Media reports of the Impact! Exhibition — which, sadly, do not specifically refer to “Smells Like Fair Trade” — include:

• George Barrow, “Impact! design exhibition explores medicine’s future” in wired.co.uk
• Clay Dillow and Denise Ngo, “British “Impact” Exhibition Reimagines Future Technology” in popsci

and an audio interview by

• Anthony Dunne,”Impact exhibition on scientific research: ‘They would start to manufacture chemicals to repair you” of  The Guardian

Fair Trade at your fingertips
19 March 2010 Royal Holloway, University of London

A radical project, managed by Dr Dorothea Kleine, of the Department of Geography at Royal Holloway, University of London, which would enable shoppers to access the ethical credentials of products at their fingertips, has been selected from thousands of projects to be showcased at a special exhibition.

The interdisciplinary ‘Fair Tracing’ Project is one of 16 projects from Engineering and Physical Science Research Council (EPSRC) grants to be included in the EPSRC Impact! Exhibition, taking place at the Royal College of Art, London, between March 16 and March 21.

The Fair Tracing concept brought together researchers from Royal Holloway, Sheffield Hallam University, Anglia Ruskin University and Oxford Internet Institute, who envisioned a digital tagging system that could provide the answers to the dilemmas faced by shoppers about where the goods they are buying come from and how much of their money ends up with the producer.

The idea is that simply by pointing your mobile at the normal barcode at the back of a product, modern smartphones can read the code, link to the internet and connect to information covering every stage of the chain linking the producer of the goods right through to the consumer – enabling people to make more informed decisions on what they are purchasing.

Engineering and physical sciences research has huge impact on the economy, on public policy, on culture, and on our everyday lives but it often goes unnoticed by the general public. To communicate the impact of the research EPSRC fund, the Research Council is working with NESTA (National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts) and the Department of Design Interactions at the Royal College of Art (RCA), to co-ordinate an exhibition of original design proposals which explore the relationship between science and society, looking at the different types of impact engineering and the physical sciences have on the world.

In preparation for the exhibition, designers worked with the scientists from each project to develop an object reflecting on future impacts of technology. “We really enjoyed working with our designer, Nicolas Myers,” says Dr Kleine, “We are an action research project so we had a good idea what we wanted the technology to do. Nicolas came at it from a very different angle and his exhibit imagines how we can do away with even the mobile phone screen and embed information directly in the surface of the object. That really pushes beyond what is currently feasible and maybe even desirable. But it sure generates debate around the exhibit and our project. It speaks to a different audience than the hardcore ethical shoppers we have mostly been working with.”

Source: http://www.alphagalileo.org/ViewItem.aspx?ItemId=70979&CultureCode=en

Unfortunately, the Impact! Exhibition is now closed, but more posts will be put up shortly giving more details and images about the Fair Tracing project design exhibit “Smells Like Fair Trade”.

The Impact! Exhibition poster

The Impact! Exhibition – featuring  the Fair Tracing project-inspired “Does It Smell like Fair Trade?” exhibit - has now opened at the Royal College of Art (RCA), London.  The exhibition is free and open to the public in the RCA’s Darwin building from 1100-1730 from Tuesday to Sunday, 16-21 March 2010. Follow this link to a map.

The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) collaborate with the RCA Design Interactions department to create an exhibition that sees 16 designers teamed up with groups of EPSRC funded researchers from Universities across the UK [selected from a shortlist of projects from the entire EPSRC remit of thousands of grants]. The mixed media exhibition will explore the relationship between science and society and will show how research is making a huge impact on our everyday lives, such as healthcare, crime prevention and climate change. Participating designers include Onkar Kular, Noam Toran, James Auger and Revital Cohen.

L-R: Dr Dorothea Kleine, Dr Ann Light, Nicolas Myers, Dr Apurba

On Monday, Fair Tracing’s pricipal investigator Dr Apurba Kundu fielded interviews from a number of media outlets (details will be blogged as they are published) in the morning, and attended the Gala Opening in the evening along with co-investigator Dr Ann Light, research fellow Dr Dorothea Kleine and designer Nicolas Myers (see his other work here), and hundreds of guests from academia, industry and the media. (Unfortunately, co-investigator Dr Ian Brown could not attend.)

1. Saguaro cacti: On the landscaping black market, these succulents sell for more than $1,000. Arizona’s Saguaro National Park plans to use RFIDs to track hot cacti.

