Co.LAB #3.3— Culture, Inclusivity and Colour
The student Time Rebels returned with memories from the future of Dudley High Street; to share stories of what they found and stepping stones of how to get there. Below is a (rough) transcript of what one of the four groups shared with their fellow Time Rebels.
Time Rebel Team 3 — Culture, Inclusivity and Colour
Kirren Channa, Siddhesh Gavali, Safiah Gordon, Yuanshun Jin
To focus our future vision, we narrowed it down to 3 key themes to direct us, which were culture, inclusivity and colour:
Culture — Vision for the High Street to be a place where all cultures and background are embraced. It is to be a place where events take place to share knowledge, entertainment, food and enjoyment from the users interests and ways of living and heritage.
Inclusivity — Vision for the High Street to be a place where there are equal opportunities and support to thrive. It is to be a place where local businesses and ideas are supported to encourage individual and collective visions, and a place where projects can occur between the people of the High Street promoting non- profitable, community based sharing.
Colour — Vision for the High Street to be a place where colours vibrantly fill the street. It is to be a place where colours are promoted appear in various ways, such as events, food, local creative installations and collaborations with the businesses on the High Street.
Altogether, we believe these three key themes promote a future vision for food-based influence. We focused on food because we believe that be emphasising routine tasks such as food into a communal collaboration, we can embrace culture, memories, companionship and so much more.
We set a scene for our narrative output, to ground our discussions and decisions:
The Day
Today (1st March 2031) , an event has been organised by the local residents and users of Dudley High Street.
The event is to celebrate the opening of the High Street Community Kitchen. The project had been undertaken by the neighbourhood of Dudley High Street supported by the new, Participatory City model.
The Surroundings
The shop frontages of the high street are each individually different. Over the years, the local creatives have collaborated with local enterprises to generate customised branding for them.
One of the shops has now been transformed into the Community Kitchen, where users of the high street can cook and eat together. The frontage has a thriving herb collection to share within the community followed by seating and planters with more herbs. This was developed through workshops and interventions over the years to bring inclusivity and neighbourly qualities into the High Street.
Colourful stalls are set up in the road, replacing the cars that once inhabited the high street. The stalls are regularly used during the markets, but during activities and events they can be transformed for other use.
We decided to present this narrative through social media and instagram posts as we wanted to showcase what individual experiences might be like when experiencing the future High Street. Each of our posts captures a different element of experience on the High Street to form a collective scenario.
In the first post, we captured the street’s atmosphere filled with colour, activity, and pedestrianised streets.
The next post promotes the opening of a community kitchen, supported by the Participatory City model.
The next post develops what the community kitchen has to offer with street grown resources and community engagement.
The next post captures the street qualities where the visitors experience the colour and aromas of the food.
We each undertook a small project, our stepping stones, to implement solutions on the High Street for this vision to become realised.
The first Stepping Stone project looks into designing multifunctional furniture for Dudley High Street to provide opportunities for a regenerative community, focusing on how the high street can be occupied with resilience. Initially, the stalls act as market stalls to provide opportunities for enterprises and small businesses to begin thriving and encouraging the High Street to become a place of inclusivity.
However, the stalls can extend out into outdoor seating arrangements, which can become an extension of the community kitchen and during events can become a part of the whole atmosphere.
By extending the furniture, they can connect together and become a large spread where people can sit together and enjoy company. It creates a lowered centre space so children can sit together, or paint on the surfaces. We decided to focus on furniture because we felt the importance of it can go unrecognised. We felt through the design of this market stall, many memories can be created and attached to these items, and become valuable assets within the community.
The second Stepping Stone project focused on the representation of colour and revitalising frontages. During our group discussions, we recognised the negligence of existing colour on Dudley High Street. Colour is a key element we believe can bring a sense of brightness into the High Street, and an element that should be of focus when revitalising the frontages.
In this example, we have approached the frontage for the community kitchen we envision. The visual showcases a Community Kitchen in which different herbs and spices can be grown. These can then be used to cook the many dishes respective to the different cultures existing on the High Street. Each frontage can respond to the different uses of the buildings to promote individuality across the street.
The third Stepping Stone project attempted to design the community kitchen in one of the empty shops on Dudley High Street. We all know that food is an essential factor in our life and eating and cooking the food is not an abstract activity we do, it is part of our everyday routine. In our initial research, we found that many people live alone in compact housing on the High Street. We thought the kitchen connect the residents with society. We decided to make the process of preparing food more enjoyable. As our aim was to grow food on the street wherever possible, we can use these vegetables for the community kitchen. This will encourage residents to come down onto the street and engage with it. This could also be a new experience for the visitors of the High Street.
We created characters with stories relating to the new design elements, to show how this kind of initiative could connect a variety of people with the High Street:
It is 5pm in the evening and the shops are still full with customers. David has had a long and busy working day at the shop and can now finally take a break, and so he ventured out onto the street to get fresh air. David randomly bumped into an old customer, they both instantly recognised each other, and decided to share some conversations on a nearby bench. The old customer could not stop pointing out many of positive changes on the High Street since he last visited. He noticed the fresh air from more vegetation and less pollution, outdoor seating and a thriving enjoyable space.
Bianca and her friends went clothes shopping. As they could smell the delicious food making in the community kitchen, they curiously went inside for the first time. Bianca and her friends were offered freshly made, delicious soup.
Atifa lives nearby. During her free time, Atifa takes part in social work and welcomes the visitors of the High Street. Her main responsibility involves managing the food produced on street garden. A group of out of town visitors seemed lost on the street as they were wondering about what to do after shopping. Atifa suggested to participate in a workshop in the community kitchen. They plucked some berries and veggies from street and made a quick salad with a locally developed recipe that they had never tried. They thanked Atifa for the new recipe.
Jack and his friends visited the High Street with their school teacher during a study trip. He learned a lot of things about sustainability, and how to grow food. He was so inspired. Atifa gave him some seeds from fruits on the street garden, and later he planted them in a small unused bucket. After a few months he came back to street to gift the kitchen some of the fruit from his tiny garden at home. Atifa felt so proud of the young generation of Dudley.
The interior of the community kitchen would be inviting and colourful to create a positive atmosphere. The colours were abstracted from one of our group collages of food. The kitchen counters are not considered as a back of house element; they have been combined with seating as we are trying to embrace the cooking process. The kitchen desk is designed in a way so multiple people can work together from all sides, with central storage for herbs.
The facade of the kitchen contains a small window so food can be sold outside. We have also created a vertical herb garden so it can be used in the community kitchen. We wanted to keep these below eye-line so people outdoors have a clear view into what’s going on inside.
This street section shows activity from the back of the community kitchen to the other end of the street and how all these elements are working coherently. The street is filled more with people rather than cars. We believe that the outdoor seating, more trees, canopies and street lights can attract people to connect with the High Street.
The fourth Stepping Stone project focused on the design of 2-in-1 flower pot seating for the exterior of the community kitchen. The design also integrates a canopy for growing herbs to also use in the kitchen. Through a collaboration with another Time Rebel collecting reusable waste, we thought about how this could be integrated into the materiality of this concept. The product analysis of this design is that it has a detachable seat to cater for a variety of arrangements. The flower pot can be raised to create a seating area, and lowered to be become a flower pot on the High Street.
The visual below shows how the flower pots can be incorporated into the design; not just thinking about the ground floor as the active space, but bringing activity to the upper levels of the High Street.
