A Campaign developed by the Office of Sarah for Canopy builds Awareness & bursts Myths around Single-Use Packaging
18/06/21
By Sarah Jackson RGD, Art Director at Office of Sarah
CONTEXT
Canopy Planet is a non-profit that works with the forest industry’s biggest customers and suppliers to develop business solutions that protect endangered forests.
This project is in support of their #Pack4Good campaign, building awareness around single-use packaging and the false dichotomy between paper or plastic. We wanted to show how all these seemingly disconnected processes and single-use products — from plastic water bottles and straws to paper bags and cardboard boxes — are connected, creating a cascading domino effect that negatively impacts our planet.
This Rube Goldberg machine provides a shareable 60-second story that visualizes this chain reaction.
.png)
METHODOLOGY
Rube Goldberg machines perform simple tasks through a series of kinetic chain-reactions. For this project, we wanted both the materials and chain reactions of our machine to tell the story of how paper and plastic are made, disposed and connected.
We began by investigating the paper and plastic making processes, relying heavily on the expertise of our client. The ideation process involved many sketch explorations, back-and-forth and edits with our team as we considered the flow of the narrative, how the sequence would be filmed and the physics of how the physical machine would work.
The final 8-foot-tall machine was built in-studio, using recycled, reused and discarded items. The build, filming and editing processes spanned two months.
PROJECT DETAIL
We didn't necessarily need a full run for the final edit, but it was a matter of stubbornness and personal pride that we get the machine to run seamlessly, at least once! It took over 30 tries (and painstaking resets), but finally, at 3:30 a.m., we got a clean run of the machine filmed. Worth it!
RESULT
This project has *just* been released, so we have yet to measure its educational contributions and shareability.
Sarah is a designer, illustrator and art director with over 10 years experience who specializes in obscure and delightful ideas. In 2018, Sarah received her Master of Design from the University of Alberta and she now likes to stomp around proclaiming that she’s “basically Yoda”. She currently splits her time between running her small creative shop, the Office of Sarah, teaching in the Design Studies program at MacEwan University and writing on her blog.
Read:
RGD's Sustainability Guidelines
2020 So(cial) Good Design Award-winners
5 Brands focused on Circularity Design Principles by Susan Yang RGD
Interested in submitting a project? Fill out this form.