Ba report andreea vlad int

BA in Communication Design & Media Design & Business, KEA, 2017

NON-PACKAGING FOR MASS COMMUNICATION A critical design perspective & prototyping for no-meat-eating

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by ANDREEA VLAD - Communication Design & Media INT Principal supervisor: Rasmus R. Simonsen Secondary supervisor: Jeremy Walton 71,997 characters with spaces

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ABSTRACT

The United Nations has concluded that factory farming is one of the biggest contributors to the most serious environmental problems at every level, from local to global: land degradation, climate change, pollution, water shortages, and habitat destruction; meat consumption has been associated with almost all of the major diseases; billions of animals are killed yearly all over the globe, creating enormous suffering. Meat eating is a wicked problem, because is difficult, maybe impossible to solve due to incomplete or contradictory knowledge, the number of people and opinions involved, the large economic burden, and the interconnected nature of these problems with other problems. Meat eating is sustained by a complex system of beliefs that shape our values and behavior when it comes to our food choices. This is called Carnism, term coined by Dr. Melanie Joy, and it is the invisible belief system that conditions us to eat certain animals, and participate in a violent practice which many of us are not even aware of.

The aim of this thesis is to raise awareness, provoke debate, and make people think and reflect on their food choices and the relationship with the other beings. The fundamental frame of thinking for this thesis is Critical Design, having the purpose to challenge assumptions and givens about the everyday objects. This report investigates how our perception about meat is influenced by certain design decisions that the meat industry are applying to their products, how psychological triggers and responses reveal these perceptions, and how critical design can challenge these assumptions and perceptions by simply making us think and question our reality. Through surveys, desk research, and scientific findings, is revealed that cognitive dissonance participates in keeping the willingness to eat meat, even though we have the palate of an herbivore. Disgust and empathy are regulating agents which have the potential to reduce meat consumption, but they are reduced by the cognitive dissonance, by the way meat packages are displaying visual information. By the application of affect theories, phenomenological perspectives, the sense of touch, and semiotic interpretation, together with aesthetic strategies and product prototyping, this thesis offers as solution in a critical design artifact, which by change of materiality, explores the potential of disgust and empathy to communicate the link between animal and meat.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction

5 Design to Improve Life, the Role of the Designer, and Wicked Problems _________________________________ 5 _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Problem Area

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__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Carnism ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________8 Problem Statement and Research Questions____________________________________________________________________________________10 Methods_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________10 Theories__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________11 Delimitation __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________12

Analysis

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Meat packaging analysis _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________13 Brainstorming for innovation _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________16 Critical Design ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________16 Dark Design: The Positive Use of Negativity _________________________________________________________________________________17 Critical Food Design____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________18 Emotional Design, Phenomenology, and Aesthetic Strategies_________________________________________________18 Touch - A sense of perception and communication___________________________________________________________________20 Affect Theory and Facial Expressions______________________________________________________________________________________________21 Meat eating and the biology of disgust ________________________________________________________________________________________22 Food Choices and Disgust _________________________________________________________________________________________________________________23 Why did humans develop a disgust response to animal flesh? _______________________________________________24 The psychology and moral value of disgust__________________________________________________________________________________24 Disgust and Moral Suspicion_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________26

Solution

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Conclusion

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Perspectives

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Bibliography Appendix

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“I think raising awareness has to be a continuous effort because people tend to forget.”

– Connie Hedegaard, the Climate Action Commissioner for the European Union, quote from the interview in Goodvertising - Creative advertising that cares, Thames & Hudson 2012

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Introduction

Design to Improve Life, the Role of the Designer, and Wicked Problems As a communication designer, I believe in the power of design to change and improve our life, leading to a more harmonious relationship with everything that surrounds us. Also, I believe in the words of Kigge Hvid, the CEO of INDEX: Design to Improve Life®, when she says that there is a “human potential to design, and the potential of design to improve life for people, not only in terms of traditional design (as products), but also as services, systems and process design” (Design to Improve Life, 2017). However, when people think of design, most believe it is about problem solving. Faced with huge challenges such as overpopulation, water shortages, food security and climate change, we as designers feel an overpowering urge to work together to fix them, as though they can be broken down, quantified, and solved. Design’s inherent optimism leaves no alternative but it is becoming clear that many of the challenges we face today are unfixable and that the only way to overcome them is by changing our values, beliefs, attitudes and behavior.

