The Gift of Giving
A pop-up charity shop for the Southbank's Winter Festival, in collaboration with mental health charity Mind.
For the 2014 Winter Festival, the Southbank Centre put out a call for designers to submit their ideas to transform the Spirit Level Gallery space at the Royal Festival Hall into a pop up charity shop, in collaboration with the mental health charity MIND.
Myself and three friends, just out of university, decided it was worth a shot. We won! We then spent the next month finalising all of the designs and the layout of the shop – before building all of the structures.
The Brief
The brief was to create playful and engaging fit outs that could display a range of donated goods in the charity shop. The shop needed to encourage dwell time for visitors and display the merchandise in creative ways. In addition to the the displays and sales points, the shop space needed to incorporate an area to display information about the charity MIND, where visitors were encouraged to reflect and interact with a display wall about mental health.
Concept
The design focuses on the snowflake shape as a symbol of, not only Christmas, but also the individual. When researching the formation of a snowflake we discovered that each arm grows independently of one another and that tiny changes in temperature and humidity affect the way in which it forms its final shape. We felt this strongly connects with mental health and acts as a metaphor for the way in which we grow as humans and represents our individual journeys through life.
For this reason, we used the snowflake shape as a basis for playful and engaging fit-outs placed throughout the space, bringing together the theme of Christmas with a subtle tone of personal experience.
The charity shop ran for the duration of the Winter Festival, from 6th December to 12th January 2014.
See more images here.
Designers
Carl Godfrey, David Gordon, Lucy Harper and Emily Hunter.
Project Tags
Companies
Southbank Centre
- Events