Raising Awareness - Information for sustainable consumption.

Considering the question of responsibility, “the first group of people that urgently need to change their behaviour are the designers themselves.” (Fuad-Luke 2009, 87) By providing products that encourage a sustainable lifestyle, designers can support the longer term goal of a sustainable society. “Sustainability is a learning about living well but consuming (much) less; it is a social learning process and will involve moving from a `product-based wellbeing` to thinking about products, dematerialized products, services and enabling solutions to satisfy our needs.” (Manzini and Jegou, 2003)

Information Activism – speaking of using appealing graphics to visualise an evidence, or issue you are concerned about is certainly an important factor when trying to facilitate a change of behavior and habit among the consumers. Simplifying the data is very important, make it appealing and easy to understand for the user. Great support and impressive examples can be found on http://drawingbynumbers.org/, for example their digital visualisation against slavery in production practices - “Products of Slavery” is an impressive sample of easy understandable and well presented information. The user can playfully find out more on the issue and problems related to exploitation of human and nature around the world.

A fairly easy approach is to already inform the user at the actually time of purchase. There are several examples on how to inform the user on the spot, the challenge is rather the way to put that huge amount of background information needed, in a small and still understandable format. How is it possible to communicate clearly a complex issue as well as the fact of getting the consumer first of all interested and concerned on the problematic in the first place? Hence, the designers approach must be to support the consumer in making conscious choices and encourage them to question the sense of the purchase, its need and place.

For example the SEAMS project, which uses “clothing as a vehicle to comment on the garment industry.” (http://seams.la/) With an experimental collection, which uses seams to communicate information on the cruel practises of fashion industry wearable and visible to the consumer. (pictures: 1) productsofslavery.org, 2) seams.la)