Following the thread of thoughts of Fiona Raby and Anthony Dunne, I find myself agreeing with the fact that, although essential most of the time, design’s inbuilt optimism can greatly complicate things, first as a form of denial that the problems we face are more serious than they appear, and second, by channeling energy and resources into fiddling with the world out there rather than the ideas and attitudes inside our heads that shape the world out there. Raby and Dunne, propose that, before giving up altogether, there are other possibilities for design: one is to use design as means of speculating how things could be [or shouldn’t be] – speculative design (Speculative Everything, 2013, p.2). This form of design thrives on imagination and aims to open up new perspectives on what are sometimes called wicked problems, to create spaces for discussion and debate about alternative ways of being. Design speculations can act as a catalyst for collectively redefining our relationship to reality (ibid). A subcategory of speculative design is Critical Design, which will be my approach and fundamental frame of thinking for this thesis.

With this different approach to design, my role as a designer unfolds as a critical thinker, where critical design enables me to regain agency, authorship, and autonomy; this way, rather than being solely instrumental and serving the industry, I can direct my focus in service of larger ambitions.

Additionally, Richard Buchanan states: “…designers would no longer be viewed as individuals who

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decorate messages, but as communicators who seek to discover convincing arguments by means of a new synthesis of images and words. In turn, this will shift attention towards audiences as active participants in reaching conclusions rather than passive recipients of performed messages” (1992, p.12; emphasis added). Moreover, when he talks about design thinking, he mentions that its purpose is “to connect and integrate useful knowledge from the arts and sciences alike, but in ways that are suited to the problems and purposes of the present” (ibid.p.6).

One such problem of the present, which lays at the basis of my thesis, is meat eating. I categorize this problem as a wicked problem, which Jon Kolko defines as following: “A wicked problem is a social or cultural problem that is difficult or impossible to solve for as many as four reasons: incomplete or contradictory knowledge, the number of people and opinions involved, the large economic burden, and the interconnected nature of these problems with other problems” (Wicked Problems, 2017). Meat eating is such a complex problem, given the fact that is so ingrained in our belief systems and habits, traditions and ideologies, even institutionalized, which makes it difficult, maybe impossible, to solve. I chose to tackle this problem because of the alarming situation in which we all are, where so many participate in sustaining this massive industry. The United Nations (UN, 2006) has concluded that factory farming is one of the biggest contributors to the most serious environmental problems at every level, from local to global: land degradation, climate change, pollution, water shortages, and habitat destruction; meat consumption has been associated with almost all of the major diseases; billions of animals are killed yearly all over the globe, creating enormous suffering, which many of us are not even aware of.

This report investigates how our perception about meat is influenced by certain design decisions that the meat industry are applying to their products, how psychological triggers and responses reveal these perceptions, and how critical design can challenge these assumptions and perceptions by simply making us think and question our reality. Through the proposed solution materialized into the critical design artifact, I attempt to communicate by way of emotions, creating an intimate connection between the object and our human values, and further on, to create a communication strategy to reach potential wider audiences of a broader social spectrum, and supported and promoted by Anima, the Danish animal’s rights organization.

This is the first step for changing and reflecting on our beliefs, attitudes and behavior, which by the medium of debate and discussions, the problem of meat eating can be tackled, and conclusively change the current state of affairs, for better. As Rasmus Simonsen mentions in his article What is Prosumption? (2016) “the good life…essentially has to do with how we define the relationship between the self, the other, and the surrounding world. (…) ‘the world is always the one that I share with Others’. In a sense, we can only know ourselves – environmentally, that is – through what we do and use, but also through what we avoid.” (p.23, emphasis added).

