Radical transparency

Last month, deep in the bowls of Sweden's first nuclear testing room, 25 meters under a University campus in Stockholm, a group of coders and web developers met for a Green Hackathon.

There is a wealth of data on the internet about environmental impacts and lifecycle assessments which show the impacts of the production and manufacturing of products across global supply chains, but this information needs more creative and transparent ways of being communicated. For this hackathon, the 'hackers' met for 24 hours and worked in teams all through the night to come up with new web platforms, apps and tools.

Leonardo Bonnani from Sourcemap, launched the event with his description of 'radical transparency' and how Sourcemap aims to offer everyone the tools for revealing data about environmental impacts in a clear, open-source way.

While most of the data that Sourcemap reveals is about carbon impacts, water use or waste outputs, we began a conversation about social impacts and how these could be more transparent and available.

Using available data from the United Nations, Leo and his colleague Bianca chose to focus on child labour for this 'hack'. The countries with the highest rates of child labour, in the supply chain of coffee, were then made visible on the Sourcemap site, using a simple magenta dot - the higher the rate of child labour, the larger the dot (see top image). This is a simple but powerful tool for communicating the social impacts of the production of commodities and products.

Obviously, this tool could be used 'radically', to uncover or reveal activities that some organisations may not want to be revealed, and Bonnani reports that some of the recent maps that people have created are clearly from people who have access to confidential or restricted data. But it is also increasingly being used by brands and companies as an internal tool for communicating their supply chain to all their stakeholders.

It was also revealed last month at the RITE Group conference in London, that Marks & Spencers has partnered with Historic Futures, who offer a similar service to companies, and M & S will be attempting to reveal the impacts of every single one of their non-food items!

The idea of making complex information easily understood, is one of the big challenges for sustainability, and is often where designers can have a role to play. Graphic visualisations of complex data is the aim of the website and recent book Information is beautiful

and the Guardian even has a Data blog, that reveals recent statistics in a easily digestible way.

This idea of the social impacts of the fashion industry, has sent me on a big research spree but Im also seeing a little mini visualisation of the social/emotional impacts of one of the pieces of clothing that I own. More on this soon!