Design for our Future Selves Awards 2007

Extreme Green Guerilla. (E.G.G.)

Michiko Nitta / Design Interactions

Highly Commended for the Big Idea Award for Inclusive Communication.

The project demonstrates how ‘extreme’ green activities might provoke awareness of an unsustainable recycling system

Social issue

We are forced to face the daily reality that environmental damage is more advanced than experts have predicted. As global warming becomes the top of almost every government’s agenda, recent trends have put pressure on world leaders to act immediately. For instance, forced recycling, carbon offsetting and a ten-year campaign to make environmentally friendly living fashionable. However, a lot of current green solutions can be described as hypocritical because many eco-trends are used as a medium for consumerism.

Design process

The project defined three types of attitude and understanding on green issues and activities in developed countries:

1. Green professionals: People who use green activities/solutions as part of their job role. These people are scientists, designers and green activists.
2. Extremely Green activists: people who claim to live ultimate green lives.
3. Ordinary people: people that don’t have any emotions towards green issues but just follow the green regulations set up by others.

User input

Having informal conversations with neighbours, friends and strangers in both London and Japan was the first step of user engagement to find people’s attitudes towards green activities and issues. The project then concentrated on people who are extremely concerned about green activities. These people included Greenpeace activists, an eco-biologist and product designers.

The next phase was presenting design concepts and activities of E.G.Gs to different groups and discover their attitudes towards green activities and related issues. The presentation sessions ranged from one-to-one sessions to a conference with 400 people. The occupations of the audience included biologists, professional interaction designers, housewives, eco-worriers and students.

Design output

The purpose of this interaction design project is to establish a point of view on the current general green vision. In order to provoke debate and stimulate imagination and opinion, a a group was created called Extreme Green Guerillas (E.G.G.s). These collectives of amateur self-sustaining people know that we must be extreme to save the earth, whilst maintaining a good quality of life. Within this context, the project has four design proposals:

1. E.G.G’s manual with a video explaining background and principals.
2. E.G.G’s Animal Posting Service (APS): in a natural sanctuary, an environmental protection agency tags migrating animals with active RFID tags. By hacking into these tagged animals, E.G.G.s can send messages internationally.
3. E.G.G’s food: high quality food made from existing local resources with the use of genetic modification such as chimera of urban vermin animals (pigeon, foxes) and game animals (quail, rabbit).
4. E.G.G’s death: dead bodies will be the only way to be useful to the Earth’s health.