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Problem area

“We have lost our sense of what it means to be human and our connection to other beings.”

– John Ehrenfeld, co-author of Flourishing: A Frank Conversation about Sustainability

We have all been told that animal flesh is an essential part of a healthy diet. Meat consumption is at all-time high in the western hemisphere (Kunst, 2016) and remains an inherent part of most people’s diet. People like eating meat, and to keep this situation favorable, the meat industry is carefully crafting their products and communication in a way to persuade people to consume meat and animal products. But all this comes at a tremendous cost for the environment, our health, and animals’ lives and wellbeing.

As stated by FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations), when land is used to raise animals instead of crops, precious water and soil are lost, trees are cut down to make land for grazing or factory farms, and untreated animal waste pollutes rivers and streams. In fact, it has such a devastating effect on all aspects of our environment that the Union of Concerned Scientists lists meat eating as the second-biggest environmental hazard facing the Earth (number one is fossil fuel vehicles). And according to a report published by the Worldwatch Institute (2017), a staggering 51 per cent or more of global greenhouse-gas emissions are caused by animal agriculture.

Meat consumption has been associated with almost all of the major diseases. According to PCRM (Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, 2015), meat is high in fat, saturated fat and cholesterol, which will increase the risk of heart diseases and can cause other serious health problems like diabetes and obesity. Meat is high in animal protein, which is far too acidic for the human body and has been linked to kidney disease, cancer and osteoporosis. Most meat also contains antibiotics and growth hormones like estrogen and testosterone, which can promote cancer growth.

In Denmark, there are 29 million pigs, 370,000 cows, 100 million chickens, 1.6 million turkeys, and 1 million ducks slaughtered every year to be sold and consumed (Anima, 2017). In regards to the animals we eat, there is a more complex system of beliefs that shape our values and behavior when it comes to our food choices. This is called Carnism, term coined by Dr. Melanie Joy, and it is the

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invisible belief system that conditions us to eat certain animals (Joy, 2015). In order to bring a new perspective on the way we look at our reality, I am going to use the “carnistic” lenses, so things become clearer under the light of this ideology.

Carnism

“When behavior becomes a choice, it takes on a much more significant ethical dimension.”

- Dr. Melanie Joy

As Dr. Melanie Joy states in her TED talk Toward Rational, Authentic Food choices given in 2015, in München, carnism is an oppressive ideology (like sexism, racism, slavery), is universal, it is a violent system, and is hidden from us by using defensive mechanisms, so that rational, humane people participate in irrational, inhumane practices without fully realizing what they are doing. Carnism denies the truth by making it invisible. One way carnism remains invisible is by remaining unnamed, so eating animals appears to be a given, rather than a choice. Another way carnism remains invisible is by keeping its victims out of sight – and therefore conveniently out of public consciousness.

Animal agribusinesses found ways to restore their profit margins by assuring us that we can eat animals who are happy to be our food, that we can eat so-called humane or “bio” meat, eggs, and dairy. However, most “humanely” raised animals live in misery, much as their “inhumanely” raised counterparts do, and all farmed animals ultimately end up in the very same place. Carnism conditions us to block our awareness and our empathy, qualities that are vital to our own wellbeing and to the wellbeing of our world.

Another defense is justification, and Dr. Joy points out that carnism teaches us to believe in the 3 Ns of Justification: eating animals is normal, natural and necessary, the same arguments used for slavery, male dominance, and heterosexual supremacy. Moreover, the myths of carnism are institutionalized: they are supported and promoted by all major social institutions (government, medicine, law, education) which in turn transmit them to us. So, carnistic bias is embedded within the very foundations of society. And when we are born into an institutionalized system such as carnism, we internalize it.

