back to the roots

back to the roots by erik åleby from sweden

designer's own words:

It wasn’t that many years ago that people had much greater knowledge about the products they bought and used. You knew the person that grew your potatoes, you used to go to school with the farmer that supplied you with milk and your sisters husband made most of the furniture in your house. This made you much closer both physically but also mentally with the things you were in contact with in your daily life. In todays society we have so many choices to make just to get a loaf of bread at the store and yet we know basically nothing about the product itself. This project is about giving the consumer back some of the benefits that we used to have and through this also gain some power. In our future I hope to see more transparency from the companies supplying us with products, giving the consumer an opportunity to see how and where its made, the environmental aspects, how the situation is for the workers etc. All this controlled through freestanding independent organisations.

This system is implemented as an application in the future equivalent of todays smartphone. It uses RFID tags on the shelves or on the actual product to give you the information about the products. This information is then projected as a hologram by the phone which gives you as much space for the information as you need. If you scan more than one product by say, different brands in the same category, the information merges so that you can compare different aspects of the products.

Go back to the roots of the products you buy for a better understanding, better health and a better more sustainable world.

back to the roots – ready to scan

erikaleby2.jpg back to the roots – one product scanned

erikaleby3.jpg back to the roots – two products scanned