How can we re-establish our connection with food?
TURF aims to empower a movement. We hope to re-establish the lost connection between the production and consumption of food, and help create strong local communities.
By growing our own food and sharing the surplus with our immediate neighbours and local businesses, we believe that people can lead healthier, active lives and be united behind a basic human need.
Think local
The pandemic brought to light the need to rethink our food networks and decrease our reliance on global supply chains. We saw supermarkets stripped of food, and food banks facing vast increases in demand. We understood that there was a need and a desire to look for more local solutions. As people spent more time at home, we also observed a desire to go back to basics. We saw people wanting to improve the connection between what they were eating and where this food came from. We also saw a gap in the market for education. We wanted to provide a helpful resource that would enable people to get started, whether they have just a windowsill, an allotment or a garden. TURF is about connecting growers and facilitating knowledge sharing.
A useful app to get you started
For first time growers, knowing where to start can be challenging. A useful starter questionnaire on the TURF app enables individuals to explore where they might want to start, based on what they want to grow, their experience and what space they have available. The app also features top tips and acts as a knowledge bank. The idea is for the app to also allow people to exchange surplus produce with other households or small businesses. One of the main advantages of the app is that information is available 24/7 without the need for staffing or printed materials.
A flexible brand identity for a broad range of applications
The TURF brand identity system is bold and confident. But also, in the spirit of a movement, easily implemented and applied in a variety of settings. The simple colour palette has roots in nature, with a green that evokes growing and the red that shows the brand’s more rebellious side. The mark or logo comprises a square within a circle – the circle representing community and the square representing the patch where the person grows their produce. The team has explored the possibility of personalising the logo, so that produce from a borough or neighbourhood could be identified. Whilst brands serve to provide definition, our goal is to provide guidelines, recognising that communities are diverse and self-governing and may want to adapt the brand to meet their own specific needs.
A zero waste product
To help first-time growers we have developed kits made of recycled, compostable materials. Each kit contains pots, seed bombs and seed markers. All the grower needs are soil and water to get started. No outer packaging is required when posting the kits and at the end of their useful life the materials ensure that the product is circular, leaving no legacy of waste. The grower kit builds on PG’s reputation for encouraging the use of sustainable and innovative materials to tackle the problem of single use plastic, as in the economy meal tray concept Get Onboard exhibited at London’s Design Museum and Zero takeaway-food packaging that featured in Wallpaper*.
Design in an Age of Crisis
TURF featured in the ‘Design in an Age of Crisis’ exhibition at Somerset House.
‘Design in an Age of Crisis began as a global open call issued by Chatham House and the London Design Biennale, inviting the world’s design community, the public and young people to submit ideas and radical thinking to help solve some of the world’s most pressing problems from poor health and unhealthy living situation, to the climate emergency and social and economic inequalities. The exhibition ran in June 2021.
