After my many emails and calls sent out over the past few weeks, I finally gained a positive and keen response last Friday!! The response was from the head of catering at the Chelsea Collage of Arts, who was very interested in my intervention proposals and wanted to meet at the Chelsea canteen sight.
So, a meeting was set for Tuesday 13th July. I was a mix of excited and admittedly slightly nervous, as this is the first real opportunity I have had where someone was very keen for me to test my proposed ideas and so I really wanted the meeting to go well. I spent the weekend prepping as much as possible. I developed mock ups of the canteen space to demonstrate what could be added where in preliminary interventions; ensuring no irreversible changes would be made to the space and keeping it relatively simple to avoid any severe interference with their day to day practises. The mock up of my initial intervention ideas for the space can be viewed below. I also developed a selection of natural themes that could be applied to the space dependent on their food offering, as I researched the canteen space and discovered that they have done themed food events in the past. Therefore, I thought I could potentially coincide these food events with an intervention to create a natural environment utilising technology that plays off the food. The list of these ideas can also be seen below.
During the pitch to the catering manager of Chelsea I spoke through the changes I wish to make for both the hospitality venues themselves and their customers through creating biophilic environments, which I have summarised below. I also addressed why I wish to test whether technology could aid connection to nature through utilising technobiophilia principles, alongside the importance of targeting the senses through scent and sound to create immersive natural environments that connect people to nature; and evoke the wellbeing benefits of interacting with nature.
Interventions in the Canteen Space
To my delight the pitch went very well. Dashnor, the catering manager was very interested in my proposed ideas to bring nature into their spaces and gave me the go ahead to conduct interventions in the Chelsea hospitality spaces. However, at present the canteen area is shut due to not enough students being on campus to sustain it and so only the cafe and courtyard area are currently open. Therefore, I agreed with Dashnor to move ahead with the technobiophilic intervention in the canteen area in September when more students are back on site and it is expected that the canteen area can reopen. Below I have included more pictures of the canteen space that I took on my visit. You can notice there is already small efforts made to bring nature into the space with their use of plants and natural materials such as wood, but there is plenty more that can be built off of this.
Interventions in the Cafe/ Courtyard Space
In the meantime, I have been granted access to test idea sin the cafe space as well as the large courtyard area that the cafe hosts tables in. This courtyard area is also opposite Tate Britain and the public are welcome to utilise the cafe facilities, making it a prime venue to target customers in.
Dashnor was very keen on my ideas of targeting the senses and also testing physical applications of nature that people could interact with. Consequently, I have developed the idea of a Herb Event that I am going to be hosting at the Chelsea cafe’s and courtyard area on Tuesday and Wednesday next week (20th and 21st July). The event will involve bringing a selection of herbs to the courtyard area which customers are able to come up and cut to add to their food, as the cafe offers a range of foods that change every few days including curry through to salads and sandwiches.
I will be present at the duration of the events to interact with the customers and to ask them about their relationships with nature, involving starting a conversation about how interacting with the herbs has impacted them, or not. I will ask customers a series of 3 short questions assessing their connection to nature before providing them with the herbs; I will then re-ask the questions before they leave to measure if there has been any change in their connection to nature. I will also provide customers with a QR code on cards I am having made to promote the event, which customers can scan to answer extra questions around their connection to nature and the impacts of the event; so that I can gain added feedback from the willing customers.
Additionally, there will be an opportunity for people to take some smaller herb plants home with them from the event or some picked herbs. This is to assess if taking the herbs into their daily lives impacts their connection to nature more greatly than just interacting with them during the event. Customers who take the herbs home will also be provided with a card featuring tips of how to utilise the herbs with certain foods, and will also feature the QR code to a google forms of additional questions reflecting on their experience in taking the herbs home.
Feedback from customers throughout the events will also be recorded to gain an understand of what customers are looking for to improve their connection to nature in these spaces and whether an offering like this would attract them to visit a hospitality space. This intervention will also help to establish the value of physical interactions with nature, which can be later compared to that of interactions to nature through technology. Pictures of the cafe site and courtyard are included below. Greater details on preparing for this intervention will be included in a later blog post.
Reflection:
I am so happy to have finally secured a venue in which I can being some physical testing of my concepts through interventions, especially that I can get stuck into testing so quickly as next week! It has been a long journey, but the struggle of continuing on in this line of enquiry to conduct testing in public hospitality venues has eventually been worthwhile. Although, I will still continue my pursuit of securing other differing hospitality venues to run interventions in, on the back burner, to ensure my project has the greatest outreach possible.