Posts Tagged ‘Storytelling’
Tracing A Box’s Life
Colombia Sportswear is asking you to ‘Consider the box’ with their project: A Box Life. A Box Life brings awareness to an often-overlooked part of mail-order products’ life-cycles: the packaging.
Box life transparently tracks the back-stories of where boxes have traveled.
Not only is it a clever way to encourage people to reuse packing materials, but telling the stories behind the travels of things also acts as a tool for transparency, and reminds consumers of how individual actions impact sustainability.
read more: Springwise
Mapping the Mississippi: Through Time
In a beautiful example of layered visual information, Harold Fisk mapped a portion of the Mississippi River in 1944. The series of plates show the changes in the path of the river through time. I’m drawn to the simple and clear detail, effective color palette and the amount of information communicated through this simple technique.
A portion of Fisk's visually-stunning map of the Mississippi
The full map is available at the US Army Corp of Engineers.
Toaster, from Scratch
The Toaster Project: A design student’s fascinating project to make a toaster – starting with finding and processing small quantities of raw materials.The project took him all over the UK searching for raw minerals, and developing methods to process them at home.
His whole process was about re-creating the background story. I’d love to see a graphic outlining all of his steps.
the final toaster (photo Daniel Alexander)
The project is featured on we-make-money-not-art.com
Tracking water droplets: Playing raincloud.
An exhibit on Water at the Science Museum of Minnesota contains an interactive display that allowed people to ‘become’ a raincloud. By rubbing a ‘raincloud’ tool over a series of screens displaying a topographic map, the cloud rains drops of water onto the topo-map. Visitors can see how the drops of water run down the sides of a topographic map to slow and pool together in the valleys between mountains. Colliding together, the blue drops create rivers which meander through valleys until falling off the screen.
Interactive table created interaction for watersheds
As a fun way for visitors to interact with the exhibit, this project helps people understand how water flows (the fact being downhill- which I thought was obvious, but apparently there is an overwhelming number of people who are surprised when rivers turn to flow North instead of South, as on maps they must have an idea that gravity makes the water flow off the page.)
Reality, augmented. [...sustainably?]
Augmented Reality: a virtually 3-d landscape unfolds via your computer
Bar graphs bring information to life with visual virtual worlds
Environmental and financial savings stack up in a bar graph.
GE infographic - Mapping CO2 Emissions
This little piggy went …all over.
Pig book cover
Pig part
Made from the pig
Book by Christien Meindertsma. Images from julie joliat.
Stuff has a Story
‘The story of stuff’ is an animation/video that strolls through the ‘big picture’ of the production/consumption life cycle.
Story of Stuff exposes the connections behind products (and really behind our whole economic system). It paints a relatively dreary outlook, and thereby inspires action. It has been out for a while, and fortunately they’ve recently added an update to the website now allows the start of an outlet for ideas on what a consumer can do about the situation. (An earlier version of the animation left out the last step “Another Way,” lacking details on what the everyday consumer can do about the situation.)
The visualization of the system is impeccable: Black & white sketched and stylized drawings with simple animation leave enough room for the viewer to get their own ideas and apply the concept to their own situation. When people can see the possibilities, they can more easily understand how their own everyday decisions impact the big picture. Story of Stuff does a great job at establishing that connection.
Ba Baa Baacode
Consumers can track the back story of their Icebreaker product through a portal on the company’s homepage.
Entering a ‘baacode’ reveals pictures and video clips of the people that raise the sheep and the place they roam.
The information for the sample code paints only a picture around the actual beast (sheep) that the wool fibers come from – not the full production cycle or other components of the clothing. But it’s a good start and an intriguing, at least partially interactive space.
It’s great to offer a sample code, but it would be even better to further incorporate the theme of transparency into the application by opening up the archives so that anyone perusing the website can see details behind all the products. (Only having viewed one sample location upon many visits, I’m also skeptical about how many different stories are actually covered in the online application).
The concept is ripe with potential to give the consumer cues to the product’s backstory at point-of-sale.
coffee from Costa Rica
Here’s a quick sketch done on the map of a pre-printed coffee cup: Shows the journey of the coffee beans from origin to consumption.
Small text reads (from top): Consumption, Minneapolis, MN; Processing, Texas; Production, Costa Rica.
T shirt tells its own life cycle.
This t-shirt tells its own back story: the t-shirt tags are cut from the inside and stitched into the screenprint graphic of an imagined life of the product. The shirt was put into production in 2006 by Droog Design.
This is a more illustrative, conceptual version of a background story – less data based. The graphic is customized based on available information at the time (this includes where the cotton comes from, and where the t-shirt is sold). More quantitative figures on distance and carbon footprint could be input with the right data available.
