BREAKING APART AN ALTOID
The project was for a research methodologies course. The idea was to select a simple object and learn as much as possible about it through quantitative, qualitative and design based research methods.
My object was an Altoid (the candy mint). While it may seem like an innocuous candy, an Altoid is made with some questionable ingredients — including animal parts and an African tree sap that's primarily sourced from Sudan, a country of conflict, human rights issues and an unstable economy. Because of this, the US has trade embargoes in place to prevent the importation of Sudanese products — with the exception of gum arabic, a crucial ingredient in soda.
I concluded my research by proposing an information design solution — or really, proposing a future project that would try to develop an information design solution. This would involve distilling all the information about the origins of products into some kind of consumer facing format. This would not only talk about the potentially negative aspects of a product, but it would also discuss the consequences of eliminating certain ingredients from a product.
For example, I have an alternative to Altoids in the example on the right. This alternative does not use gelatin (an animal by-product) or gum arabic (a product of conflict) in it's mint. This taste test was designed to foster conversation around what we've lost in the product (mouth feel, flavor, etc.) while comparing hypothetical information labels (dark squares = bad).
