Observe

As the festival planning got more detailed, the meal times were set. There would be breakfast, lunch and dinner. Breakfast would be served at 8 am, lunch at 13 and dinner at 17. Coffee was planned for breakfast and lunch. Desserts were originally planned, but scrapped due to the rising cost of food since the offer for catering was made to keep things fair for the caterer at Rautiala. There would be a café by Kurki ecovillage each afternoon for a few hours with waffels and freshly baked goods.

Knowing myself and people in general it was apparent that some people would be hungry in between meals and especially in the evening. Also knowing how much coffee Finns and other Nordics drink, it would be necessary to find a way to keep the coffee flowing outside of mealtimes.

The program was rather tight, as we got an amazing amount of cool lecture offers from the community. In the actual program there were little chances for festival goers to meet each other and chat with friends and strangers – mealtimes and evenings mainly. Nordics tend to bond over coffee.

Me, the festival team leader, am a person who can deal with a lot of stress if I can have enough time alone and have some simple tasks that I like as a balance, to relax my mind. I’ve always liked feeding people and counting coins.

Based on this, an idea of a self-service café came into my mind.

What the café should ”do” / yields this project should provide

• A place for the festival goers to gather around and meet each other for a cup of coffee and a relaxed chat
• Happiness and nutrition for festival goers
• A design in my portfolio
• Some leftover foods for organizing team
• A project to keep the festival project manager sane and happy; a place to putter in otherwise hectic environment
• A demonstration of trust as a given
• A demonstration of DIY as part of permaculture
• Material for the compost

Mind map

For a general idea about what the café could be and do, I created a simple mind map to get some thoughts on ”paper”.

Boundaries

• Money, the café project should not need a big investment to begin with and should at least break even
• Labor, the volunteers and the core team were planned for other activities during the festival
• Space, it needed to be indoors and have electricity
• Resources, we’d need at least a fridge, a coffee maker and a kettle as well as a serving table and utensils to make the café work, plus food of course

Image below is a map of the festival area with DIY Café. Authors: Laura Allard and Elisabeth Grossemy. Date: August 2022. Scale: Not drawn to scale as to serve as orientation map. Scale of the bigger map is roughly 1:1000.

Resources

• Kostiakeskus (local community and recycling centre)
• Fiksuruoka (shop for foods otherwise-wasted)
• Local, small supermarkets
• Space, there is a lot of it in Rautiala
• Utensils like a coffee maker, freecycled paper cups and a pay-here-box already existing
• Some work from the festival team/volunteers
• Willingness of the festival goers to serve themselves DIY style
• ”Nordic honesty”
• Knowledge and enthusiasm of the designer

Evaluation

Principles

Let’s evaluate and collect ideas with David Holmgren’s design principles first:

1. Observe & Interact

• Observe yourself and what you’d like the café to be and do
• Observe and interact with the festival core team to hear their ideas, too
• Observe and interact with the festival goers and switch things up if needed

2. Catch & Store Energy

• Use your own knowledge of similar events in the past
• Try and combine functions as much as possible
• Trust other people to do their part and use their energy to help themselves and others and keep the café running (make coffee, tea, get water, keep places clean etc)

3. Obtain a yield

• Have the café bring a monetary yield to at least break even
• Have the café bring joy, relaxation and community feeling to the festival goers

4. Apply Self regulation & accept feedback

• We should not get everything for the café just because it will be cool, but self-regulate and keep the café as ecological and small as possible, but as big and versatile as needed

5. Use & Value Renewable Resources & Services

• Use salvaged foods, either obtained free or at a discount
• Prefer organic food if avalable
• Use what you have at hand, reducing purchases

6. Produce no waste

• Prefer unpackaged foods
• Set up recycling station

7. Design from patterns to details

• Integrate the café into the bigger festival design, don’t see it as a standalone

8. Integrate rather than segregate

• Cooperate with Kurjen café and other elements of the festival
• Use existing spaces and resources

