The Impact! Exhibition, featuring the Fair Tracing project-inspired "Does It Smell Like Fair Trade?" exhibit, was held at the Royal College of Art (RCA), London, from 6-21 March 2010, proving very successful and generating considerable media comment.

The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) collaborated with the RCA Design Interactions department to create an exhibition that saw 16 designers team up with groups of EPSRC funded researchers (representing a shortlist of projects from the entire EPSRC remit of thousands of grants). The mixed media exhibition explored the relationship between science and society and showed how research is making a huge impact on our everyday lives, such as healthcare, crime prevention and climate change.

The "Does It Smell Like Fair Trade?" exhibit designed by Nicolas Myers was in collaboration with the Fair Tracing project, a recently-concluded £411k EPSRC project led by principal investigator Dr Apurba Kundu that examined how ethical trade might be supported through the use of digital tracking and tracing technologies in supply chains to provide consumers and producers with enhanced information. Myers imagined how such information might be represented in the future:

"If the surface of a product could react and reveal its composition, how would it tell its story? What is it made of? Where has it been? Inspired by the way the natural world communicates, this design project envisions an alternative to labels and packaging: a living skin, translating consumer information into patterns, smells or textures. In the same way a fruit tells us about its nature, could products themselves inform us of their ethical credentials in an immediate and physical way?"

Dr Apurba Kundu describes how Myers's thoughts were manifested in an exhibit that displayed eight generic consumer objects wholly covered in white. This allowed moving images to be projected onto each item in turn, showing how the item's 'skin' could reveal information over time. At the same time, written text was projected onto the table to illustrate just how complex the information represented might be in the future. While the exhibit represented information visually, in the future information might also be conveyed by changes in the smell or texture of a product's skin.

For Dr Kundu and his project team drawn from colleagues at the University of Oxford, Royal Holloway and Sheffield Hallam, one of the most rewarding aspects of the collaboration with Myers was seeing their academic research taken beyond its immediate implications:

"We were genuinely surprised and impressed with Nicolas' vision of how our technology might be realized in the future."

Discussions are currently underway to have the Impact! Exhibition displayed elsewhere. More details may be found on the Fair Tracing project website.

Please click images to enlarge.

 

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