Abstract Body

Today, supermarkets have a stronghold on the UK’s grocery market; as such, they function as the main interface between urban citizens and the food they eat. Based on a nested model of convenience, the fifty-year dominance of supermarket shopping has reshaped cities and resulted in the deterioration of citizen health through issues of access, transparency, and choice. Visualising how supermarket shopping impacts citizen health; from the scale of the city to a shelf, may be an effective strategy to reimagine healthier systems and spaces for the future. This study applies a research-by-design methodology to visualise and reimagine supermarket shopping through the lens of health. A propositional, health-focused supermarket, named Fit-Bytes, is designed using systems thinking and scenario-building techniques. Loosely based in Belfast, UK, the propositional supermarket is visualised through simple ‘from-to’ diagrams and descriptive photomontages. Read together, the drawings function as tools to interrogate current relationships between citizens and food and develop a suite of design moves to holistically embody health in future relationships.

The study’s results suggest that a nested social, ecological, and technological strategy is necessary for food shopping to become healthier. At the urban scale, repositioning both food production and shopping space closer to citizens promotes health through considered consumption, active mobility, and improved air quality. While at the scale of the building and shelf, personalised health and fitness data could generate healthy food choices specific to individual shoppers while also enabling an educational shopping experience. The propositional supermarket, Fit-Bytes, reflects on the agency of supermarket business models to encourage disconnected and impulsive consumption. The proposition theorises that truly healthy food shopping might only be achieved if retailers reframed shoppers as patients, prescribing food as a form of preventative healthcare.