Concordia University’s Center for Creative Reuse (CUCCR) is a zero-waste initiative that diverts materials from the university's waste-stream and makes them available to the general public free of cost.
As their Material Lifecycle Research Resident, I was responsible for investigating the origins of items that appear en masse in CUCCR’s depot each year, producing two visual research posters.
Design
Research
November 2019 – March 2020 (5 months, part-time)
Tiohtià:ke/Montreal
In November 2019, I participated in the second iteration of the Material Lifecycle Research Residency. Hosted by CUCCR and organized in partnership with Sustainable Concordia, this 3-year research program aims to enable investigation into the lifecycles of materials commonly found in CUCCR’s depot.
Residents are tasked with communicating findings to the Concordia community in campaigns that both illuminate impacts and question our complicity in them, as well as propose changes to university policies and practices.
Each residency centers around a chosen item. I chose to focus on cotton T-shirts, and "swag" event merchandise by extension.
Examples of T-shirts and cups purchased as swag by student groups at Concordia. Due to their distinct event branding, these items are essentially single-use, and end up in CUCCR's depot in large quantities each year.
Lifecycle assessment (LCA) is a methodology for assessing environmental impacts associated with all the stages of the lifecycle of a product, process, or service. Concordia professor and LCA researcher Dr. Carmela Cucuzzella describes it as “a precise science of an imprecise method.” There are different degrees of depth to which you can go with it, calculating everything from the extraction of materials to the manufacture and disposal plus transport necessary for each step, all the way up to the impacts of the electricity used to power the machines in the manufacturing process. These are all variables that change depending on where an item is produced, so that the LCA of a T-shirt produced in Indonesia would differ from that of a T-shirt produced in Canada, for example.
I determined that if I were to conduct an LCA myself, I would need to begin by looking at the label and contacting the T-shirt company to ask what materials they use and where those materials come from (ie. their suppliers). After that, I’d contact those suppliers and ask them similar questions, essentially trying to trace the line back as far as possible so the LCA could be calculated in a manner appropriate to the transportation methods used and the regions in which materials come from/are processed. Validating answers is also good practice, as some may lie to appear more sustainable/equitable than they really are. The final step is to enter materials and methods into an LCA database, which calculates environmental impacts based on scientific data sets.
I chose not to do my own LCA as I didn’t feel this would add enough value to the project in relation to its goals and the time it would require on my part. Also, the shirts I found at CUCCR all came from different places. Luckily there are quite a lot of LCAs out there about cotton T-shirts already, so I selected a paper from the existing literature which focused on T-shirts produced in China, and used it as the basis for a large visual that could make the information more accessible.
We don't usually think about the true cost of the items that saturate our lives. This information is carefully hidden from the consumer, so as to make financial expense the only cost one is used to weighing in one's purchasing decisions. Might things be different if we were encouraged to look at the broader costs associated with our choices?
The goal of this poster is to educate viewers about the lifecycle impacts of cotton T-shirts, as well as get them thinking about the true cost of commercial production more generally. CUCCR ordered two to be printed, with the intention of having one up permanently in the depot and the other as a traveling piece for conferences, tabling and events.
Design decisions To counter the heavy nature of the topic, I opted for a bright, illustrative style that would draw the eye and make for a pleasant visual experience. Flat organic shapes serve to partition and bring structure to the information-heavy landscape.
The illustrations of each stage balance the text and add rhythm and imagery to the lifecycle journey. For the impact categories, I chose to develop an original set of icons as a means of creating a quick visual reference that could be paired with numerical data. I also included a table that elaborates on each category in two ways: with a technical definition, and with more concrete imagery of the impacts each category entails.
For fonts, I used Source Sans as it is my go-to when I’m looking for something both friendly and sleek, and Gill Sans for titles to be cohesive with Concordia’s visual identity (Gill Sans is Concordia’s font).