In the Forward of Critical Perspectives on Veganism (2016), Dr. Joy writes about the 3rd defense mechanism of carnism, which builds a strong argument to support my hypothesis (further on verified by more in depth research), which I will describe in the next sections of this report:

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“Cognitive distortions comprise another set of carnistic defenses. Like other

violent ideologies, carnism employs a set of cognitive defenses that aim to distort

perceptions. These defenses work as psychological and emotional distancing

mechanisms. Accordingly, carnism causes people to see farmed animals as objects,

as something rather than someone. It also causes people to see animals as

abstractions, as representatives of an abstract group without any individuality or

personality and who have often been given numbers rather than names. And, finally,

carnism places animals in rigid mental categories in order to enable people to harbor

different feelings and behave in different ways toward different species: dogs and

cats are friends and family; pigs and cows are food.�

These cognitive distortions support the cognitive dissonance1, which justifies and enables people to eat meat, even though they are against violence and causing pain and suffering to animals. This is defined as the meat paradox (Loughnan et al., 2012), and is influenced by the way we present, prepare and talk about meat, increasing the willingness to eat meat by reducing empathy and disgust.

The impact of this realization, awaken a curiosity and an urge to look at where the disconnection between the meat (as food) and the animal (as once living sentient being) happens. So, I started to look where the meat is (usually) sold: in the supermarkets. When going to the meat section, I could see pieces of meat, cut and processed in various stages, wrapped and packaged in plastic, orderly arranged on the shelves. Looking at the packages (Appendix 1- A, B, C), most of them display simplified illustrations of the animals, or images of the meat already cooked and served on a plate.

This finding was a major culprit of cognitive dissonance in relation to meat eating, at the level where the consumer gets access to and procures meat from, in the western urban areas: the supermarket.

This is a space where decisions are made and where we as consumers impact the world. Frequently, the public participates as citizens arguing in very general terms about the ethical, moral, and social issues. Yet, when we act as consumers we often suspend these general beliefs and act on other impulses. Usually when we discuss big issues we do so as citizens, yet it is as consumers that we help reality take shape. It is only when products are bought that they enter everyday life and have an effect. The act of buying determines our future (Dunne & Raby, 2013, p.49, emphasis added).

After this observation, I was curious to find what people think and perceive, so after gathering data provided by a couple of surveys I designed and shared with approx. 100 people, I defined my hypothesis: people don’t (want to) think about the connection between meat and its source: (now) a dead animal.

1. cognitive dissonance = noun, Psychology. (from Dictionary.com): anxiety that results from simultaneously holding contradictory or otherwise incompatible attitudes, beliefs, or the like, as when one likes a person but disapproves strongly of one of his or her habits.

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Problem Statement

How can meat packaging be reconceived as a critical design object for mass communication and thereby persuade meat consumers to change their perception and food choices?

Research Questions: 1. How can packaging design raise awareness, remind people that meat is coming from a living sentient being, and persuade them to eat less/no meat, by involving other senses when interacting with the meat packaging?

2. How could a critical design object be used as a mass communication product (public exhibition or advertising) by Anima through meat packaging redesign?

Methods In order to get insights into the way the meat industry is operating at the communication level through packaging, and to understand people’s perceptions, beliefs, and values in regards to meat consumption, I used various methods to gather and process quantitative and qualitative data.

From field observations in supermarkets, I gathered information by looking at their communication material, particularly meat packaging; a more structured approach such as surveys, offered insight into how people think, perceive and behave; a more creative method, such as How Might We? questions was used as a brainstorming technique to look for innovative solutions; for a more thorough research, I used desk research, where the study of Kunst and Hohle (2016) titled Meat Eaters by Dissociation: How we present, prepare and talk about meat increases willingness to eat meat by reducing empathy and disgust, the scientific article Don’t Mind Meat? The Denial of Mind to Animals Used for Human Consumption by Bastian et al., and the lecture by Milton Mills MD (2012) on Meat Eating and the Biology of Disgust offered valuable information, which is described, explained, and analyzed with the support of the theories I found relevant for this subject.

