MOBILE SOUP KITCHEN SPATIAL REDESIGN
St John's Bread & Life, Brooklyn, NY
The Food Bank for New York City estimates that 3.3 million New Yorkers experience financial difficulty putting food on the table(1). The St. John’s Bread and Life Mobile Soup Kitchen (MSK) is a customized RV soup kitchen that serves over 250 meals per day at multiple locations throughout Brooklyn. In addition to hot meals the staff offer other social services to the patrons, including counseling on housing, health and public assistance. MSK staff and volunteers work as quickly as possible to make sure everyone gets served, however they still depend greatly on volunteers to help out.
TYTHEdesign spent time volunteering at and observing the working dynamics of the mobile space. Using design approaches and ethnographic research, we discerned some clear organizational and spatial design opportunities within the MSK that could result in a more efficient process, and therefore a better experience for staff, volunteers and the community.
TYTHEdesign worked directly with the staff to redesign and organize the storage space for more intuitive, efficient and easy use with volunteers. Following this we collaboratively designed a new serving table to reduce backups and inefficiency at the service window. We worked directly in the small space to create prototypes, tested them with staff and volunteers and redesigned to make sure the design matched the needs of the client. The co-created table has a large serving area for dishes, easy access to utensils and napkins and a space to store the combo cutting board/serving tray. The table also folds up for safety when the RV is traveling.
Our redesign of the soup kitchen’s space enabled a number of positive feedbacks. Speeding the serving process means the community spends less time waiting in line (and seasonally, in the cold), so they enjoy a more respectful experience, are more open to the other social services offered by the staff and are less likely to allow tensions to build into fights. Minimizing time needed to train volunteers, serve patrons and break up fights means that staff can spend more time administering social services to the community. A better experience for volunteers means they are more likely to return. All of this time saved also translates to cut costs for St. John’s Bread and Life.
It’s now 2011 and since our first collaboration with St.John’s Bread and Life we’ve come back together with them to work on a second MSK that we’re very excited about. This time around we’re working on the entire interior layout of their new MSK. In this collaboration we worked directly with their team and the consulting vendor to ensure that the entire design is as efficient and friendly as possible from the overall layout to the choice of appropriate materials. The van is currently being outfitted in California and we’ll have more news about it in the next 6 months.
For now we’re excited to announce that we’ve been honoured as one of finalists in the Victor J Papanek Social Design Award 2011! Along with the other finalists and winners, we will be featured in exhibitions held at the University of Applied Arts Vienna (November 10, 2011—January 31, 2012) and the Museum of Arts and Design and/or the Austrian Cultural Forum New York (March 6—June 17, 2012), depending on the number of finalists. We hear that there is also a possibility that the exhibition will travel to other venues worldwide.
The competition solicited entries from established, emerging, and student designers of projects from around the world that upheld Papanek’s vision of environmental and/or social responsibility under 2 categories: “Designed Objects” and “Social and/or Ecological Infrastructures and Design Concepts.” We’re honoured to share this award with the likes of Yves Behar of Fuse Project and Mitchell Joachim of Terraforma one.
(1) Food Bank for New York City. <http://www.foodbanknyc.org/go/food-poverty-in-nyc>
