Struggling to find our way

UN's goal of "Sustainable Production and Consumption Patterns" is about using less non renewable resources and reducing the per capita foot print of waste and how we could decouple economic growth from resource usage.

We started talking about what sustainability really is how planned obsolescence can be a thing and how consumers could make informed choices. We got interested in the informed consumer and dove down that rabbit hole. When every product is as complex as they are today it seems impossible to make a real informed choice. We would have to spend hours just to shop for tomatoes.

We had ideas for more labeling, with the real cost of a product in the veins of "Only 0.12 children died in the production of this smart phone" or maybe more abstract like a green tree but red human to symbolize how the product is good in resource use but bad in worker conditions.

We continued on the ideas we had last week of labeling goods as good or bad for sustainability and developed that into some kind of Kharma-currency, where you would on top of the normal cost of a product, have a "kharma" cost that reflects how sustainable the product would be. A company could have a kharma sale, where they lowered the kharma cost of their products by increasing their sustainability for a period of time.

It all seems to lead to surveillance and governmental control in a Chinese totalitarian and dystopic manner, and that feels a bit lazy. Maybe even like the Black Mirror rejects Clint told us not to produce.

Critique sessions

The critique we got was that we lacked a clear vision on what we want to achieve and communicate with our project. We should stay away from trivial truths and do some field work. We also got some concrete examples on what we could look into and while I didn't find any of the ideas that interesting in themselves, they inspired us to look into new problems and areas.

DIY

We decided to get more into clothing and fashion as theses are areas with notorious sustainability issues. How could we make users value their clothes more? We started to ideate on this a nd came up with kind of DIY clothing kits where you would have to assemble your own t-shirt. This would teach you how much time and care goes into something as trivial as a H&M t-shirt.

The end product could be an unboxing video of this product and we started do look at fashion unboxings. Wow, that is dark, so much waste. We decided to go out and do some research on how much resources go into a t-shirt and how we could make our own kit.