Maya de Groot
Sustainability. It’s one of those words you hear all the time, a word that might be over-used and by doing so, people might not even really register it anymore. How can we make people aware of sustainability without overly addressing the word? That was one the questions I asked myself when joining the D-Exto course in 2014. D-Exto stands for Delft Experience Tomorrow and is an interdisciplinary course at both the TU Delft as the other schools in Delft, in which students design as sustainable pavilion that travels to festivals in the Netherlands.
How to make festival visitors aware of sustainability, while they are basically there to party? Is it possible to make sustainability fun? Is it possible to make it an integrated part of a festival, making people participate without having to overly advertise they’re doing something sustainable? That’s something I find interesting, I personally learn more by doing something and un expectedly finding out how sustainable it is, than having people lecture me about what is or isn’t sustainable.
Together with my team we were responsible for the design and execution of the smoothie bar; the centre of the pavilion. A smoothie bar that serves smoothies made from so called Ugly Food. Ugly food is exactly as the name implies ugly, but his doesn’t mean the quality of the food isn’t up to standard. In fact ugly food refers to food, mostly fruit and vegetables, that only on a visual level does not meet the standard and therefore cannot be sold. The term ugly food is only given to these fruits and vegetables because they’re crooked, the wrong size or colour. And I can hear you think that’s a shame and it is. By making smoothies, we could make people taste the products without them possibly being taken back by the way the products looked.
Besides the bar we also created so called Blender Bikes to make people aware of the amount of energy it costs to produce a smoothie. Because right now you probably walk into your kitchen, still half a sleep placing the fruits into the blender. The only thing you’ve got to do is press a button and wait. And often we wait too long, we forget that the blender is running or that’s its already finished, which means we’re wasting energy. The Blender Bikes were the solution for this energy problem in the sustainable pavilion. They were made of second hand home trainers, in which we connected the cycling movement to the rotating movement of the blender; by bicycling yourself you were blending your own smoothie.
The smoothie bar with the blender bikes were a big success on all the festivals we visited. Especially those festivals on which we didn’t tell the people upfront the entire project was actually about sustainability, we got the most positive repsonses. With as top point the Mooi Weer Spelen in Delft, where we had lines of at least 20 people all the time. Just to create their own sustainable smoothie.
We realised then that the success of this project was the interaction with the visitor. It’s not just showing or telling the visitor about sustainability, it was making them participate and by doing so they learned about why this was sustainable. It shouldn’t be about hyping a word, it should be about showing and proving that something is sustainable without putting extra attention to it. Cause sustainability shouldn’t be special. It should be one of the most normal things in the world.