Niki Marathia
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Eat the rich
Week 3 of 5
Team
Food is more than fuel. Consider the ways that food is a medium of exchange when an influencer shares a plate of food on social media, when it is hoarded or witheld by those with power, when the desire for it is supplanted by a costly injection. In an age of dematerialisation, food remains stubbornly and emphatically physical, sensory, high-touch and frictional. Design a currency based on food.
Project partner: Revolut
Ayesha Saleem
Eniola Aminu
Jaime Santos
Keya Bangera
Mary Mehtarizadeh
Matthew Yue
Niki Marathia
Oindrilla Sinha
Revati Banerji
Canary Wharf

To start narrowing down on an ecosystem for our currency, we decided to focus on Canary Wharf. As the home of Revolut's office and one of London's financial centres, the area felt fitting. At Canary Wharf, we observed different relationships with food: where office workers seemed to gravitate towards salad bars for their lunch, construction workers (Figure 2) were having Sainsbury's sandwiches.

Figure 1. People queueing at The Salad Project, taken by Revati Banerji
Figure 2. Salads on the left, sandwiches on the right, taken by Revati Banerji

Love/break up letters

We wrote love letters and breakup letters to both food and money to surface our own internalised feelings about both. Common patterns emerged across the group: anxiety around not having enough money, and the security that comes with having it. With food, there was a shared sense of adventure tied to trying new flavours, though also guilt around eating unhealthily. Interestingly, nobody actually wanted to break up with food, as none of the breakups were final goodbyes.




























Material exploration

We started exploring materials by attempting to make our first bio-based banknotes from food. For this first round of exploration, we used seaweed, rice paper, potato, cornstarch, and oats. The process was exciting and felt promising, but the final results were a little too brittle. We were excited about this direction though, and felt that with more iteration it could work.

Figure 3. Rice paper and seaweed, recorded by Revati Banerji


Figure 5. Baked oats, taken by Revati Banerji


Figure 8. Mixing potato with cornstarch, recorded by Keya Bangera

Figure 4. Baked rice paper and seaweed, taken by Revati Banerji


Figure 6. Grating potatoes, recorded by Keya Bangera


Figure 6. Baked sheet of potato and cornstarch, taken by Revati Banerji


Food banks

To conclude our primary research for the week, we picked up a volunteering shift with a food bank in Old Street, and another in Tottenham. We were interested to observe how food is used in these environments, what it’s like for people preparing and serving it, but also what the experience is for those dining there.

Figure 9. Preparing food at a food bank in Old Street, taken by Oindrilla Sinha
Figure 10. St Paul’s church in Tottenham, a food bank on Wednesday evenings
Notes from Old Street

  • food is delivered from asda for now but they’re moving to the felix project
  • vegetarian only ingredients (stored in the fridge)
  • people decide what to cook based on the vegg that’s available, no fixed recipes 
  • what do they procure - whatever is in stock
  • has been open for only 6-7 months 
  • what we made 
    • starter - carrot cabbage soup
    • main - cauliflower curry 
    • dessert - makeshift apple crumble 
  • a lot of older people (some health issues or disabilities - wheelchair bound)
    • 20-30 people, 
    • don’t like too much seasoning on it, bland is good
    • significantly less people probably because of ramadan
  • soup had such little salt but they still asked for more, people loved the soup 
  • ⁠they throw away left over food and try to give away ingredients that are about to expire 
  • they use seaweed paper packaging 
  • people usually book and then cancel - they receive many last minute cancellations. total about 8-10 volunteers 
  • what made it nice for me - being able to chat with everyone while cooking, watching people actually enjoy their meals, low stress environment (as compared to my part time job), knowing that everyone else is here by conscious choice (esp since they’re inconveniencing themselves for other people they don’t know)
Reflections from Tottenham

All of the volunteers were professional and dedicated to providing a good service. They all worked well with one another, and showed positivity throughout the evening. I felt comfortable right away, as people were around my age and showed interest in getting to know me. 

At times, I felt bad about guests when they appeared to be in a poor state (whether messy clothes, missing teeth, or possible drug use). I wanted to remain empathetic without shifting into pity as it felt like they sometimes expected my default reaction to be that.

Takeaways:

surplus food is useful

food creates a sense of belonging

empathy and pity are different

there is relief in a warm meal

can we encourage inclusion

User flow

‘Community’ started to become a big buzzword in our group conversations, so we made a first draft of a user flow to wrap our heads around how a currency made of food could benefit one.

Figure 11. User flow first draft, drawn by Jaime Santos


Feedback

Our midpoint review feedback was similar to that of last week’s from our partners, as well as the other industry partners who were seeing our work for the first time. It was noted that it wasn’t clear how our research is connected and that we still needed to define our user, scope and ecosystem more clearly. We were encouraged to analyse and synthesise our findings once more, and our classmates were also uncertain about what the project direction was. All of this signalled to us that our work was making sense to us as a team internally, but not so much to our peers. It felt like the right moment to move more swiftly over our final two weeks, and we hoped that working in smaller groups would help us do that. Having done a lot of the groundwork together as a team of nine, we made the decision to split into smaller groups.