VISUALIZING GROCERY IMPACTS

Visualizing Grocery Impacts is a data-driven and interactive installation that will help individuals better understand how their daily purchases have global social and environmental impact. In an installation which mimics a super-market, products with custom labels can be collected from the shelves by visitors, and scanned with a barcode reader that will project interactive and visual information on the productʼs background impacts (including global, ecological, political, social and cultural impacts) onto a nearby wall. The variety of visual background stories presented will display information with an activist intent as well as in a positive light to motivate consumers toward more conscious purchasing decisions. The installation will provide an innovative approach to understanding sustainability: as an intersection between digital data and the physical world.

read more at : http://northern.lights.mn/programs/aov2/arlene-birt/ 

Arlene Birt
email: arlene (at) arlenebirt.com
www.arlenebirt.com Arlene designs for the communication of backgrounds: bringing cultural, environmental, political and historical stories into focus.
With roots in the Midwest U.S. and a background in journalism, advertising, sustainable development, graphic and product design, Arlene graduated with a Masters in Humanitarian Design at Design Academy Eindhoven (the Netherlands). She is an occassional design writer and was a 2004-05 Fulbright grant recipient to the Netherlands, where she focused on the visual explanation of product life-cycles. She's currently fascinated by telling visual stories with brand public relations agency Haberman and mapping the 'water flows' of the Twin Cities. Arlene is adjunct faculty of the Minneapolis College of Art and Design Sustainability Certificate program and catalogs critique and inspiration for the visual communication of background stories on www.arlenebirt.com/blog.