian citizen, one of my biggest concerns was how the local produce trends will affect countries like mine that rely heavily on exporting all kinds of fruits to Europe and the USA. I thought about the need for early identification and long-term thinking to mitigate the impacts. I saw the value of speculative design in identifying many things I would have not considered before.
Speculative Design: I learned that hesitation and over-analysis can lead to frustration. The future is vast, every element inserts a new possibility. Summarizing and representing it all is simply not possible. The key is to identify one element quickly that is strong enough to open conversations. This is not only applicable to the future of food. This is human behaviour and the very reason why creating tangible provocations is so powerful. Speculative design is ultimately about challenging and questioning people’s desires.
Long-Term Thinking: The dystopian world became a reality. Maybe a pandemic was not that dystopian! I cannot stop thinking about how long-term and future thinking are more needed than ever. How we need to empower more people to not only innovate but to do it in a way that can lead us to a future we would like to live in. Every designer, innovator, entrepreneur, and businessperson creating products and launching services without thinking long term is a threat to our own existence. We all need to take responsibility for what we design. We need to rethink concepts like disruption and growth and reframing them in a way that does not backfire on us later.