Critical Reflection on Design Project A:

From the RSA projects I chose the ‘Resourceful Supermarket’ brief to work on.

The general concept of the brief was to come up with a system or a design idea for local supermarkets to become a more useful and convenient place for their costumers and their neighborhood to spend time in, and be able to offer better services.

We started to map out the project into different details such as:

• What normally supermarkets offer and how.
• Where different products come from, and what usually happen to the expired ones.
• What sort of people and organizations are involved.
• How different interactions happen in a place like a supermarket.
• How supermarkets can help to promote their community, its people or their services.
• What type of individuals are the regular visitors at the supermarkets.
• How satisfied are they with the different services they get such as products and costumer service etc.
• How convenient, accessible and enjoyable the experience of shopping at a supermarket is.

From all the details that we mapped out, I decided to concentrate on the aspect of consumer service at supermarkets. And started to think about how one supermarket can be distinguished from others. What sort of services local supermarkets lack mostly and would be able to offer them with an exclusive design idea.

Therefore, through observations and research that I started to conduct, one aspect that caught my attention more that others was, children at supermarkets.

I have witnessed different scenarios where a child was brought to a supermarket with a parent or their care provider, and in most of these cases the child/children were giving a really hard time to their care provider while they are trying to do their shopping.

I started to think about different services that an organization could offer for childcare. Having a playroom for children at a supermarket was sort of what I had in mind in the first place. And through my research I found out that some branches of IKEA for example offer a service of taking care of children in a playroom and then their parents can do their shopping in a better state of mind. However, I’d really like to come up with an idea, which could specifically be appropriate to use for a supermarket and nowhere else.

Therefore, I’d planned my final brief based on the idea of creating an art room/ playroom where parents or other care providers would be able to leave their children for the time they are involved with their shopping. The exclusive aspect of this playroom is that children will be involved in a variety of activities such creating art works and learning about food by using some supermarket products as well as some packaging material that are going to waste or are expired.

There will be different types of creating art out of supermarkets’ products such as; making potato stamps, using pasta to make necklaces and collages and painting eggs, which can be a special activity to do during Easter Holidays. (The visuals of these activities have been illustrated on the final boards).

All these activities are about creating something meaningful for children, which they can take home with them after their parents’ shopping is done. Therefore, the room where these activities are about to happen needed a name and I decided to call it ‘Let’s Create’, to encourage the children to get involved. And I had so much fun with creating its logo by potato stamps. Moreover, this design is about supermarkets and their local communities, I thought some of the local schoolteachers or any other qualified volunteers can take part in this project to guide and take care of the children at ‘Let’s Create’.

Creating a survey was one of the methods in my design research to discuss my initial ideas with my audience, which in this case are parents/care providers of children. Thus, I prepared an online survey for parents whose children are aged 4-9 and asked them several questions about their supermarket shopping with their kids. There were some facts that became confirmed to me during this project, like all of the participants in the survey agreed that their children have given them a hard time in supermarkets at least once, and almost all of them like the idea of having a service to take care of them or get them involved in some activities such as interacting with other children, having a reading corner etc, which means most would encourage this design idea for a supermarket.

The main purpose of my design, apart from using some of the waste supermarkets’ products in a productive way, is educating the children about food, and what a vital role such supermarkets play in our everyday lives. However, if I would have the opportunity to take this design idea any further, I would start and plan to make film clips and cartoons to show how different products such as meat, dairy and vegetables etc get to supermarkets and children would learn about the value of food. Then there could be two different activities in this room, the children who are not interested to take part in making art works could watch the film clips and an instructor would explain these process to them.

There are several aspects that I would need to pay more attention to if I were to redo this project. One of which is getting more target audience information, asking children their opinion and seeing how they would be able to make their art works independently or how much help they would need. And how actually having a place like ‘Let’s Create’ can impact the supermarkets’ environment.

There are also possible questions that can be asked about this project, like how the supermarket would pay for the art materials, which are going to be used?

What we should do to earn the parents’ trust for leaving with children with this facility? And many others questions about the environment and the emergency events, which would need answers and solutions.