Aims and Objectives

Team Rambo

Stuff-O-Meter

What we were asked to do:
The Stuff-O-Meter asked us to choose a common household item and design a visual representation of its life cycle, from cradle to grave, highlighting the sheer amount of waste produced. The visuals must prompt potential buyers of said household item to do further research into the environmental issues surrounding the product.

What we propose for the project:
· The campaign will take place over three phases. The first, and most important phase is essentially making people care about the project and hooking their interest.

· The second is our real aim: to make people question the absurdity of the level of waste produced by the manufacture of laptops.

· The third phase is then effectively providing potential laptop buyers with the means to discover for themselves the most environmentally friendly laptops, as well as potentially working with leading laptop manufacturers to improve their environmental policies.

How we will do it:
What we propose to deliver for this three part plan is an interactive website kicked off by a poster campaign.

The first phase: Hooking people’s interest:
A striking visual such as this (the “Did you know that this much waste…”) we feel will garner people’s interest.
Variations on this theme can be explored; exploiting the fact that the amount of waste generated during the production of a laptop is the equivalent in weight of three fully-grown African elephants, [at a conservative estimate.]

This sort of image and slogan could also be virally marketed via email.

Hopefully this will generate enough interest for the second phase: the interactive website.

The website will be home to several key features: perhaps most notably an informative yet humorous animation much in the style of Chris Ware. This will break down each stage of laptop production, examining and exploring the actual waste produced.

The animation is represented here by some stills of the sort of style and feel that we wish to achieve.

We feel this is the best and most inviting way for people to make a secondary emotional connection with the project.

[The animation could perhaps be voiced by someone like William Shatner, who could read the script in a straight manner, but with an ironic twist. We feel he would add an urgency and mock seriousness, highlighting the overall absurdity of production methods. A good benchmark for the animation would perhaps be “A brief history of the United States of America” by Matt Stone and Trey Parker, which they made for the Michael Moore film “Bowling for Columbine”, which is humorous and visually appealing whilst all importantly hammering the message home]

The third phase
The Website will also have descriptions of the most environmentally friendly products on the market and links to their homepages. The intent here is to name and shame those companies that aren’t doing so much, into action. A great aim for the project would also eventually be to set environmental targets for the manufacturers to achieve, perhaps then winning a STUFF-O-METER stamp of approval.

There is a great precedent for this working. When people began realising Nike was using sweatshops to produce goods, with exploitative labour policies, Reebok was then first to come out and say that they were the healthy alternative. (They did this despite the fact their sweatshop policies had previously been as bad as Nike’s)

Perhaps then, if there is green to be made out of the green of the environment then companies will take note.

Other features on the website could be a list of tips on how to improve your own environmental contributions, perhaps accompanied by a list of links to MPs’ email addresses so that the website users can ask them what they are doing to help the environment.

Basically, we want to remove that feeling of “but I’m just one man”, and (more importantly for this project) “but I didn’t know” by having all the facilities to judge products, and even, to actually make a difference to how environmentally sound things are, in the one place.

Slogan:
Perhaps the slogan that sums us up best is “It’s your planet; play nicely”