Last month’s Doors 9: Food, energy and fuel conference was a great opportunity for several of the Fair Tracing team to meet like-minded designers and activists. You can read some after-event musings from organiser John Thackara.
Most relevant for us were the following projects:
- Starbucks’ food certification: an end-to-end software system to track coffee certified as meeting Starbucks’ standards.
- Massive Change, whose project lead Jennifer Leonard works for design and PR agency IDEO for clients such as Campbells Soups on communicating the environmental impact of products.
- farmsubsidy.org, an example of tracking certain food attributes (in this case, European agricultural subsidies) using information provided by third parties.
- Carboncare, a design project to convey the carbon footprint of products to consumers.
- Beeline, a Canadian project to create less polluting distribution chains between farmers. Could logistics information in a fair tracing system be used to similarly redesign distribution chains — perhaps on the fly?