CharioCity: Rethinking the Charity Shop Through Systems Design Project Scenarios

As a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, UK charity shops have been heavily impacted on economic, social and cultural levels, resulting in closures, redundancies and an increasingly overloaded textile recycling system. Challenges stem from relying on high numbers of volunteers - often vulnerable and elderly – compounded by an overload of donations, national restrictions and lockdowns. Shops now face long-term repercussions, combined with pre-existing issues. A paucity of applied research and collaborative design projects within education have accelerated the need to respond with dynamic, multidisciplinary and systems-based investigations. This paper explores how project scenarios were created, for use by fashion/textile educators, with the aim of ultimately benefitting and adding value to the UK charity shop sector. The short project, which included six online workshops involving over 100 people, focused on the immediate impacts of the pandemic. The sessions were concerned with uncovering the issues and opportunities in the front- and back-end spaces within the physical charity shop. These challenges were explored by bringing in stakeholders from across the sector, including volunteers, shoppers, sorters, recyclers, designers, educators, multiple non-profit organisations, as well as anthropologists and historians. The workshops used multifaceted interaction and creative engagement methods, delivered through a number of platforms including Zoom, Miro and Menti. Activities included 1:1 live interviews, surveys, digital mapping, design sprints and open discussions. The outcomes of the workshops – the project briefs - can be used to support the development of new curricular, collaborative projects by textile educators across educational levels, from primary school up to PhD.