buyproduct by nitipak samsen

thai designer nitipak samsen exhibited during tokyo design week 09 at designtide.

carbon credit brings the ‘convenience’ back to the ‘inconvenient truth’. global warming has been driven by capitalism, now we are trying to solve global warming through capitalism. is this possible? should we save the planet for the planet’s sake or for money? from an ecological perspective, CO2 is a byproduct of the living, either directly or indirectly. from the economic perspective, CO2 may become the world’s largest commodity market. what do we consider the price of our own byproducts? buy product by nitipak samsen is a project which aims to criticize the carbon trading system, while letting society know how good we have become at destroying our planet.

selecting activities for CO2 conversionone problem is how to display the intangible amount of CO2. as part of the buyproduct project,  samsen has designed A.T.R.E.E.M. (automated tree-rental for emission encaging machine)  a renting meter for a tree to offset a client’s carbon footprint. this tree has been grown by a carbon trading company in a nursery and then brought into the urban space, acting as a new carbon sink for customers. the result is a signpost-like object attached to the tree with a tape measuring the girth of its trunk in order to calculate the growth and CO2 which has been absorbed by it. there is also a tape measure for children which converts how much CO2 is absorbed in the tree into activities rather than grams of CO2. for example, 1 hour on a flight or 2 days of breathing.

A.T.R.E.E.M.

the user interface of A.T.R.E.E.M. shows the intangile CO2 in terms of grams and how long it takes a tree to offset that amount (i.e. 10 minutes on tube journey emits 350 grams of CO2, with the tree taking 2 days, 10 hours to offset that amount. this way the user can imagine how good they are at leaving waste to the planet.

tree measuring tape for children

overview of poplar’s life time CO2 balance

detail of timeline