Design Observer recently featured a piece on “Greening the Grocery Store” by KT Meaney, a professor at North Caroline State University College of Design. Meany shares several graphic design concepts from his students at NC State that are aimed at encouraging sustainable interactions in the grocery store. The students’ explorations were guided by questions similar to those I’ve been wrestling with my own projects: “how do you inform without infuriating? How do you get people to practice what you don’t want to preach? Laden with grocery bags, why add heavy information to the shopper’s load?” Their design approach is not to ” ‘criticize, condemn or complain’ but give ‘honest and sincere’ information to ‘arouse in the person an eager want’ to help the environment.”
For example, “buy me” door decals highlight greener options.
And floor graphics at the checkout lane remind customers of the bring-your-own alternative to paper -or- plastic.
My favorite is the redesigned receipts that organize purchases into recyclable, partially recycle, and non-recyclable items. “An ASCII image of a ruler-wielding nun appears on a receipt with too many straight-to-landfill items. Tsk, tsk.” Not only is it informative but it playfully encourages more conscious consumption with simple feedback and humor.
Currently, grocery store design mediates everyday interactions in some very unsustainable ways: sales fliers, price tags, and receipts encourage purchasing decisions based on cost rather than nutritional content or environmental impacts, free disposable grocery bags encourage waste rather than reuse, and products allow users to perceive health information but not the amount of waste generated in its manufacture, the treatment of workers involved in its production, the distance the product traveled to reach the store, or its potential for reuse. These concepts highlight potential for good design to encourage sustainable interactions in acceptable, perhaps even enjoyable ways. Perhaps they can be applied to campus efforts to encourage recycling and green purchasing…