9. Use slow & small solutions

• Keep it as simple as it can be

10. Use & Value Diversity

• Remember to offer lactose free, gluten free and vegan foods
• Foods for breakfast alternatives, plus fruits and sweet and salty snacks

11. Use edges & value the marginal

• Do not exclude anything (solutions, foods, ideas) just like that if it doesn’t fit my idea of things right away

12. Creatively Use & respond to change

• We should be able to answer fast to feedback if something is not going well/going especially well, or something surprising happens

Input-output analysis

Analysing location alternatives

For the space as per the input-output and needs analysises and some common sense would be needed. The space would need to be

• close by to the festival centre and sleeping areas
• A roof and walls, an indoor space to counter any natural forces that might emerge, like strong winds, pouring rain or wild animals in order to keep the products safe from ruin and the visitors dry and warm in any weather
• electricity to run the coffeemaker, water cooker and fridge
• If possible already a fridge onsite for less transport needs
• water for the coffeemaker, water cooker and juice mixing
• Good access to people visiting the café – close to the festival space
• The space should be so, that other activities there are not disturbed by the café visitors

Exclusion analysis

Space alternatives are:

• Main house
• Navetta
• Info house
• Accommocation houses
• Garage

Main house would be used mostly for courses, so it would be very busy. Also the main cooking is done there, so the DIY Café would much disturb the cooks. This is a clear dealbreaker, even though it is the most central place and has the best facilities in the kitchen – but not for the cafés use unfortunately.

Info house (small house at the back) has water, but very small spaces, and the action there would disturb the sleepers and the info station very much. Plus it is rather far from the action.

The same here for the other accommodation buildings. They are for sleeping, and not a café! The other one didn’t even have water and was situated on a slope, which would make tables outside difficult. These were not real alternatives at any phase of the design.

Garage is reserved for the Café by Kurjen. The location itself was good, water was close by in the main house and the space had roof and walls and electricity, and some space for a counter and working tables.

Navetta’s spaces are downstairs and upstairs. Upstairs is reserved for the party, but downstairs could be shared with the courses taking part in there in bad weather, and it has all the resources needed. It has lots of space, as well as water an fridge already there/adjacent.

Navetta looks promising, so let’s just write everything down in a PM chart for good measure.

PM analysis of Navetta as a locaction

Offerings ideas

• Plain to see is coffee and tea, the essence of a café
• Pretty self-explanatory are also snacks, as the purpose of the café is to accompany the main meal times. Snacks can be divided into sweet and salty snacks. 
• Fruit would be good in the café as it can be eaten as snack, dessert or instead of a meal even. Plus fruit is packaging-free and can be obtained sometimes for free or for very cheap.
• The same goes for bread and sandwiches: if a meal was not tasty, one could make themselves a sandwich.
• This led to further breakfast replacing ideas in case someone didn’t enjoy the porridge we would have at breakfast. 
• Also, the offerings should not compete with the offerings of the ”served café” where there would be baked goods and waffels accompanying the coffee and tea.

Where to obtain these things:

Possibilities for obtaining food are

• supermarket or shops
• salvaged foods online shops
• food sharing stations
• dumpster diving
• homegrown
• community

For this café we would prefer the last five, but will need to use all surely.

Design

Space

For the space the downstairs of the Navetta was chosen based on the evaluation.

Offerings

As a general statement, I decided early on that the extra food and coffee shouldn’t be included in the ticket price as some would want it and some not.

Choosing the offerings

The main offering would be coffee, that hardly needs any reasons other than this statistic.

Coffee we needed to buy full-price, as it doesn’t often go on sale. I would get that as well as tea and milk and oat milk in a local supermarket. Sugar we had from a previous event.

The coffee we got was organic dark roast coffee from Middle America and East Africa, and also Rainforest Alliance certified. I got this coffee simply because that is the one we use at home and I know how to make it. Curiously, I personally don’t drink coffee at all.

