The Greek philosopher Heraclitus is often portrayed as a crying man, unable to get a grip on the changing world around him. He saw change as the only constancy … an image that fits well in most foresight contexts.

When people ask which purpose exploring or (en)visioning possible futures serves, there are several answers, but at least two concepts are central: preparedness and awareness. Put (too) briefly, preparedness has to do with thinking things through in advance, with anticipating and learning. Awareness is about looking with more and different eyes, from different perspectives, but also to be confronted with things that are perhaps beyond direct eyesight yet nevertheless present or possibly emerging in one’s environment.

In many ways, awareness helps to prepare for appropriate action, to create change in response to possible change. As such, it is a crucial ingredient to persuade people and organizations to alter their behaviour. In this sense, making things visible, ‘experiencable’ helps to raise people’s awareness, confronts them with things which are otherwise beyond their viewing range.

For example, think sustainability, think any product you might pick up in your supermarkt, take chocolate for instance (yes, forgive me, I am belgian). Like any product, your bar of chocolate has a lifecycle, its ingredients originate somewhere, are manipulated, the waste generated along the way as well as after consumption return to, hence affect Mother Earth somehow (and people’s lives along with it). Most people do not think about this intricate web of little chains of cause and effect associated with your product’s lifecycle. But once you know or rather – once you see – your shrimps might have been fished 3kms from where you live, but travel all the way to Morocco to be peeled and are then transported back to your supermarkt (not to mention dozens of other steps inbetween), you think twice.

Designer Arlene Birt decided to do exactly this, context connection, to tell the background stories to our products and make sure our awareness of their context is raised and we cannot escape informed choice any longer :

“By making the backgrounds visible, design can inspire thoughts about the big-picture influence of a product; and facilitate awareness on the social and environmental impact that results from our food choices.”

In a way, Arlene’s wonderful work extends and improves upon ecolabels, and possibly succeeds where they fail: in touching the people at an empathic level, in a poetic, stylish, subtle way but with a hammer-like effect. Both critical as well as strategic design.

Via Worldchanging

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 8th, 2007 at 21:17 and is filed under design, future, sustainability, visualization. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.