RSA Student Design Award Submission 2020
for my 2020 submission for the RSA Student Design awards I chose the Cultivating Community brief which asked students to re-imagine common spaces to build diverse communities through food.
I decided to create the branding for a student focused pop-up restaurant that would provide low-cost, home cooked meals produced from surplus food.
This would not only provide perhaps financially struggling students with a nutritious meal, it would provide a safe space to socialise and meet new people and also reassure worried parents that their child would be receiving at least one nutritional and home cooked meal per week. Additionally the implementation of surplus food would work towards reducing food waste, therefore helping the environment.
After attending a workshop run by the RSA addressing my chosen brief, I decided my focus group for the project would be students, more specifically university students.
I began looking at statistics and was socked to find out the high levels of loneliness and hunger experienced by university students nationwide. I decided that tackling loneliness with food was going to be my angle.
I designed the branding for Fuddle, a community restaurant created by me that is targeted at university students, placed in a student environment such as student bars etc.
Fuddle is a common word used around the Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire region, much like a potluck, its an event in which attendees all bring an item of food for the rest of the group to share. However in this situation The Fuddle restaurant would be providing all the food and the 'fuddle' element would be each attendee bringing their own diversity, culture and personality to the table.
Fuddle Community Restaurant would be a surplus food restaurant. What this means is that it would create home cooked and fresh meals from 'surplus' food left over from super markets etc. Companies such as FareShare are distributors of such food and in its own way this is also sort of a potluck as its uncertain what food will be provided in the deliveries of food each week. This would mean that meals provided could be purchased at extremely low costs and it is also a sustainable and eco-friendly way of providing nutritious meals for a wider group of students who may be struggling to feed themselves due to money issues.
Recipes cards would be available at every meal for attendees to collect so that they can recreate meals in the future if they so wish. These cards could be collected together in a recipe book. This is a way of Fuddle giving something back to community as well adjust providing meals once a week. Left overs boxes would also be available, a common issue raised by the workshop was that some of the most common surplus food is bread. Therefore if these leftovers could provide another meal for students when they are away from the restaurant then win-win!
Due to the nature of the restaurant, it's unlikely that it would be possible for Fuddle to be a permanently placed eatery. More likely it will be a once a week 'pop-up' restaurant, this therefore means that the designs would need to be portable and easily changeable. Furthermore with no set menu in place everything would need to be planned at the beginning of each week.
Another idea I played around with was the idea of a membership card. This would provide a sense of inclusion, family and create a sort of club for regular visitors to the restaurant. A really poignant aspect of Fuddle is that you never know who you will be dining with. The diversity that it would bring to the student community is a really valuable aspect to the whole project that I wanted to bring through through my designs.