2. Indian elephant: The New Delhi forest department requires pet jumbos be chipped to prevent trafficking. No parades until implanted.

3. Surgical sponge: One out of every thousand or so intra-abdominal surgery patients “retains” a sponge. Oops! With SmartSponges, docs can find stowaways by passing a wand over the body.

4. Mexican: Security firm Xega uses GPS chips to track kidnapped people—a pretty big market in a nation where 6,500 were abducted last year.

5. Pirelli tire: A chip inside the new Cyber Tyre transmits info on road conditions and friction coefficients to the car’s computer.

6. Clubber: At Barcelona’s Baja Beach Club, VIPs are injected with RFIDs linked to debit accounts, making wallets passé. Handy when all you’re wearing is a thong.

7. Toky: The city aims to blanket itself with microchips—from bus stops to restaurants. Tourists may soon get maps, schedules, tips, and other info just by waving their cell phones.

8. Police badge: The Blackinton SmartShield badge hides an ID chip, preventing knockoffs. Good idea: Remember Terminator 2?

9. Inmates: Forced to release prisoners due to overcrowding, Britain wants to chip them. Cops would know if, say, a felon enters a school.

10. Cat door: Kitty flaps are great—until you find a possum hanging from your towel rack. The Pet Porte waves through only preapproved critters.

Just what can you achieve with a weekend of Social Innovation? After 24 hours of simultaneous hacking, designing and user requirement gathering, our Barcode Wikipedia team came up with a basic prototype system: WIBI.it. This is a simple user interface to a wiki-like system that lets anyone look up a product by its barcode and add information. The system also grabs related tagged photos from Flickr and automatically links to Amazon, price comparison sites, and related blog and review articles.

Tom and Fred managed to integrate some open source code to recognise photos of barcodes taken using Nokia phone cameras, allowing users to look up information directly using their mobile. One of the killer apps we envisioned for this type of system would be in-store price comparisons. If you are looking around shops for say DVDs or a flat-screen TV, wouldn’t it be useful to see what online prices were available at the same time — and click to order? This has the potential to turn most of the world’s shops into exhibition spaces, with the real commerce happening on the Internet.

Thanks to David Wilcox you can watch our team’s presentation at the conclusion of the weekend:

I’m spending this weekend with fellow enthusiasts at the Social Innovation camp in east London. This group of around 60 developers, designers and campaigners have met up to work on technologies that build social capital. One of the six ideas being developed is Barcode Wikipedia, described by the Guardian as follows:

The basic idea is to build a system that lets people quickly identify information about products they find in the shops; particularly things like ethical information, news items about it or reviews. Ideally this would work through a mobile phone – you could snap a photo of your product’s barcode or tap in the numbers and get back information that helps you decide whether it’s good to buy.

I’m trying to feed in everything we have learned so far on Fair Tracing, which focuses more on information from producers, distributors and retailers. Barcode Wikipedia should generate some extremely useful ideas on incorporating user-generated content from consumers into product information systems.

“UK supermarket chain Sainsbury’s is to launch a £1m fund to enable farmers in the developing world to join the Fairtrade initiative…

Initial projects under consideration include helping rural farmers in Uganda sell dried fruits for export.

Another possible scheme is a credit fund for small-scale peanut farmers in Malawi to buy seeds or machinery to boost production.”

As counter-intuitive as it is, a study by New Zealand’s Lincoln University last year found that New Zealand dairy products sold in Britain, even allowing for shipping, used only half the energy and emissions per tonne than did their British equivalents. For lamb, it was only a quarter. Like size, distance isn’t everything.

“A group of computer scientists and economic geographers in the UK put their heads together over the last few months to address a challenge in food systems design. As they see it, the Fair Trade movement faces obstacles to widespread adoption due to an ongoing divide between Northern consumers and Southern producers, as well as a lack of direct, specific information for customers about particular products. Their Fair Tracing Project proposes to enhance the growth of equitable global trade systems by adding digital tracing technology to individual items so that they can be tracked, and their stories recorded, as they move from farm to table.”

See the full article at http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/006245.html

“The Fair Tracing project at Britain’s University of Bradford is developing a digital tag that would tell the backstory behind your bananas–or your coffee or chocolate. “

The magazine, Fast Company, issue 116, June 2007 has a short article on Fair Tracing entitled “Where has your food been?” by Tracy Staedter. The article in full is on the Fast Company website. Find it here.