For the other offerings I contacted two of the otherwise-to-be-wasted/salvaged food shops that operate in Finland, Fiksuruoka and Matsmart, and asked them to sponsor our festival.

From Fiksuruoka I got an email back very soon stating that they couldn’t unfortunately give us food, but they could give us a 10% discount on our orders and send some discount codes and materials to us.

Matsmart answered only after the festival and in English language that they were not interested. Some difference in communications!

I decided to get the packaged sweet and salty snacks as well as some foods for the alternative breakfast station from Fiksuruoka, based on price, availability and thinking about special diets like vegan and gluten free. The amounts were estimated intuitively based on the duration and estimated amount of people coming to the festival, in the hopes everything would be sold out by the end.

In my town, there is a community center that gets the bread from the supermarket that has just passed its best before date. People can get it from there daily for free, so this is what I would also do. I would go on several days and freeze the bread, as to not take too much on any one day so that others will also have enough.

For the fruit I would keep an eye on a getting-old offer – a bag of spotty bananas or bit soggy grapes for 50 cents is what I would get at my local supermarket. Only if I didn’t get these, I would buy some full price.

For the toppings for sandwiches I decided on homemade hummus (plus I can make it for cheap and it’s tasty, minus of course chickpeas not growing in Finland), some cucumber and tomato (Finnish, from supermarket), vegan butter as well as some jams, some bought, some of my own making.

The purchases were about 190 euros altogether.

Payment

For payment there was no official evaluation done, it was just a clear idea that I had in my head and went with it.

As the Café was DIY, also the payment should be DIY. In many occations in my life I have seen this work in the Nordics especially in the countryside, even though many people from other countries can hardly believe their eyes when they see it: the Pay-here-box.

On the counter of the Café there was an information/menu printout with instructions to pay in the box. In the box I placed a cash base as change money, and on the box we wrote ”Pay here :) ”. The box was placed on the counter next to the instructions and voilá, done.

As the Nordics use very little cash nowadays, another alternative was offered: payment per card was possible in the Café by Kurjen, so the instructions stated you could take what you need now, and pay it the next time the Café by Kurjen was open. Also a system based on trust.

Where to get things?

The needs analysis had shown a good list of things we need. But where to get them?

Plan for getting the needed things

The plan was that the people would drink their coffee from the cups they have brought with them for the festival. In addition some reusable cups that could be borrowed from me and Kurki ecovillage. But some weeks before the festival I spotted a posting in my town’s Facebook ”roskalava”, freecycling group. A lady gave away about 60 paper cups from a business that had quit recently. I figured it would be a good addition, and got the cups. Tissues, plates were also either donated or the permaculture association had got some for previous events and I had them at home.

The Fox Box has served me many years as a flea market cash register, so it was clear it would help me here too (image above).

Most other utensils were found at home. I also got some from the community center which is also a recycling centre. For example a big box that ended up holding the raisings, I got for 20 cents. At the end didn’t have enough ladles or a decent cutting board and knife, so those were bought for about 20 euros. Also the dish towels were mostly from the community centre, and after use found a home at Lumias’ place. For water containers I reused some 5 litre water canisters, that could easily be filled from the tap.

Recycling station should follow a good Finnish standard and have not only compost, but also plastic, metal and glass. If needed, also cardboard and paper.

Implement

The photos above give you an impression of the setup. The images are from Sunday the 7th of August, the last day of the festival.

The first tweak happened when we arrived at Rautiala on Wednesday, one day before the festival. We were greeted by the host’s husband who very briskly told us that the Navetta could not be used at all, as it had been deemed unsafe by the authorities the previous weekend.

Read more about how we shifted the whole festival setting around in that design, but also the DIY Café had to move literally from one day to another.

The team from Kurjen and me looked at the different spots and decided based on the ad hoc evaluation, that the DIY Café could share the garage space with the ”served café”, from now on called Gafé by Kurjen which was planned for the garage. Whenever the Cafe by Kurjen would be in operation, the DIY Café offerings would be lifted to the side table and then put back after the Café by Kurjen was done.

