Food centres – shifting relationships of technology, food and family

It’s a weekday evening. We are on our way for a user interview. Time to grab dinner before that. We end up at the local food centre. It is located in one of the newer estates in a Northern suburb of the city. Beside it is the usual collection of retail outlets that cater to the needs of the residents e.g. pharmacy, small hair salon etc.  Just round the corner is a refurbished fast food outlet with automated self-serve ordering booths.

We are intrigued by this new style fast food centre. As we go through the entire journey from food ordering to consumption, it is clear that the biggest change in the food centre concept is the activity centered around the food ordering and payment process (Apparently the have robots to clean the outlet although we did not see any).

At the entrance are 5 ordering and payment kiosks which are hard to miss. 3-4 staff are stationed here to direct and help diners. Customers from different demographics all seem to need some kind of help from the staff although some younger diners appear more confident. A mix of card and cash is used to pay at the machines. In this area, there is also a promoter trying to get sign-ups for one of the cashless payment services in the city.

The inside is neat and clean with warm lighting and graphics on the wall. The new element in the visual landscape are the large screens announcing the next number being served for food collection. Collecting food is similar to electronic queuing at a bank or a fast food restaurant.

The food centre has retained the ethnic identity by providing all 3 key cuisines even though space is limited. There is Yong Tau Foo, Malay and Indian food and a few Western food options. A drinks and dessert stall completes the typical food centre combination of stores. Prices are affordable and in line with general food centre prices.

A conventional eating ritual at a food centre has 4 key elements: 1) walking around to look at the food options, enjoying the visual treat and smells; comparing these across stalls 2) picking the food stall to order from often based on how popular the stall is 3) queuing up to place the order, paying for it and collecting it 4) consumption.

At the new age food centre this ritual is somewhat modified

• Often people look at how long a queue at a food stall is as this indicates how good the food is. The longer the queue at a food stall, the better the food is assumed to be. At the food centre you need to order at the entrance so symbolic cues like length of queue are not available
• There is no opportunity to walk to the store and look at the food or smell it. Except for the Yong Tau Foo store where ingredients have to be picked, the other stores do not have any food display to view. People make food choices using the visuals on the electronic panel at the entrance
• Decision making on what to order can be a collective experience. For families, where kids are young, they are often left out of the ordering process as they are too small to reach the screen and parents just place the order. Where kids are older then they may even take the lead in ordering for the entire family as using the touch screen to order appears to be fun.

Food consumption as a way to bring family and friends together however remains unchanged. The place is full of both families as well as lone diners from the neighborhood enjoying a normal dinner.

Food centres play an important communal role by providing accessible food and enabling local community interaction. They are the very core of what it means to be Singaporean. The new age food centre retains the primary function of a food centre and the classic Singapore identity.

At the same, it has adopted cashless payment and automation which are symbolic of what it means to be part of the new world. This confluence of ethnic identity with a global identity is reflective of the nation’s ambitions to be at the forefront of the new world while maintaining harmony and where family is central to life. The deployment of cashless initiatives at a Food centre has enabled a grassroots way of moving into the new world cohesively.

Our embrace of the new world also comes with the embrace of convenience in food (as is evident in the thriving food delivery services). The new age food centre is distancing individuals from the actual food at least in terms of selecting what one wants to eat. Ordering through an electronic machine based on some pictures reduces the food ordering experience to just the visual senses. Moreover, it has standardized the choices the stall can provide to a manageable finite set with little opportunity for personalization.

  It seems that the new age food centre has moved food closer to convenience and has kept us in pace with the new world.

