Designs

Five Senses Picnic of Brixton

The 5 Senses Picnic of Brixton is an installation and experience design that presents the sensory experience of going through Brixton Market in the form of a picnic to the passersby in Hyde Park.

Brixton market is a gentrifying locale in Lambeth, South London that once celebrated a vibrant market culture and with Afro-Carribean community and a market that offered cheap rent under a generous “gift economy” business model. After several visits, we learned about the gentrification of the area and how large parts of the original community were forced to leave.

Picnics are a quintessential British experience practiced by people of all ages, and a method we thought would allow us to introduce Brixton Market in an interactive and fun way to people that have the leisure to sit and experience. We invited passersby in Hyde Park, a central London landmark, to see, smell, hear, taste, and touch the objects authentically from Brixton. We wanted to create conversations about this vibrant multicultural community and its threat of disappearance. We set up picnic mats, soap products, scrubs, reading material, Carribean snacks, incense, David Bowie’s music and more, all unique and authentic to the heritage of Brixton.

Category installation,

experience design,

cultural sustainability

Challenge Create an installation,

intervention for Brixton
Market

Role concept design,

content design,

coordination,
photography,
video editing

The installation:

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Our Process:

Observations from the second part of our visit to Brixton, next to the market, there are hip eateries and sustainable services housed in shipping-container turned community space. The seemed to align with the 'sharing & gift' story of the market.

Observatiosn from our first visit to Brixton. From our online research, we learned about the market's Gift Economy business model, its Afro-Carribean heritage, and unique multicultural identity.

In our subsequent visits, we were rejected from the local organization on our proposed participatory-collage installation idea using locally-sourced materials. We visited the vendors again and learned about our surface level evaluation of Brixton Market. In reality, the is no longer under the "Gift Economy" framework, rent hiked up due to gentrification in the area, and many were forced out.

Our process and steps we took to develop the picnic

Picnic participants enjoyed learning about Brixton through us. Many didn't know about the area at all nor its history and current state. Through experiencing Brixton from our pop-up installation, Londoners expressed great interest in visiting the area for themselves.

Our Experience:

We were able to and give value back to the vendors by using our design skills to present our experience in a tangible, interactive form so others can understand without any barrier, the values we gained from the Brixton community. In our process of collecting and conversations, not only did we learn about the history of the market, but also each store-owner's also gave us their personal account, immigration story and their experience finding a new home in the multicultural community.

Yuyu Lee service & experience design, video direction & editing, card description, research & concept development
Mongtzu Tsu service design, presentation design, research & concept development

Jiaxi Zhong poster design, visual branding, video filming & editing, research & concept development

Han Ze Ge card illustration, video editing, research & concept development

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