Since Concordia student life is the driving force behind the appearance of swag in the university waste-stream, I reached out to student leaders to better understand the conditions surrounding items purchasing in their organizations.
I developed a list of questions and conducted six interviews, targeting the five faculty associations and the student union. The goal of these interviews was two-fold: one, to find answers to my questions; and two, to build relationships with student leaders. This was in anticipation of the final part of the project, which I envisioned as a co-design workshop with new and departing student leaders to explore possible alternatives to swag.
Empathy Being a student leader is thankless work, involving countless hours of unpaid labor and blood, sweat and tears. I have enormous respect for the students who undertake this type of commitment, and wanted to make sure they felt supported rather than criticized by my inquiry. Every student I talked to was aware of the environmental crisis and was taking steps to address it in the ways that they could. On this level, my goal was to get a sense of what they were already doing, what they wanted to do but couldn’t, in what ways their capacities were maxed or limited, and what their general needs and priorities were so as to imagine solutions respondent to the conditions that structure their lives as organizers of student life.
Gigamapping Breaking down the answers from my interviews into bite-sized chunks and clustering them to identify themes, patterns and outliers. This wasn't as necessary as it usually is since the interviews were quite structured and specific, but it always gets my mind working to see all the information laid out physically and non-linearly. Each colour represents a faculty association.
Before a problem can be addressed, one has to understand the conditions that give rise to its formation. The goal of this poster is to provide a clear and concise overview of some of the major factors influencing swag and items purchasing in Concordia student life so as to provide entry points for future redesign efforts.
CUCCR printed one copy with the intention of bringing it to meetings as a communication and strategy piece.
Design decisions The design is purposefully simple, consisting of a table with a few line illustrations of the swag items I encountered in my research. It uses the same visual language as the lifecycle impacts poster, with uneven edges and organic lines to contrast against the boxiness of the layout. The white branch motif serves to add some dimension and variation to the background without distracting from the text too much.
On March 9th, I presented both posters and a summary of my research at a Sustainable Concordia board member meeting in a hasty conclusion to the project just days before Concordia shut down in response to the Covid-19 pandemic.
For this reason the final phase I envisioned for this project never came to fruition, although some elements may find implementation once normal school activities resume.
Deploy findings for structural change As mentioned in the call-out, institutionalizing sustainability is a key aspect of this residency. That means not merely producing research but deploying it to generate tangible changes in the school’s policies and practices.
Coinciding with the residency was the Sustainable Event Certification working group’s renewal of the Sustainable Event Guide, a long-standing resource for Concordia students looking to reduce the impacts of their events. I joined the working group at the invitation of Paige Hilderman, Student Engagement Coordinator with the Dean of Students Office, who suggested the updated Event Guide include a segment on best practices for event merchandise purchasing based on my work. Renewal of the Event Guide was suspended with the lock-down but will likely restart sometime down the line, at which point my swag research poster will hopefully provide an informative resource in my stead.
To briefly touch on the original conclusion I’d had in mind: my dream for this project was to organize a co-design session at the end of the year with new and departing student leaders to reimagine swag culture and explore possible alternatives. Results from this workshop would've then been integrated into a “swag re-design guide” in the style of the Open Innovation Co-Creation Handbook, which could allow for the information to be passed on through annual turnover and which I had already done a bit of prototyping for. This was something I was loosely planning with Paige, as she organizes an orientation for new student leaders on frosh and event planning at the end of April each year, which is when we thought we’d try to fit it in.
Another concept I was eager to explore was that of designing for “emotional durability,” as described by design theorist Jonathan Chapman in a paper by the same name. He proposes that new, sustainable products must look to instill meaning, such as when a user shares a unique personal history with an object and develops an emotional attachment to it. It’s the antithesis to the mass-produced single-use item and the near-definition of what is commonly created in CUCCR’s maker space. What if we could replace swag with new traditions around emotionally-durable items or experiences? Could departments or organizations from within the Concordia community potentially be involved?