And here it is, our first BE ECO post! I had the pleasure to talk to Andreas Pawlik of dform in Vienna, a design studio that is involved in sustainable design for several years. Today we want to present one of their latest project: A beautiful poster collection about organic agriculture. Boring? Not a bit!
Along with some very interesting and shocking truths about agriculture (to grow one kg of tuna you need 20 kg of fish), there are several fun facts. Did you, for instance, know that a pumpkin is considered a berry and the heaviest pumpkin is from the US and weighed 766,12 kg, that pigs cannot sweat or that a chocolate bar can contain as much caffeine as a cup of coffee?
How did you come up with the idea of a poster collection on organic agriculture?
It is important for me to say: it was not solely my idea, but the work of an interdisciplinary team: the poster collection is a joint project of FiBL (Research Institute of Organic Agriculture), science communications research (Alexander Martos), dform (Andreas Pawlik and Christian Manser) an Juliane Sonntag. Roughly said, FIBL and science communication research were responsible for the content, whereas we did the artwork.
We jointly thought about the connection between organic agriculture, science and the general public and what was missing. And that is when we came up with the posters, which visualize with the help of diagrams and pictograms important and interesting scientific facts and figures about organic agriculture. The 16 double-sided posters in the collection were designed by Juliane Sonntag. Because of their great success, we decided to produce a poster collection which includes all 16 as well as a three-piece box for the posters.
What is the goal of the poster collection?
Our goal is to keep the discussion about organic agriculture alive. It is quite difficult to talk about “organic” and “non-organic” because the positions are quite rigid: there are the ones who are only interested in buying cheap and the others who want everything to be organic. Most of the times the discussion is based on opinions and attitudes – it’s not like in sports where someone is the winner because he was the fastest. That is why we decided to introduce some facts into the discussion in the form of posters.
I think this is a clever idea because it introduces some fun into the discussion. The posters with all the pictograms and bright colors and the whole collection, in general, are really stylish – I will definitely hang up some of the posters in my office.
This makes me very happy! It is, indeed, a problem, that “organic” is often considered quite unsexy. I think it is our task to improve this image.
What was important for you when you designed the poster collection?
For us, the most important factor was that the collection fulfills its function: this means that it looks good, is easy to handle and – also very important – fits to our limited budget. We developed the design of the box as well as the dye-cutting form. As we started to think about the material for the boxes, we immediately thought of cardboard because of its recycling character. Finally, we chose SH Recycling, a 100% recycled brown board with great printability. Druckerei Gradwohl handled the whole production (printing and die-cutting). However, the final boxes and were manually assembled by five students.
Very organic production!
Yes, indeed! Not only the paper involved is organic, but also the printer of the posters Druckerei Janetschek produces CO2 neutral and uses bioinks. At first we wanted to print some details in silver and gold. However, the printer did not approve, because silver and gold ink not only looks metallic but also contains some metallic particles.
Where would you like to see the posters hanging?
Behind your desk!
No problem!
Dear, Mr. Pawlik, thank you very much for the interview!
For those of you how are dying to know where you can buy the poster collection called “Bio-Wissen/Wissenswelt – Biolandwirtschaft: Plakat-Kollektion”, click here to get to the order form. Be fast, because the edition is limited to 1000 pieces!