FeedAMillion

Our client Econé is a registered charity that advocates for sustainable development in four key areas: property, education, welfare, and health and well being. The project aim was to develop a future vision for Attercliffe, Northeast Sheffield around the theme of food production, with the ultimate vision of extending the practices learnt to future human colonies on Mars.

Econé specified our team to create a transformation vision of Attercliffe, one that could be persuasive enough to attract private and public investment into the area to enable its implementation.

The area is an industrial suburb of the city, has a low population and sits on the South Bank of the River Don, and the project began with establishing the specific aims of the brief following the first client meeting. Through a series of collaborative design charrettes we developed and refined the brief over the six week period. The charrettes were informed by the client objectives, visits to Attercliffe, stakeholder interviews and group research around the subject and site. The process was iterative and receptive.

As a team of fourteen students of mixed courses, we formed a group structure,  assigned roles and shared skills. Under the circumstances of the global pandemic, the group work took place predominantly digitally and occasionally face to face where possible. Miro was a key platform and tool to create a digital studio where ideas could be shared and developed.

Over the course of the project the importance of collaborative working was reinforced and the time we could spend working in the physical studio, valued. As a visionary project, the challenge was to produce a convincing scheme through images and other media. In evolving sub groups we developed several drawings at varying scales, all with the intent to express the project ambition’s. A key strategy of the feeding a million project was phasing. This was established to provide a pragmatic scheme for the project that could grow over time, but one rooted in the community and stemmed from the place. At each phase a wider masterplan was produced, key site collages, a large axonometric, and three tool kits. 

All drawings and images produced have been assembled on the Feed a Million website (feedingamillion.co.uk) and a film produced as a tool to describe the whole project from past, to present and future.

Credits

Student Team: 

Mohammed Khizr, Meesam Mirza, Anna Moroney, George Appleby, Bor-ren Hui, Xinwen Zhang, Xiaoxing Pan, Eleanor Watterson, Yinhai Chen, Yi Guo, Weilin Lai, John Gray, Jinyuan Xu, Perdita Ratsma

Mentor:

Catherine Skelcher