CARE MART
TYPE: Animatronics, Personal Project
TIME: 2026.05-06
TIME: 2026.05-06
Printed receipts, price tags, and discount stickers translate invisible bodily impact into familiar retail formats.
An interactive web interface lets users shop, check out, and generate personalized receipt posters.
Interactive Page:
https://viviennetian.github.io/Print-and-Code-2025/project4_EP_partB_6/
Inspiration:
This project grew out of something I used to do in daily life. I liked collecting small pieces of paper from everyday situations. Some were receipts, some were price tags, some were care labels, some were stickers, and some were luggage tags. For me, these papers were never just about the materials or the nice layouts. They were small containers of memories. Each one was a record of something that happened. A purchase, an action, a moment. All captured through numbers, barcodes, and timestamps. They were the leftover traces of everyday behavior.
From there I started thinking about how these objects and memories affect the body in different ways. Some effects feel good, some do not. We assign value to objects through money and show it through receipts and price tags, but in daily life, while we consume objects, the objects also consume us. Receipts never tell us how much something costs our body, either as a benefit or a burden.
So I imagined a fictional global currency system where the body acts as the wallet. The unit of currency is an affective unit.
Here “affective” does not mean emotional in the narrow sense. It refers to anything that can influence the state of the body. This includes emotional states, physical energy, stress, cognitive load, recovery, and even tiny pleasures or small discomforts.
A supermarket receipt becomes a kind of bill for the body. It makes invisible bodily costs visible and concrete.
The final presentation uses supermarket formats. Receipts, price stickers on shelves, discount tags, and other printed materials. The idea is to link the act of buying directly to what the item does to your body, whether it drains or restores you. Using these printed formats becomes a way to show the hidden cost of everyday objects.
For example, the disclaimers on the receipts reveal absurd rules of this fictional system. They say things like:
- “Any bodily burden purchased today cannot be returned.”
- “Emotional fluctuations will be settled automatically within twenty-four hours.”
- Fictional Elements:
- The supermarket is called CARE MART.
- The currency unit is AU, affective unit.
- A negative value means the item takes something out of your body wallet,
- and a positive value means it adds something back.
-
- Terms and conditions describe how AU translates into bodily or emotional effects and that none of it is refundable. Some of these disclaimers appear on the receipts.
- There are also fictional discount tags and special promotional stickers.
Real elements
The items being purchased are real. I did not fictionalize the objects themselves.
They are all everyday things you would normally encounter.
The price levels also closely match how people actually perceive their cost in real life.
Through this redesigning supermarket, the project tries to ask a question.
How much do we underestimate the impact of everyday objects on the body.
Receipts and labels give emotional measurement an official feeling.
Consumption is both an economic act and a physical one, but the physical side has never been recorded.
Technical Process:
The main generative components are:
- producing many receipts through an interactive interface and randomly placing them into poster layouts
- generating the price tags for each item
1. For the first part
The interface simulates a supermarket. The left side shows shelves. Buttons let you explore more unknown products. Clicking an item adds it to the cart. Checking out generates a receipt on the poster page.
I also experimented with Figma’s Make Mode, which uses Gemini inside Figma. The nice thing about it is that it can generate UI components that I can directly copy, adjust, and paste back in. It becomes a kind of co-creation where Gemini handles the dev part and Figma makes the entire workflow very intuitive. The problem is that it produces React code. I have not learned React yet, so I cannot modify the code myself. For now I returned to using simple HTML, CSS, and JS.
Gemini is not stable enough yet to rebuild my intended UI directly from screenshots. In practice, Figma is still the more efficient option for copying UI components. So I ended up doing a lot of adjustments manually. I kept the general structure Gemini created and changed the styles and added some image-based buttons.
2. For the second part
I created a price tag template in Figma and prepared a .csv file with all the items, their AU values, and their descriptions. The .csv was generated with GPT. When I sent these to Gemini in Figma’s Make Mode, it produced a large number of editable price tag components automatically.
Print-ready Preview Files:
Unseen Cost Receipt Poster:
https://freight.cargo.site/m/N2684177194322049539119409068578/poster-whole.pdf
Market Page 1:
https://freight.cargo.site/m/U2684176621827347211543474666018/market-page-1.red-black.preview.pdf
Market Page 2:
https://freight.cargo.site/m/I2684176444111414805425654397474/market-page-2.red-black.preview.pdf
Price Tags:
https://freight.cargo.site/m/W2684177671926700351533409958434/price-tag.pdf
Stickers:
https://freight.cargo.site/m/K2684178009354542947828528118306/sticker.red-black.preview.pdf
Reference and Inspiration
Chanel Supermarket Runway, Fall 2014 Ready-to-Wear
NYT article: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/05/fashion/chanels-supermarket-chic.html
Chanel’s 2014 runway show designed by Karl Lagerfeld left a strong impression on me. The entire set was staged as a supermarket, and every item on the shelves was wrapped in Chanel-branded packaging while still keeping the recognizable features of the original product category. The whole scene felt surreal and detached from reality, yet it stayed connected to it at the same time. In that show, the fictional supermarket world served as a way to escape reality for the sake of visual play and cultural commentary. In my project, I use a fictional reality for a different reason. It highlights the idea of Affective Units as a form of currency and makes the relationship between people and everyday objects easier to see and think about.
Splatoon 3 Artbook, Nintendo
Stickers, signage, and graffiti styles that inspired the visual direction.
Jmail
https://jmail.world/
© 2026 Yanrong Tian