A fridge was moved from the Navetta and the serving table was made with a tablecloth. Some tables, chairs and benches were brought from the Navetta to the front of the cafés to create nice places to sit, eat and relax.

I wanted to set up the café on Wednesday, but unfortunately there was no time for that due to the usual chaos of building an event, so the set-up was done on Thursday afternoon, while people were arriving. I brought everything to the back of the garage, borrowed a few bowls from the kitchen and set up my the little DIY café. In the Fox Box I put a starting cash amount of 50 euros in coins and small bills.

I had not found other fruits in the 50 cent offer other than some pretty black bananas, so I got some more organic bananas and some apples. Stupid thing was it was too early for Finnish apples, so they were just any apples from the store, from Poland if I remember correctly.

On Thursday, the arrival day, the dinner was potluck and everyone brought something to the festival table. I of course grabbed the suitable leftovers like dried plums and bread to the café after the dinner :)

During the days, every time I restocked the DIY Cafés offerings I also took a peek into the Pay-here-box and removed most of the bigger bills to take to the ”headquarters” for safekeeping. I restocked the café every morning and also every time I needed a break from the hassle :)

The vegan chocolates were the first to sell, and after that the fruit (black bananas being last to go) and other sweets, licorice and candy, as well as the snack-type rye bread crisps. The crackers were not the biggest hit, and neither was the breakfast or sandwich bar. On the last day I brought the hummus and breads to lunch to be served alongside it. The dry ingredients like muesli and dates and crackers were divided between Kurjen and my place. I am happy to inform that absolutely no edible food was wasted in the café and all the scraps, mostly coffee grounds, all in all about two 10-litre bucketfuls, went to the compost at Kurjen!

Recycling station

There were two recycling stations by us at the festival, other being in the main area and other next to the café. The café station had two buckets with lids for compost, one next to the coffee maker and one outside by the other containers. We also had cardboard boxes for plastic, metal and glass, plus a sac for cardboard and a regular trash for the incinerator.

Maintain

As this is a part of an event, a specific maintenance is not required in that sense like a running system would. For the event itself my crude maintenance plan was to visit the café every morning to stock up, get water and make coffee, and always when I needed a break from the bigger things, pop over and see if anything needed some ”puttering”.

What can be seen as maintenance, a life beyond the one-time event if you wish, is making sure all the gathered information and knowledge is documented for the next time I create this kind of café or a similar thing, as well as sharing this design with others, so that they can start not at zero but with some tips and thoughts to get them started. 

Reflecting on the design

Evaluation using the ethics as a mirror

Earth Care – Perhaps about 3/4ths of the offerings were foods and drinks that would otherwise go to waste. The rest was bought full price to make the offering palette complete so to say. Of the things we got for the café, perhaps 9/10ths were already there or were obtained second hand. The smallest amount of utensils were bought new. Indeed all the scraps went to compost and will help the plants at Kurki Ecovillage soon enough! I feel as a balancing act, the café did well enough when it comes to Earth care.

People Care – In my opinion the people care aspect of the café succeeded very well. The café was much liked and people used it a lot. It did indeed help to keep people happy with chatting, nutrition, sweets and coffee throughout the festival! It also did keep me relaxed during the stressful festival organisation work as my little ”hideaway”. A bit on the side it encouraged people to participate in DIY, be active in a common activity and help others without anything in return. The design succeeded in demonstrating trust. The Fox Box was full every morning.

Fair Share – We did keep prices as low as possible and give access to the volunteers for bottomless coffee. We also shared the leftovers with the organizing team and guests. The work was shared very fairly between myself and the guests. I didn’t feel left alone with the work at any point the café, as someone had always filled the water canisters and made coffee. Only cleaning the coffee machine was apparently my job only!