Stumbling into a graveyard of insights

Summer time brings with it some much needed time at work. It’s time to recalibrate. We decide to take on the daunting task of sorting through all the digital photos sitting in our laptops eating up mountains of space. Every project into consumer’s lives finds us capturing lives through our camera lens. During the life of a project the photos play an important role, either as a record for us the researchers or as a medium for story telling in our reports and workshops. After each project however, the photos lie forgotten in the project folder, the stories and faces fading away.
As we set out on the cleaning up process we are encountered with thousands of photos dating back to several years. Instead of moving them out into some sort of filing system we begin to click through some of them out of nostalgia, recalling our experiences, the people we met, the places we had been.
Although our memories are still fresh, time has created some distance from the granularity of consumer life. As we flip through the pictures we begin to notice details and patterns we had not noticed before. Suddenly connections between consumers across different projects became alive. To some extent these had existed in our conscious as cumulative learning of a consumer/market but the pictures are able to make it more tangible and give a voice to the lived experience of the research team.
We had stumbled into a trove of visual material which had been forgotten in project folders and become a graveyard of insights. Our stumbling into this graveyard made us think about how we miss the opportunity to make our cumulative learning over time into something more tangible and more easily shareable.
So we began to put together the pictures across several projects in Vietnam and before we knew it we had an interesting story of the Vietnam market and its evolution.
Archived photos are a great tool that can be used to create an artefact. As an artefact they can be (re)used in many different ways a) as a way to communicate current understanding and assumptions b) as a way to probe client understanding of a market or deepen understanding as a team c) create an experiential learning to sensitize clients to unfamiliar contexts even at the beginning of projects.
So as the summer holidays came to an end, it was time pull out the photos buried in some inaccessible sub folder and give them a new birth.

Cambodian markets – where the story of the country unfolds

We are at the Olympic market in Phnom Penh spending an afternoon with Chhit and her two sisters to understand the young women of Cambodia. All three are turned out in the latest fashion. Their hair is coloured and styled in keeping with the latest international style. Chhit greets us enthusiastically and we begin our journey through the crowded and dimly lit aisles.

Olympic market is popular with young Cambodians looking for fabric, fashion and beauty products, many of them imported from Thailand, China, Korea and Vietnam. Although set up in a proper building structure; Olympic market has most of the same characteristics as the traditional markets in the city. It is packed with small shops selling their wares. There is no air conditioning although the building has been constructed to keep cool. Visual communication is loud and obvious as it needs to stand out in clutter and communicate simply. Each store is crammed with products in an attempt to maximise space and only the store owner can make sense of how each store is organised.

For a while we just weave in and out till eventually we are at a store selling beauty and skin care products. Chhit and her sisters are clearly regular customers here and are warmly greeted by the girls running the shop.

While we try to make sense of the densely packed store that is both visually and physically overpowering, the three girls have already walked into the store and are exploring for the newest products in the shop. The salesgirl introduces them to the latest new foundation from South Korea. Chhit definitely wants to buy this. She trusts the salesgirl who she considers an expert in beauty products.
We spend 20 minutes exploring the products in the shop. There is a lot of laughing and excited discussion about the products and some giggling about how much effort women need to make to look attractive.

In the end Chhit and her younger sister buy a basket of products that includes a 1 kg bottle of unbranded homemade face mask, a bright red Mac lipstick – a colour that is all the rage at the moment – and several other make up products. Their eldest sister has made no purchases.

The sisters represent two different generations in Cambodia. Chhit and her younger sister are a part of the new generation of Cambodians that is benefiting from the growing economy. She and her younger sister are both educated, still single and have office jobs. They take pride in their jobs. Finding jobs which can be fun and pay well is not always easy.

Their elder sister in contrast is married with 2 kids. She is not very educated and reflects the previous generation’s life although she is only in her late 30s. She has to content with managing her family and running a mom and pop shop.

The market highlights the tension point between indulgence and responsibility on the young generation to rebuild the country. Given the recent war history, Cambodia has a relatively young population (50% of the Cambodian population is younger than 22 years old). Whilst being under pressure or focusing on rebuilding life and society back into shape, spending a pinch of time in cosmetic stalls/hair salons at the market where women buy their daily groceries seems to be their daily indulgence. The markets allow the girls to experience a new world that is otherwise not so easily accessible.

Chhit and her younger sister represent the future of the country. They are aware of the opportunities they have but also of the responsibility they carry of building the country. Chhit wants to set up her own online fashion/beauty business.

There has been a new mall that has opened in the city but Chhit and her sisters prefer to shop at the markets. The mall is just to have some dessert not really to shop. For now, the markets represent the hopes of the country, the cautious optimism and the responsibility of the young generation.