How FARM Stockholm’s 2030 Calculator will help brands to be more transparent
The 2030 Calculator is a tool devised by Swedish impact startup Doconomy and the service design agency FARM Stockholm, which uses appealing design to help brands be more green. The idea is simple: the calculator enables brands and designers to determine the carbon footprint of their products. Usually, this would be a complex and expensive process that rests in the hands of external professional consultants, but Doconomy’s calculator gives smaller brands the power to do it themselves, quickly and easily. The 2030 Calculator scooped an impressive three Pencils this year, including a Yellow for design transformation.
Determining the carbon footprint of a product is not an easy task, and empowering brands and designers to do it themselves was far from straightforward. As Johan Pihl, founder and Chief Innovation Officer at Doconomy, explains, the 2030 Calculator came about following a two-year process of working with existing data available around the environmental footprint of various consumer goods — apparel, furniture and so on. But the power of the calculator, according to Pihl, is how its complexity is made more accessible through the creative communication design built into it.
The 2030 Calculator, FARM Stockholm
“That’s the most important part of it,” he explains. “As creatives, we really wanted to create something that was a proactive solution. We wanted to ensure that the design was appealing, and was something that would inspire brands to actually start calculating.”
Doconomy and FARM Stockholm, who have offices in the same Stockholm building, worked together closely on the 2030 Calculator. The combination of a big idea with great design backed up by accessible data was a winning formula for a project that carries real positive impact. Pihl told us a little more about the work itself, as well as the lessons other creatives can learn from it.
Good design can help democratise data
The key idea at work in the 2030 Calculator is the easy presentation of a lot of complex information that had previously been off-limits for small and medium-sized businesses. By giving producers and brands access to the information around the carbon footprint of their own products, Doconomy’s hope is that these users can then make better decisions about the impact of their products – and that could have far-reaching positive consequences for commerce itself.
But the first step was to make the calculator work well and look good. “If you want to change behaviour, you need to inspire people to make that change,” Pihl explains. For the team working on the 2030 Calculator, that meant prioritising the design of the tool and making sure it was visually appealing for the user. “We wanted to push something that was really proactive,” says Pihl. “So we could let the world know, ‘Hey, here’s a simple tool that allows you to make these complex calculations with ease.' So we designed the whole service to be user-friendly, to encourage people to get going, try it out and start calculating for themselves.”
The 2030 Calculator, FARM Stockholm
Focus on transparency before sustainability
There is an important conversation happening around the topic of sustainability for many brands at the moment, but Pihl says that the focus should be on transparency overall, rather than sustainability alone. “Transparency is bigger,” he says. “Right now, the calculator measures the CO2 impact, but soon we’ll also introduce water scarcity data, and socio-economic rights.”
Introducing transparency is a big ask for a brand, Pihl notes, because it involves shifting their mindset completely. But good creative ideas can help companies as they take steps in this direction. “Transparency is perceived by big corporations as Pandora’s Box — once you open the doors to your factory, you can’t close them again,” Pihl says. “But this tool is a way to accelerate brands' ability to start establishing transparency as a core principle of doing business.”
Quantifying impact can push brands to do more
Measuring the success of a platform like the 2030 Calculator has less to do with concrete numbers and KPIs and more to do with observing how its users go on to change their behaviour. Right now, the world is standing on a precipice with regards to the climate crisis and our own behaviour, and Pihl believes that creatives have a vital opportunity to help push for positive change.
“It’s an era for innovation,” he says. “Impact, as a value, is as important as price, quality, and quantity right now. It is going to change everything, and can influence all commercial activities on the planet for the next decade.”
Pihl compares the role of impact in consumer decision-making to the introduction of calories and nutritional information on food packaging. “This transition needs to happen. It’s about thinking how we can help brands make that journey. What can we come up with to make them want to be part of that shift? That’s the goal: find tools, services, ideas that accelerate this necessary shift. We [creatives] should not be someone you call when you can’t sell your product. We should be the people you call to ensure you have a great product to start with.”
For adventurous creatives, this decisive moment also represents fertile ground for big ideas. “I think that creatives have an excellent opportunity to help accelerate this shift by putting innovations and big ideas out there.”