‘A Taste of Happiness’: Sensory Memory and Community Ice Cream E’cone’omics

The Taste of Happiness illuminated ice cream cart was exhibited at Show Town and the Grundy Art Gallery for Blackpools Lightpool festival. Its manifestation symbolized both what make residents of Grange Park individually happy and through a co-design process, it represents the possibility of a collective ‘Right to Happiness’ that they want to share.

They want to bring happiness not only by sharing their community made ice cream, that brings a sensory taste of happiness, but also to share their story of a group of women from The Grange Estate in Blackpool, claiming their right to happiness and a collective ‘possibility’……A Community Ice Cream, with produce grown locally, made and run by people of Blackpool, with profits invested back into its communities.

Economist Phil Williams states…… ‘Government should never be allowed to hand its people a self-licking ice cream cone and call it a treat’ , the political term, a ‘self-licking ice cream cone’, meaning a self-perpetuating system that has no purpose other than to sustain itself. This term is also recognised as a perfect metaphor for why many governments and companies still exist despite their miserable performance or blindness to the future. Therefore, a fitting a starting point, at a local level, to begin to challenge this self-perpetuating system with our own Community Ice Cream E’cone’omics.  Where the purpose of Community Ice-Cream from Blackpool is to help sustain, enrich and collectively choose a future where all involved can have an equal share of a ‘Taste of Happiness’.