Bringing people together through culture
“We are all individuals, yet we have so much in common.”
We feel that culture should be a source of connection and celebration; not difference. This site displays our digital concept for a café in Carrigtwohill, inspired by these values and the cultures of the town.
ABOUT US
We are Conor, Sam, Oksana and Jack; 4 Digital Media students from MTU working on a ‘Socially Engaged Art’ project.
Our work is inspired by information gathered through research and discussion in focus groups with members of the community.
How did it start?
The goal is to create a piece art based on Carrigtwohill that engages viewers and urges them to re-think their views on a certain topic. The work was to be based off of research and focus groups with members of the community.
Our idea
Upon some initial research into the community, it was clear to us that Carrigtwohill has an extremely diverse cultural background. After a lot of thought and brainstorming, we decided that we wanted to focus on breaking down the idea that culture makes us different, and wanted to create something that brings people together through difference. We found out that the best way to do this is through food and music. We decided on the idea of a digital concept cultural cafe, built with interested community members.
“We want to show people that culture should be a source of connection, not difference.”
The Culture Cafe website
We have created this site as a way to display our process, ideas and our finished work. On this site you will see art work, menus and playlists that could be used in a physical version of this cafe. We hope that this site will change some people’s perspectives on culture not only in Carrigtwohill or wherever they may be viewing our site from. We also hope that our work here might inspire someone to create a physical version of this idea, or inspire more cultural events and celebrations in Carrigtwohill. This project would not have been possible without our participants. A huge thank you from all of us to Linda, Mouna, Joanna, Teresa and Miriam
Don't forget to follow us on our Instagram to not miss anything about the development of The Culture Cafe!
OUR WORK
Focus Groups
We began our focus groups on the 22/03/21. We met with Linda, Mouna, Joanna, Teresa and Miriam. We asked them to speak about their own experiences of culture in Carrigtwohill. We had some really interesting conversation in these meetings. We then compiled what we had learned and used it to generate menus, artworks and playlists for our café concept.
The logo and menus
This is the logo that we created for our project and our conceptual cafe. This logo represents both closeness, individuality and diversity.
This is our concept menu that we created. The menu is in keeping with our overall theme. The menu features breakfast, lunch, drink and dessert options.
Each of our identified cultures is represented in some way in the menu. We chose menu items based on information from our participants and also from our own research.
The Wall-art
Below are concepts for wall art that could be displayed in a physical café. The content of these pieces was inspired and based off of the conversation in our focus groups with Carrigtwohill residents.
This design is a large mural-style graphic that would be a central feature of the cafe. The piece is an image of the tree featuring the different nationalities of Carrigtwohill.
This pieces are posters filled with ideas from our participants. We asked them to talk about some things that reminded them of home while the second one is made up form all the different cultural backgrounds our participants identified within Carrigtwohill.
It is interesting that these ideas are from people of very diverse backgrounds, yet many of them are so universally relatable and that's not the only thing interesting thing about these artworks. Not all of the words are immediately visible; you must look for a moment to see all of them. This is reflective of the facts that culture is often unnoticed until one decides to explore it.
The 3D lay-out of the cafe
In order to clearly visualize our plans for a possible cafe in the future, Jack started by making a 3D render of the cafe an how we think it would look if it were to become a reality.
No Cafe would be complete with some music playing in the background to set the mood and entertain the visitors. We created a Spotify playlist and tried to add at least two songs for each culture; one new and one old.
The Style guide
In order to guarantee a continuous brand-experience, to enhance brand loyalty and to help build the brand a style guide is needed. Our style guide outlines the used fonts, color-schemes, our 'Tone-of-voice' and more.
GENERATING TRAFFIC
In order to generate traffic towards the website of the cafe, to help build the brand and to start a brand community around The Culture Cafe, we have come up with a social media campaign.
The content
Meal on Monday
Each week one culture will get chosen to be put in the spotlight. All the content that week will feature things from that culture. The first content type to be posted is called 'Meal on Monday' in which the cafe shares a recipe from that culture. This can range from drinks to deserts, from main courses to appetizers.
Culture Facts
The second content type to be posted is called 'Culture Facts' in which the cafe shares fun facts about that culture. This can range from food facts to cultural facts.
Spotifriday
The third and last content type to be posted is called 'Spotifriday' in which the cafe shares 2 songs from the Spotify list with the followers each Friday.
The content calendar
All the posts have been scheduled on the respected days in a content calendar. This is an editorial calendar or publication schedule is which is often used by bloggers, publishers, companies and groups to manage the publication of content on different media, e.g. newspapers, magazines, blogs, email newsletters and social media channels.
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