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Theories As mentioned in the Introduction, I categorized meat eating as a wicked problem, due to its complexity and many factors involved to sustain it. Because of the nature of the problem, I decided to use Critical Design (as opposed to Affirmative Design – Appendix 2) as the fundamental approach to my perspective, analysis and solution. Critical Design “uses speculative design proposals to challenge narrow assumptions, preconceptions, and givens about the role products play in everyday life and the surrounding environment“ (Dunne & Raby, 1999). Both the design artifact and the process of designing such artifact cause reflection on existing values, morals and practices in the culture. In addition, Dark Design, as a dimension of critical design, has the role to question the limited range of emotional and psychological experiences offered through designed products. And because my subject is meat eating, therefore about food and eating, I place my project in the Critical Food Design, a sub-discipline of Food Design, term defined by Dr. Francesca Zampollo, founder of the Online School of Food Design.

Phenomenology and aesthetic strategies are used to analyze and define the concept of the critical design artifact, where Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s writings offer the frame to understand objects and their functions from a phenomenological perspective. I chose to use this perspective by reason that perception is a dialog between a subject and an external object (or phenomenon), where an object’s properties can be understood only in the context of our experience of it. Hence, I want to employ the sensuous experience as senzorial communication in combination with thought based experience, where intellectual and cultural communication convey meaning. This is where Roland Barthes’s interpretation of signs comes into play when analyzing existing communication on meat packages, and in my design proposal to convey meaning and emotional function. Dealing with emotions, I looked into Donald Norman’s Emotional Design concepts, where he states: “emotions are inseparable from and a necessary part of cognition. Everything we do, everything we think is tinged with emotion, much of it subconscious. In turn, our emotions change the way we think, and serve as constant guides to appropriate behavior, steering us away from the bad, guiding us toward the good” (Norman, 2005, p.7). Furthermore, I used Mark Paterson’s touch theory, where his analysis of the sense of touch brings another level of interpretation: touch is a sense of communication; It is receptive, expressive, and it can communicate empathy, notions that support my decisions for the design artifact. Given the ingrained potential of emotions to change perceptions and behavior, in relation to my hunch about meat eating, and afterwards verified by science – the biology of disgust, I used Silvan Tomkin’s affect theory to understand the nature and function of emotions and facial expressions, and further on, Aurel Kolnai’s writings on visceral values, disgust, and moral disgust.

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Delimitation This report is not focused on an affirmative design approach, therefore is not offering a solution to the problem of meat eating, but is focusing on a critical perspective that has the aims to raise awareness and provoke debate, by addressing the problem of meat eating and the cognitive dissonance that maintains meat consumption. This report is not serving the industry, but is in the service of the society. Furthermore, the focus is not on the research for design, but on research through design. The proposed design artifact is not for production, but for debate; consequently, methods of mass production are not considered, nor a potential market. The target audience for this object is not the consumer, but the citizen, and is not the user, but the person. The final aim of the proposed product is not to make us buy it, but to make us think. The connections and associations between survey results, scientific data, theories, aesthetic strategies, and intuitive design thinking support the proposed solution.

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Analysis

Meat packaging analysis When I started looking at the surrounding reality through the “carnistic� lenses, things suddenly appeared in a different light. My critical thinking was activated, and I start questioning why, how, and what are the elements and factors that keep people eating meat, what are the reasons people use to defend their choices and tastes, and how is the meat industry using these in order to communicate that this is the choice for a healthy diet.

The habit of meat eating goes way back, when we started to hunt because of lack of fresh fruits and vegetables, and continued when we started the practice of agriculture, by using animals in our own benefit. This is an old and entrenched human practice, which became abundant, even excessive with the industrial revolution. This enabled societies to mechanize and optimize farming, and in order to make it a profitable business, advertising and communication methods start being used to persuade people to consume animal products in an unreasonable and unsustainable manner.

I chose to focus on the meat packaging, and to analyze and understand how packaging design (labels, imagery and visual style) can play a role in influencing people’s perceptions, and persuading them to choose this product. For this stage of my research, I visited some supermarkets in Copenhagen (Netto, Lidl, Kvickly, SuperBrugsen, Irma, Aldi), to look at their meat products and how they are packaged and presented. Most of the packages are using plastic trays and plastic films, or vacuum bags, which according to FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations) is used to protect meat and meat products from undesirable impacts on quality, including microbiological and physiochemical alterations. The interesting part though, is what kind of information is displayed on these packages. Most of the packages use illustrations to show the animal source of the meat; these are simplified depictions, that most of the time are used as indicators to show from what animal the meat is coming from, or to specify what part of the body is that distinct meat cut (Appendix 1- A, B, C).

