Make Responsibility Beautiful

Marketers have tried darn-near everything to get you to care about the world around you: Earth Day, Energy Star, e-mails with a “please don’t print this” comment… the list goes on.

But on a trip to Bite PR’s Stockholm office, I came across a rarely-used tactic that fuses technology, responsibility and my favorite part – art – to help you understand why you must care about the world around you. Check this picture:

This is one of two obelisks situated along Strandvägen, where each of the four sides combines data from environmental agencies on the pollution of air, water, and other natural resources in the city. This particular picture represents the levels of nitrogen (left) and phosphorus (right) in the waste water, streamed continuously by the Stockholm Water Co and Port of Stockholm. Obviously you can see that not all’s well in the water world (oh yeah, click that link), and as these sculptures are situated right on the water, I can say with total honesty I started caring about the water pollution levels in Sweden.

No one’s saving the world from these sculptures, but the city found a way to make your responsibility to know about pollution, in my opinion, beautiful.

I’m sure this isn’t the first time that art has used pollution to raise awareness about social issues like clean air and water, but it’s the first time I’ve ever seen something with such stature use a real-time tech mashup to really hit the message home. With RFID, WiFi and WiMax, mobile technology and other at-your-fingertips tech continuosly becoming standards, I do hope to see more of this.

Would love to know of any other mashups like this that you’ve seen, as well as any results from it!

Tagged as: art, eco, mashup, pollution, stockholm, waterworld