GoGreen
An online game that allows users to investigate and uncover the hidden truths of corporate greenwashing.
Solo Project
Skills Used: Product Design, UI/UX, Frontend
Date: June 2021
PROBLEM
I was motivated to develop this work due to my personal passion for discovering legitimate environmental alternatives and uncovering false sustainability stunts. Personally, I have been fooled and misled by ‘green’ products at the store, ‘compostable’ packaging on food, or ‘sustainable’ clothing lines. Thus, I attempted to address the trend where businesses greenwash in order to attract more customers and avoid any responsibility for their environmental impact.
CHALLENGE
For an experience and interaction design class, I produced a piece of tactical media. The time constraint was one week. Requirements included a functioning display of frontend developing skills.
THE PRODUCT
GoGreen is an online game, hosted on a GitHub website that prompts users to select the most sustainable choice, but failure to discover the ‘green’ choice is inevitable. My work focuses on misleading environmental claims (greenwashing) by companies and corporations. Dozens of informational websites including (but not limited to) Client Earth, Bloomberg, Medium, Ethical Consumer, The Guardian, National Geographic, and Vice informed the subjects, or corporations, and their products, production, advertisements, and policies.
The purpose of the ‘GoGreen’ website is to imitate the ‘green’ options that consumers face in the oil, energy, waste, plastic, clothing, and packaging industries, in order to educate consumers about the realities behind corporate ‘green’ initiatives. While there are alternatives that are far more sustainable, the options I prompt are the popular, mainstream, and constantly advertised companies that consumers commonly have a choice between. After ‘failing’, I aim to open users’ eyes to the misconceptions and untruthful environmental trends among businesses, with the ability to expand their environmental education with some forms of alternatives and sources for further research. Despite the accessibility of resources and alternatives, the main goal is to expose greenwashing and encourage the investigation of company policies, priorities, products, and production processes.
RESEARCH & PLANNING
With corporate greenwashing in mind, I settled on six categories that address major environmental detriments: oil, energy, waste, plastic, and packaging. Each category contains four options, including corporations, technologies, products, ad campaigns, etc. The user can select an option, or read more about the option and its environmental efforts. The user's choice of any option will result in a "Fail" and an explanation of the falsehoods of the option's sustainability efforts.
CLICKABLE FIGMA PROTOTYPE
Below you can click through the Figma prototype and "play" the "game". I recommend clicking the "fullscreen" button.
GITHUB LIVE SITE
To demonstrate my frontend developing abilities for the project criteria, I developed a GoGreen live site. The site is hosted on GitHub and coded using CSS and HTML. Due to time constraints and prioritization of the designs, the live site is less detailed than the Figma prototype. Visit the live site below.