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Meat packaging – imagery of animals In his essay Rhetoric of the Image (1964), Roland Barthes analyses an advertising image and how different messages are conveyed by a system of signs. By analyzing the meat packaging visual imagery against his semiotic theory, I can detect that by using illustrations (drawings) (Appendix 1A), instead of photography, is a way to not reproduce everything; this way, the denotation of the drawing is less pure than that of a photograph, for there is no drawing without style (p.158, 1964).

The style, in many cases, is carefully designed and crafted to persuade consumers to associate the meat product with quality, craftsmanship, technique, tradition, pleasure and taste, indicating “delicacy”, touching on the sensuous nature of meat eating. The “execution” of a drawing itself constitutes a connotation. According to Barthes, “insofar as the drawing displays its coding, the relationship between the two messages is profoundly modified: it is no longer the relationship between a nature and a culture (as with the photograph), but that between two cultures; the ‘ethic’ of the drawing is not the same as that of the photograph” (p.158, 1964). In photograph – the relationship of signified to signifier is not one of “transformation” but of “recording”, this implying the myth of photographic “naturalness”, by showing that the scene is there, captured mechanically (a guarantee of objectivity). The cases where the photography is used, either to represent a specific animal as the source of meat, or to reproduce a farm scene, the accent is put on the idealized image (a “happy” cow on a grass field under the blue sky) (Appendix 1B), making reference to what Dr. Joy defines as compassionate carnism - a category of neocarnsim (characterized as anti-veganism). Compassionate carnism is a defense mechanism of carnism, which invented the concepts of “humane” or “happy” animal products, recommending moderation in meat consumption, to encourage people to keep consuming meat, this way reducing guilt and concerns about animal welfare.

Meat packaging – displaying cooked meat as a plated dish In other instances, the package is displaying images of the cooked meat as a plated dish (Appendix 1C). This choice of imagery is proven to work efficiently to increase cognitive dissonance, and make people more willing to consume meat. The study Meat eaters by dissociation: How we present, prepare and talk about meat increases willingness to eat meat by reducing empathy and disgust (Kunst, 2016), is using a variation of scenarios with real-world stimuli and simulating consumer-choice situations to experimentally demonstrate that culturally entrenched process of dissociation found in the way we produce, prepare and talk about meat and animals sustain people’s willingness to eat meat as they make it easy to ignore the meat-animal link. Such dissociation reduces empathy and disgust that would otherwise reduce meat consumption. In six experimental studies, they empirically demonstrated that meat practices in the modern world indeed facilitate divorcing meat products from their animal origins, thereby reducing empathy and disgust, which ultimately bolsters

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meat consumption. This insight is relevant to take into consideration when analyzing the packaging that displays the cooked meat, and next finding reveals how this imagery is influencing people’s perception.

Inspired by this study (Kunst, 2016), I designed a survey (Appendix 3) to find out exactly how people perceive meat and food. After a series of questions on food choices, motivations for the specific choices, and certain behaviors around food, I asked people to look at three different images depicting meat in different stages of preparation, and asked them to choose between two versions of the same image, but with two different captions (Appendix 4): When you see this picture, what do you see? A. Food and B. Dead animal. The first set of images showed several meat cuts displayed in a freezer, where the pig’s head was placed; the second set of images showed meat cuts, but this time without the head of the animal, and the third set of images showed a piece of meat, cooked and sliced, displayed on a cutting board. In average 73 out of 75 people who took the test answered these questions, and the results argue for my assumption: that the more the meat is disconnected from its animal source, the more people associate it with food. For the first set of images, where the pig’s head was present, 68% of respondents answered that they see a dead animal; this is also arguing for one of the agents that supports cognitive dissonance for meat eating, defined as the denial of mind to animals used for human consumption (Bastian et al., 2011). The presence of the head of the animal influenced people to see in the image the dead animal, instead of food, due to a couple of reasons: the head is the locus of mental capacity (Kunst, 2016, p.763); and, the face is something that we see and use as association with ourselves, increasing empathy towards the animal. The possession of mental capacities forms the basis for ascribing moral worth, so denying these capacities, such as the capacity for suffering, should diminish an animal’s moral standing (Bastian et al., 2011).

