Enabling Food Well-Being While Addressing Food Insecurity
🪄 Created as a part of the Independent Research Project
🎓 MA Service Design, Royal College of Art
⏰ May 2024 - August 2024
The project explores community kitchens as vibrant, inclusive dining spaces rather than emergency food aid.
The intervention, Full-Fill, works on destigmatising kitchens for individuals, and supports these kitchens through sustainable funding, partnerships, and branding to enhance visibility and long-term impact.
Our process began by looking into working class individuals’ experiences with mainstream networks of food access. (Restaurants, Cafes, Grocery Stores, markets, etc).
We conducted deep research by reading tons of studies, talking to experts, and conducting structured conversations with our perceived user group.
One of the participants summarised the experience of many, by stating that the food system is upside down — cheaper avenues of food access are unhealthy and processed, whereas eating well and ‘good’ cooked meals is a luxury.
Community Kitchens are spaces that provide hot nutritious food for free or a low cost to individuals, by sourcing surplus food from grocery stores and restaurants.
They’re charity-run operationscooking and hosting is done on a voluntary basis, and the time for lunch is pre-decided.
We volunteered routinely at 3 community kitchens within the same area and performed contextual enquiries.
Combined with our experience with the kitchens, we collated our findings from the research, and found our initial Research Insights.
Our new understanding was that while communal kitchens provide food access, they lack autonomy and stability, offering basic sustenance without addressing food well-being.
We built a food well-being framework based on our research and workshops conducted with 20 individuals, where they were given prompts and asked to illustrate their most notable food experiences, both good and bad.
We put down all our viable ideas into an impact matrix, and decided to prototype the ones that seemed to have the highest impact with the lowest effort to enable their implementation. The selected ideas (highlighted in red), gave way to formulating the new service.
Full-Fill is a service-focused organisation dedicated to making food of choice accessible and affordable for everyone. Full-Fill partners with external organizations, serving as the face of community kitchens within a larger alliance.
We realised that if community food has a negative perception, we needed to find ways to destigmatise it. Visual merchandising emerged as a potential solution.
Products include surplus meal kits and Full-Fill branded shelves, offering people alternative food options to cook at home while increasing engagement with community kitchens.
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By increasing the visibility of community kitchens and offering individuals navigational choices, we help build their reputation as autonomous food sources. It also helps people establish stable daily food routines.
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The dashboard provides support to community kitchens in managing their operations related to funding and volunteering. It also acts as a quick access point to ask for a shout for help.
Revati and I had the honour of presenting Full-Fill at the Service Design Exhibition, held at the Royal College of Art, July 2023, where we created a poster and interactive zines to engage visitors and receive feedback from industry-experts.
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