Evaluation using the principles as a mirror

Observe & Interact

• This was very much my design, there was no client interview or much common decisions in the core team about the specifics of the DIY café, which meant observing during design and implementation was important. Observing what intutively feels right for me, observing kind of fresh offerings I can get in the days leading to the festival, observing and interacting with the festival goers. Switching things up didn’t really happen – what was there, was there, and looking back that was good. If after observing that the chocolate was out on Saturday already, I would have panicked and driven to the store for any chocolate, it would have diminished the relaxing effect of the café to me, as well as rising the prices by a lot for the festival goers. Plus I feel for us humans today it is very healthy to see things run out from time to time. So there was interacting in the sense of interacting with people, but not really with their wants.

Catch & Store Energy

• I think that I could really use my knowledge of hosting a café in this design. I have hosted served cafés before as well as many events with offerings. The design moved along really easily and without resistance.
• Trusting other people to do their part and use their energy to help themselves and others and keep the café running paid off. It worked just as well as I had hoped and planned for, which was amazing!

Obtain a yield

• The café did bring a monetary yield. It took about 200 euros to set up, and the turnover was around 260 euros, even though the volunteers really enjoyed their coffees! The surplus was used to pay the musicians for Saturday’s party.
• As far as I observed, the café did indeed bring joy, relaxation and community feeling to the festival goers. It was much visited and in the festival feedback form it received 4,25 stars from 5 (based on humble 12 opinions).

Apply Self regulation & accept feedback

• The café was perhaps a bit big. Looking back, I really would skip the sandwich station completely and just donate the bread to be served at lunch to help the caterer with the costs. I think I got a bit carried away. But the amount of packaged foods, snacks and sweets was – looking at what was left over – pretty correct. Less would have been a bit too little.

Use & Value Renewable Resources & Services

• The amount of salvaged foods and using what we have was decent (see Earth care for numbers). We didn’t have much organic food, perhaps 1/5 of everything served was organic (like the coffee, bananas, muesli, dates and raisins plus one chocholate).

Produce no waste

• Perhaps 2/5ths of the food was unpackaged or bought in bulk. The rest was individually packaged, like the candy, or in normal packages like the bread. The recycling station was implemented as planned and worked nicely.
• All leftovers were shared among us organizers and festival participants who stayed to help clean up

Design from patterns to details

• I feel the café really served the festival and was an integral part of it.

Integrate rather than segregate

• The unexpected change of location really helped us cooperate with Kurjen café much better, and it worked wonderfully. The sharing of resources before, during and after the event went in my opinion very well. Also the cooperation with Rautiala (the location and caterer) went well.

Use slow & small solutions

• (see principle 4.)

Use & Value Diversity

• The variation of food was sufficient. I paid much attention to offering different vegan and gluten free options. Looking back, the offering was pretty grain-dense – possibly because its what I prefer to eat.

Use edges & value the marginal

• Perhaps this principle was not so much apparent in the design and implementation.

Creatively Use & respond to change

• well, speak about change with the location! I think we mastered this.

General reflection on the design

Only afterwards I realized the coffee we used was not Fair Trade. I plan to find a coffee for home that is both organic and fair trade (since the festival my husband has also stopped drinking coffee, so it’s only for our guests).

The ad hoc move to the garage was a very good thing after all. It was much closer to water and it didn’t disturb any courses. The shared resources from Kurjen like the table cloth and a beautiul coffee cup holder really elevated the DIY Cafe´s style. They on the other hand didn’t need to bring another coffee maker etc double appliances. The space sharing went brilliantly, of this a warm thanks to the kind people of Kurki Ecovillage.

I feel I thought of pretty much everything and like mentioned, the design felt really easy and effortless. Possibly because this kind of setup is something pretty familiar to me. I really enjoyed designing it with intention and ethics in mind and not just like any random café with profit in mind.

Tweak

For the next time of for anyone else reading, some things I would indeed do differently.

