Guerrilla Marketing Campaign - Digital and Physical
Project Selected for been showcased at Milan Design Week 2020
The University of Amsterdam and the Hogeschool van Amsterdam have the ambition to become the most sustainable universities in terms of resource management and want to adhere to the Amsterdam goal of implementing the circular economy by 2024. For this reason, while working at Digital Society School, I run a project that will look into what the current behaviour and conceptions are around the UvA and HvA campuses towards waste and how these behaviours can be changed or steered towards a more sustainable approach. The challenge is to design a product, tool, method or strategy to change the behaviour of students and staff to handle waste more sustainably within the campuses and university facilities. Plasticful Food is a speculative design project which draws attention to the amount of microplastic people are incidentally eating on a daily basis. The aims of the project are to disrupt the normalised mindset toward waste management and decrease the psychological distance between the global problem and the audience's everyday behaviours.
The issue of micro-plastic itself is a waste management problem. Therefore, by drawing attention to the personal problem of micro-plastic consumption (which leads to negative health side-effects that scientists are only now beginning to research and understand), we hope to decrease the psychological distance between the global problem and the audience's everyday behaviours. This invites audiences to imagine the undesirable possible future of waste management, which provokes critical thought and sparks the debate about our topic. Our Plasticful Food products utilise believable branding and marketing strategies, to suggest to the audience that these are real products. This creates shock, curiosity and/or discomfort among the audience, which provokes them to look further into our topic.
Physical stands will be placed within the university to display our Plasticful Food products. The labels of these products, and the stand themselves, include QR codes linked to our website. Along with the stands, we will also be using the university’s narrow-casting screens, and social media, to encourage our audience to scan the QR code and therefore, visit our website. Our website aims to educate people about plastic pollution and inspire them to take action against it. We collected reliable sources of information into a single website, where university students and staff will have access to tools, inspirational cases and initiatives that they can take part in, to start acting towards a solution for plastic pollution. By collecting all of these diverse and trustworthy resources regarding plastic waste management into one place, we hope to somewhat resolve the discomfort we provoked in our audience through our Plasticful Food products. Thus inspiring them to act to avoid the possible future where eating plastic waste could be a viable waste management practice.
The project has been exhibited during the Digital Society School showcase in January 2020. For this exhibit, we envisioned the concept of a cafeteria of the future with our food products advertised. The cafeteria exhibit aims to give an immersive experience to the audience regarding how the future may be. This will leave them questioning if the project is real or not. Speculative design is a relatively new, and often unknown or underrated design discipline. As specified by Dunn and Raby (2013), the practice involves projecting current facts into a possible future. Therefore, projects utilizing speculative design include a high level of design fiction, and thus often straddle the line between design and art, making them difficult to implement seriously in the current day. Yet speculative design could also be the perfect tool to change people’s behaviour to be more sustainable, as it provides a framework for audiences to critically analyze the near possible future. As such, the Plasticful Foods project is an experiment, an investigation into whether or not speculative design, if framed and presented correctly to everyday audiences, could influence behaviours to be more sustainable.