For the second set of images, where the head of the animal was not present anymore, 57% of the respondents said they see food, showing the change in perception; mentally disengaging from the origins of meat serves an important function, increasing dissonance. (Bastian et al., 2011).

For the third set of images, showing the cooked and sliced piece of meat, 68% of the respondents saw food in the image, clearly demonstrating that there is a tendency to perceive differently the same material (flesh) according to the way it is presented – the closer it is to what we identify as food (in this case cooked), the higher the dissonance.

In conclusion, the choice of showing the meat cooked and plated to be served on the meat packaging is increasing the cognitive dissonance, reducing empathy and disgust, and appealing to people’s tastes and sensuous nature when it comes to food choices.

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Brainstorming for innovation

The analysis of the meat packaging inspired me to use this product as a starting point for my design process and led me to ask How might we? questions (Designkit.org, 2014) as a design method to try reframe my insights, and to turn challenges into opportunities for design. Out of several such questions, I decided to stick to the following: 1. How might we increase awareness and make it visible that meat is coming from an animal?

2. How might we use packaging to show that meat is coming from an animal?

3. How might we increase empathy and disgust (these two emotions being likely to mediate the effects of dissociation on attitudes towards meat consumption) to reduce dissociation?

4. How might we use packaging as a communication product to remind people that meat is coming from an animal?

5. How might we use emotion and materiality to communicate empathy and disgust, to increase awareness and touch people in their core values, by making them questioning the taste (and choice) for meat?

Critical Design “Critical design uses speculative designs proposals to challenge narrow assumptions, preconceptions and givens about the role products play in everyday life. It is more of an attitude than anything else, a position rather than a method. Its opposite is affirmative design: design that reinforces the status quo“ (Hertzian Tales, Dunne and Raby, 1999).

We can attribute the roots of critical design to the radical design movement that started in the 1970’s, which was highly critical of prevailing social values and design ideologies, and to the conceptual design movement that started in the 1990’s; during those years there was a general move towards conceptual design, which made it easier for noncommercial forms of design like critical design to exist. The term Critical Design was first used in Anthony Dunne’s book Hertzian Tales (1999) and later in Design Noir (2001) (Dunne & Raby, FAQ).

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Critical design represents a body of work that is a counter force to mainstream conventional design practice, and “it relies on that odd combination of empathy and repulsion, to affect disturbances, to act against the inertia, the routine of our lives”, as Anthony Dunne reflects in his lecture Speculative Everything, from 2013. Critical design is the type of design that creates products or services that are not meant for mass production or big distribution, therefore there is no market for such products. Usually products don’t pass the prototype phase, and services are down to the one pop-up event. Their function is to make people think about the present, about the future, about social issues, and problems of everyday.

In this case, critique is not necessarily negative; it can also be a gentle refusal, a turning away from what already exists. Critical designs are testimonials to what could be, but at the same time, they offer alternatives that highlight weaknesses within existing normality (Dunne & Raby, 2013, p.35).

Critical design as critical thinking means not taking things for granted, being skeptical and always questioning what is given. Critical design is critical thought translated into materiality. It is about thinking through design rather than through words, and using the language and structure of design to engage people. Ultimately, it is “positive and idealistic because we believe that change is possible, that things can be better; it is just that the way of getting there is different; it is an intellectual journey based on challenging and changing values, ideas, and beliefs“ (ibid.).