I would…

• plan to share the space with a served café team from the beginning, if there are no problems with the people/the co-operation
• get coffee and tea that are both Fair Trade and organic
• bring more homemade teas and products, perhaps even ask people to bring theirs too as a donation or exchange
• get more chocolates and fruits and less crackers and muesli
• try to find more local foods, whatever the season
• perhaps skip the sandwich station altogether
• hang around the café a bit more and listen to the people chatting

Generally it was efficient to not get too innovative with the design and take the pragmatic route – use what I can get, do what I know well – but for next time some more creativity might be in place, to really stretch the edges how sustainable a café like this can be to still be versatile and interesting to the public.

I usually never try to design for atmosphere or beauty, as I simply forget, and here that was completely left out too! In my mind, if something is functional and not ugly, it’s good enough. I hope the atmosphere created itself in the interactions of the people rather than any decorations etc I could have set up. Perhaps in some design I remember to think about this aspect!

Reflecting on experience, process and next steps

Reflection about my experience of using the principles & ethics

Using the ethics and principles comes really easily to me. To me, they are the essence of permaculture. If I don’t base my work on them, I cannot see how the work, whatever it is, could be called permaculture. I like using them throughout the design. I really went all in with the principles this time. For me they are one of the key tools of permaculture design, that give me limits and mirrors throughout the process. I like that.

Reflection about my experience of using the design framework and tools

OBREDIMET was the design process I encountered in my PDC. Funnily enough it was the lesson I missed, so I only learned it on paper afterwards. I haven’t actively designed with it before, and certainly not in a social design. It worked nicely enough, if you allow the OBR be rather short and the EDI longer. M and T were short here too. I seem to really like the evaluating part on a design – in this process twice or even three times of you count this process reflection as a kind of evaluation too.

My tutor said something once that stayed with me: that the D can be seen not only as Designing but Deciding. I feel in this process especially it was easy to divide between gathering and analysing information and only then deciding what to do, aka designing. It was hard to keep O and E separate, though.

For the PMI I couldn’t find any I’s, so it became a PM analysis. It worked for me like that, too. I am very thankful for Elisabeth and Laura that I could use the map they made for the festival goers in this design. I really am not the biggest fan on maps, I struggle with them every time no matter what. Something to work on!

The needs list and the exclusion analysis were very helpful. As those were just text, I did try my best visualizing the mind map and the input-output analysis which are both my go-to tools. For this I tried the tool Miro which has been recommended to me by many permaculture folks. I haven’t evaluated the sustainability of the tool itself, but for visualising things it does seem helpful. Moving forward, I will play with it some more.

General reflection about the process and next steps

What was tough was dividing design and implement while writing this particular design down, as many decisions were made ”on the go”, especially the offerings based on what I could get at the store, the salvage shop or the community centre. I feel this is design as it often is in life. A straight line between the steps can’t often be drawn, but they blend into each other. Therefore these reports can always just give an image of the actual design process.

I need to remember this moving forward, as sometimes I feel the need to really go letter by letter so to say, and force what I do into the process and the report, and not vice versa. Art imitating life, kind of. Not really helpful! I guess the design processes are there to help the designer, and not to limit them too much.

I am writing up the main Festival design parallel to this café design. Once I have both done, it will be a big thing off my plate. During these both designs I have learned some new tools and taken into permaculture design tools I know from elsewhere, like the mind map. I use the mind map so much, that it’s sometimes difficult to remember it is a valid tool and not something everyone does anyway. It helped me here a lot, too.

I feel with this design I am getting a bit of a hang of this, looking at new tools and trying them out, really learning while I am designing. It’s at times really fun!

I also notice I lean much more towards social designs than land-based ones. Let’s see if that preference stays as I do more of all kinds of designs. I plan to observe it, and not try to make any changes right now.

Thanks

Special thanks to the festival team and especially the Kurki ecovillage café team that were so nice to share space and resources with my little café. Thanks for Dominik for pointing out this little plan could be an actual diploma design, for the video, the proofreading and for everything else too!