Week 2 of 5
Team
Project partner: Revolut
Ayesha Saleem
Eniola Aminu
Jaime Santos
Keya Bangera
Mary Mehtarizadeh
Matthew Yue
Niki Marathia
Oindrilla Sinha
Revati Banerji
Eniola Aminu
Jaime Santos
Keya Bangera
Mary Mehtarizadeh
Matthew Yue
Niki Marathia
Oindrilla Sinha
Revati Banerji
Money
Visiting the Bank of England Museum, we learned about banknote design, making and recycling money, and even got to touch real gold.
In terms of design, the Brixton Pound offered a counterpoint to what we saw at the BoE museum. In an interview with the Design Museum, the Brixton Pound designers explain that by embedding local heroes on the banknotes, they promote community values (Design Museum, no date).
Figure 1: Design Museum (no date) 'Q&A with Brixton Pound/Brixtopia', Design Museum. Available at: https://designmuseum.org/exhibitions/hope-to-nope-graphics-and-politics-2008-18/hope-to-nope-in-depth/qa-with-brixton-poundbrixtopia (Accessed: 4 April 2026).
Figure 2: Design Museum (no date) 'Q&A with Brixton Pound/Brixtopia', Design Museum. Available at: https://designmuseum.org/exhibitions/hope-to-nope-graphics-and-politics-2008-18/hope-to-nope-in-depth/qa-with-brixton-poundbrixtopia (Accessed: 4 April 2026).
Food trading
We played a game where we each wrote down our favourite foods and tried to persuade each other to trade. Though the exercise felt a little contrived, it made us think about what drives people to transact at all. To better understand this, we drew on Meadows' (2008) framework for intervening in systems. We thought of leverage points that exist in traditional monetary systems, and considered how they could relate to our own. These were introduced to our process by Jaime.
12. Parameters: central banks change interest rates, set inflation targets (around 2%), and adjust money supply.
What small numerical settings can be adjusted? Changing portion sizes, slightly extending or shortening expiration times within an already established limit or adjusting how much preservation slows spoilage.
Revolut
This week we also presented our work to our project partners at the Revolut office. It was refreshing to get their eyes on our work, receive feedback from their point of view, and present outside the university. We hadn't considered our user yet, so to address this, we did a crazy eights exercise that we then categorised through affinity diagramming.
Harrods
In keeping with last week's research on class and food, we also paid a visit to the food hall at Harrods. From ornate fruit baskets to beluga caviar, it helped us begin to get to grips with the 'rich' part of our brief, which we were still figuring out how to approach.
Materials library
We also visited the materials library at Central Saint Martins, to get a better sense of what material-led projects can look like. Some highlights included jewellery made from hair and 3D printing with plant roots, both of which showed us how unconventional materials can produce something beautiful.
Interview
To close the week, Jaime interviewed Father Daniel, director of the Bogotá Food Bank. He described hunger and violence as two deeply intertwined issues, each capable of causing the other. Perhaps most relevant to our project was his vision for the future: moving away from donation dependency toward community self-sustainability, with urban farming playing a central role.
J: What is your role in the food bank and for how long have you been in the organisation?
D: I’m father Daniel and I’ve been working in the Bogota Food Bank for over 30 years. I’m currently the director of the organisation.
J: How do you get donations? Who can donate?
D: So getting donations is one of my main tasks as the head of the food bank. I’m constantly in talks with companies in a wide variety of sectors to understand what resources from their production could be better utilised and to propose operational strategies to move the resources to the people that could benefit from them. We’re always aiming to cooperate with companies that could be able to supply large amounts of food for the bank, but that doesn’t mean we don’t benefit from smaller donors. We gather as much as we can while maintaining an organised and sustainable flow of inventory.
J: What communities need the most aid?
D: In Bogota, and in most regions of the world in my opinion, the biggest challenges right now are violence and nutrition. We think they are deeply intertwined, as they can be a cause of the other almost interchangeably. When people are hungry there’s violence, and when a community is impacted by violence, there’s hunger. This has the biggest effect on children and young people, as they will always have problems with their social and physical development. When there isn’t proper nutrition, nothing else works the way it should. How can a child learn if they are hungry? How can they play if they did not have a proper meal in the morning? We are constantly aiming to work in nurturing the future generations, we believe that if we manage to have a significant impact in this demographic the rest of the population can even benefit indirectly from this aid.
J: What are the biggest operational challenges of the food bank?
D: As any food bank, the biggest challenge is to have a steady flow of inventory. Donations fluctuate a lot, so we have to plan strategically to be able to supply food that is good for consumption to the communities that need the most aid. Natural disasters, pandemics and all sort of events that are out of our control generate the most pressure in our supply chain. We need to be able to aid the ones who need help the most while resources may be scarce in situations like this.
J: How do you imagine the food bank will be like in 20-30 years?
D: We are looking to move from relying on donations to help communities be more autonomus. This is off course a huge challenge that might even sound a bit like an utopy but we believe that if we reduce realiance on this donations, the communities will have a much more constant flow of resources. Here’s where education and innovation play a big role, as developing spaces for urban farming is not something very conventional in Colombia. Also, as you can imagine we are always allocating resouces to provide the most inmediate help we can, so developing this strategy will take time but is where we are moving towards in the future.
J: What’s the role of the church in the food bank?
D: The church has always been an entity that has been able to provide helping hands. We need as much people to help with all the logistics related to the distribution of the goods, so the church plays a big role in getting people to help.
J: Are you developing any new strategies to reach more people?
D: Yes as I mentioned before, we are working with external organisations to develop new strategies for self-sustainability among these vulnerable communities. We believe innovation will play a big role while developing these new strategies, but it’s still a work in progress.
Feedback
At Revolut, our partners advised us to invest more time in analysing and synthesising what we had already found before doing more research. They’d also felt that our secondary research was disconnected from the more active parts of our process, which came across as more energetic. Going forward, we were encouraged to be more selective about what we present, so as not to overwhelm our audience with information.
On the project itself, we still had not answered who the currency is for. At uni, we were prompted to move beyond broad concepts like dystopia, which we were keen to explore after our crazy eights. This feedback started to weigh on us a little, as despite the effort we were putting in, it felt like we were still quite far from a clear direction. This uncertainty motivated us to keep going, but it also made us realise that although we had been busy, we weren’t always purposeful. In a team of nine, moving forward had started to prove a little challenging.
Sources
Meadows, D. (2008) Thinking in Systems: A Primer. Chelsea Green Publishing.
Design Museum (no date) 'Q&A with Brixton Pound/Brixtopia', Design Museum. Available at: https://designmuseum.org/exhibitions/hope-to-nope-graphics-and-politics-2008-18/hope-to-nope-in-depth/qa-with-brixton-poundbrixtopia (Accessed: 4 April 2026).