Very Bad, Feels Sad
Environmental Design
Environmental Design
Environmental Design
Environmental Design
Environmental Design
Environmental Design
Environmental Design
Environmental Design
Environmental Design
Packaging Design
Designer(s)
Samm Campbell
Duration
30 Weeks
Recognitions
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, 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.
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 environmental guilt has become a driving force in my design process that has translated itself into my fourth-year design thesis project.
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 bad 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.
