Feels Bad, Very Sad. An exploration of a print and package designer's environmental guilt.
I’ve always thought of myself as an eco-friendly person. I recycle, I walk when I can, I’ve been a vegan for 6 years and a vegetarian for 10 before that, and I always use a reusable water bottle. But as the years have gone on my willful ignorance and “woo woo hippy” hypocrisy has come back to haunt me. As an artist and designer, I’ve always been aware of the looming effects of paper production, of how much paper we use, and how often that paper is wasted. As soon as I started design school the sheer mass of rough work really hit me. I’d have to print off so many sheets of paper just for us to look at it for 10 minutes, scribble a few things on it for me to change, and then repeat the same thing over and over again until I had a giant Tupperware container full of basically trash paper that I just couldn’t bring myself to throw out because I felt bad about it. In the last few years, my nagging environmental guilt has become a driving force in my design process and has greatly increased my interest in sustainability within print design and that has translated itself into my fourth-year design thesis project.
Feels Bad, Very Sad
Feels Bad, Very Sad was a way for me to channel my environmental guilt into a tangible object for myself to come to terms with and hopefully as something to make other print and package designers think about the environmental consequences of our industry. I wanted to create a physical representation of the guilt I was constantly feeling in hopes of making others understand it, but do it in a way that wouldn’t be too serious and preachy, which unfortunately just scares people off.
I have created a physical representation of the guilt I am constantly dealing with out of all of my design waste. I took all of my rough work, blended it into pulp, and made giant sheets of paper out of it. I designed guilt-themed branding for the packaging, including traditional components of packaging. The inside of the box was an issue throughout the project. I didn’t really know what to put inside it but I knew if I didn’t it would be a missed opportunity. My general idea for the inside was a memorial to the trees that died for my projects, I decided to expand on that by turning the whole inside into a shadow box as both a memorial to the trees I killed as well as the environment that is suffering because of print and package design. This piece is specifically representing my guilt and how I feel so it has comedic undertones because I use humour as a defense mechanism. If I don’t laugh about it I’m going to cry and I feel like a lot of designers feel that way, especially the ones in my age bracket. I wanted it to be conversational and funny so it would be light-hearted and easy for others to relate to, but with actual information and specific things I feel guilty about. The goal is not for a fellow designer to look at it and feel like crap about the waste they've created, but to make them think about ways they can restructure their design process to reduce waste in the future.
I want Feels Bad, Very Sad to inspire meaningful conversations and help other designers to come to terms with and consider their environmental impact so in the future we don't have to feel bad or be very sad about it.
This project was made entirely with recycled and sustainable products including, recycled design rough work for the paper, cabbage and turmeric scraps for the ink, recycled cardboard for the inner support, homemade glue, sizing made from cornstarch rather than chemicals or animal products, and all of my time and effort which I guess isn’t sustainable but only I suffered for it. It is 4 foot 3 inches tall, 38 inches wide, and 18 inches deep.
Vegan, Gluten Free, Organic
Feels Bad, Very Sad
100% pure environmental guilt
no artificial colours or flavours
totally self inflicted
100% real guilt
Made with Anxiety
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Side effects may include:
You may experience long nights filled with dwelling and dread, an ever growing pit of despair in your heart, mild to severe panic attacks about how you’re single handedly destroying the ecosystem, feeling a part of your soul die every time you have to print rough work, nausea when considering the fact that over half of the world’s trees have been harvested for paper, irrational thoughts about how it’s your fault that there is a trash island twice the size of Texas floating in the Pacific, overthinking the 6 sheets of paper that got slightly overprinted and are now just ruined, trouble breathing when thinking about the amount of waste created by single use plastic everyday, feeling an overwhelming sense of shame when thinking unsustainable packaging looks cool and finally, dreading the fact that paper, the basis of your entire career, is the third largest polluting industry on the planet.
side effects may vary, if they persist maybe call a therapist?
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Ingredients:
all of my hopes and dreams, blood, sweat, tears, four years of wasted paper, ink and brain cells, cabbage.
COntains: sadness and stress
processed in a facility with nuts
Please don’t shake, I’m very fragile
Proof of said effort (process)
