Through reviewing environmental datasets and references with my group, I realised climate justice is not only negotiated through policy but also through everyday consumption systems that designers actively shape. Although climate discourse has been prominent for over a decade, I recognised that I had internalised it as distant and overwhelming rather than actionable. This project shifted my perspective as a practitioner: instead of imagining change as large-scale and inaccessible, I began to focus on designing small, implementable systems that influence daily behaviour.
I consequently reconsidered graphic design not as a one-directional act of raising awareness, but as a framework for structuring participation. We applied this approach by developing a canteen system in which each stage, choosing, purchasing, eating, and disposing operates as a learning interface. The proposal supports institutional sustainability goals by embedding guidance directly into user experience rather than presenting information separately. By prioritising seasonal, high-quality produce, it aims to reduce energy demand and food waste while encouraging responsible consumption.
This process reframed my role from communicator to facilitator, positioning my practice within climate justice as one that enables agency, accessibility, and collective accountability.
Bibliography
1. Jason Hickel (2020) Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World. London: William Heinemann.
This text examines Enlightenment philosophy, particularly the ideas of Descartes and Bacon, as foundational to a hierarchical worldview that separates humanity from nature and legitimizes extraction. By tracing how colonial power classified racialized subjects as closer to “nature,” the author reveals epistemological links between ecological exploitation and social domination.
This framework clarifies how contemporary capitalist economies continue to organize resource use through asymmetrical power relations. It also reshaped our understanding of the food system: rather than interpreting intensive agriculture as a technical or policy failure, we began to see it as an extension of a longer intellectual history that normalizes control over land and bodies. Because the text operates at a macro-historical scale, we were required to translate its claims into situated design strategies. This tension led us to foreground seasonal, local plant-based consumption not as lifestyle advice, but as a design intervention that challenges extractive logic within everyday practice.
2. Nicole Shukin (2009) Animal Capital: Rendering Life in Biopolitical Times. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
In Animal Capital, Nicole Shukin theorizes how animal life functions simultaneously as material resource and symbolic currency within capitalist systems, a dual process she terms “rendering.” This concept was pivotal to our enquiry because it reframed industrial food production not simply as agriculture but as a representational economy in which animal bodies circulate as signs, commodities, and surplus value. Rather than treating meat production as an ethical issue alone, Shukin’s analysis situates it within biopolitical regimes that manage life itself as extractable capital.
This shifted our project away from a narrow sustainability framework toward examining how visual culture, branding, and consumer narratives normalize extraction.Particularly influential was her claim that capitalist systems depend on representational strategies that obscure the violence and material costs of extraction. Recognizing this mechanism directly informed our design methodology: instead of presenting food as a finished dish, we visualize the emissions and resource data embedded within it. In this way, our project adopts Shukin’s critical framework as a visual strategy, transforming concealed infrastructures into perceptible information and repositioning design as a tool for rendering hidden systems legible.
3. Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley (2016) Are We Human? Notes on an Archaeology of Design. Zürich: Lars Müller Publishers. – from reading list
In Are We Human? Notes on an Archaeology of Design, Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley argue that design does not merely surround human life but actively produces it, positioning humans themselves as outcomes of designed systems. This claim reframed our understanding of design from a communicative tool into an evolutionary force that structures perception, behaviour, and knowledge. Rather than seeing our project as simply visualizing environmental data, we began to interpret it as participating in the ongoing construction of how ecological reality is understood.
The authors’ assertion that we are “suspended in design” was particularly generative, prompting us to consider how informational formats shape what counts as visible or actionable knowledge. While their argument operates at a broad philosophical scale, translating it into our project required grounding it in specific visual decisions. This led us to treat data not as neutral content but as a co-authorial agent, where the act of redesigning information becomes a reciprocal process through which both viewer and dataset are reconfigured.
4. Hezin O (2018) ‘Gaji #9: Paper and Offset Print’. Interview with It’s Nice That. Available at: itsnicethat.com (Accessed: 20 February 2026).
The interview published by It’s Nice That on Hezin O emphasizes process as the source of meaning rather than a neutral production step. Discussing her work with silkscreen and Risograph printing, she highlights how visible dot structures reveal that gradients are optical constructions rather than seamless images. This attention to pre-image systems, grids, units, angles, and line densities reframed our understanding of visual language as something built from rule-based frameworks rather than expressive surfaces. Her calendar project was particularly influential because it translates numerical time into a visual syntax generated entirely through printing logic, demonstrating how information can be structured through material constraints.
This methodological approach directly informed our own strategy for visualizing hierarchical data: instead of illustrating information descriptively, we began constructing it through systematic visual grammars that make structure perceptible. While the article functions primarily as a practitioner interview rather than theoretical text, its emphasis on procedural thinking provides a practical model for how design methods themselves can encode meaning, positioning technique as an epistemological tool rather than a neutral medium.
5. Queneau, R. (1998) Exercises in Style. London: John Calder. – from reading list
In Exercises in Style, Raymond Queneau systematically retells a single ordinary event in dozens of stylistic variations, transforming linguistic constraint into an experimental method for testing how form alters meaning. Rather than treating language as a neutral vehicle for content, the work demonstrates that structure, tone, and format actively produce interpretation. This procedural logic was particularly influential for our project, which approaches data visualization as a series of formal experiments rather than a single optimized solution. By repeatedly redesigning the same informational content through different textual and graphic systems, we began to assess how shifts in representation affect legibility, authority, and pedagogical impact.
Queneau’s method encouraged us to treat variation not as decoration but as research, using iterative translation to probe the limits of comprehension. While his work operates within literary language, adapting this approach to visual communication required us to extend stylistic experimentation into diagrammatic and informational forms, positioning design iteration itself as an investigative tool.
6. Klaus Pichler (2012) One Third. Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz.
In One Third, Klaus Pichler stages discarded food in the visual language of classical still-life photography and pairs each image with statistical information about global food waste. By juxtaposing aesthetic seduction with quantitative evidence, the work demonstrates how representation can shift from passive depiction to critical disclosure, revealing the infrastructural realities embedded within everyday consumption. This strategy was particularly influential for our project because it models how data can function as a perceptual intervention rather than supplementary information. Instead of treating environmental statistics as explanatory captions, we began to integrate them directly into the visual system of each dish, allowing emissions data to actively reshape interpretation at the moment of viewing.
Pichler’s approach suggests that when information is encountered simultaneously with the object it describes, it has the potential to alter judgment and choice. While his work operates within a photographic and exhibition context, translating this logic into a design framework prompted us to consider how informational visibility might influence real-time decision-making, positioning data visualization as a behavioural catalyst rather than a descriptive layer.
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