Dark Design: The Positive Use of Negativity One of critical design’s roles is to question the limited range of emotional and psychological experiences offered through designed products. Design is assumed only to make things nice; this limits and prevents designers from fully engaging with and designing for the complexities of human nature, which of course is not always nice. Critical design can often be dark or deal with dark themes but not just for the sake of it. Dark, complex emotions are usually ignored in design; nearly all the other areas of culture accepts that people are complicated, contradictory, and even neurotic, but not design. Design views people as obedient and predictable users and consumers (Dunne & Raby, 2013, p.38).

In design, darkness creates a frisson that excites and challenges. It is more about the positive use of negativity, not negativity for its own sake, but to draw attention to scary possibility in the form of a cautionary tale. Critical design might borrow heavily from art’s methods and approaches, but is not art. Critical design needs to be closer to the everyday – that’s where its power to disturb lies. It suggests that everyday life, as we know it, could be different, that things could change (ibid.).

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Critical Food Design Because the subject of this thesis is Meat Eating, I place my project in the Critical Food Design, a sub-discipline of Food Design, term defined by Dr. F. Zampollo, founder of the Online School of Food Design. As she states on her website, “Food Design is, simply, the connection between food and Design. Food Design is the design process that leads to innovation on products, services or systems that intervenes in the production, procurement, preservation, transportation, preparation, presentation, consumption, or disposal of food“ (Francesca Zampollo, 2017). Therefore, Critical Food Design is the discipline that makes us think about food and eating issues. It raises awareness, exposes assumptions, provokes actions, and sparks debate on food related issues, problems and future possible scenarios. As seen in the Food Design Diagram designed by Dr. Zampollo (Appendix 5), Critical Food Design is placed outside all the other subdisciplines, and therefore circling all of them, because Critical Food Design has the potential of being applied to any of these subdisciplines.

Emotional Design, Phenomenology, and Aesthetic Strategies In order to gain a better understanding about the potential of critical design to, firstly, question the limited range of emotional and psychological experiences through a designed product, and secondly, to challenge values, ideas, beliefs and consequently change behavior, is needed to understand how emotions work. There is a strong emotional component to how products are designed and put to use. In his book Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things (2004) , Donald A. Norman proposed a framework for analyzing products in a holistic way to include their attractiveness, their behavior, and the image they present to the user. In his work on design, these different aspects of a product were identified with different levels of processing by people: visceral, behavioral, and reflective. These three levels translate into three different kinds of design. Visceral design refers primarily to that initial impact, to its appearance. Behavioral design is about look and feel - the total experience of using a product. And reflection is about one’s thoughts afterwards, how it makes one feel, the image it portrays, and the message it tells others about his taste. These three components interweave both emotions and cognition. Along with emotions, there is one other aspect: aesthetics.

Aesthetic judgment refers to the sensory contemplation or appreciation of an object, while judgments of aesthetic value rely on our ability to discriminate at a sensory level. Aesthetics examines our affective domain response to an object or phenomenon. In order to explore this aspect more, I used a phenomenological perspective and employed aesthetic strategies to lead me in deciding the concept for my design product. However, aesthetic judgments, in the same time, go beyond sensory discrimination, when they engage reflective contemplation, articulated by the intellect, and for this dimension, semiotics comes into play for defining my design concept.

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Phenomenology is the philosophical method which has been initiated at the start of the 20th century by the German philosopher Edmund Husserl. Any philosophy which seeks to take us back to the perceived world is, in its general perspective, empiricist – “we cannot conceive anything that is not perceived or perceptible”; but Merleau Ponty departs from classical empiricism by the use of “a priori” concept – ideas are innate within the mind, and that the role of experience was primarily just to bring them into use by us. The role of the senses in perception is to organize experience in such a way that it presents to us a world of things in a three-dimensional objective space within which we are located as just another object.

In Ponty’s view, an object is a system of properties which present themselves to our various senses and which are united by an act of intellectual synthesis (Ponty, 2004,p.41). The unity of the object is in its various qualities, belonging to the entirely distinct worlds of sight, smell, touch and so on.

Each of these qualities has an affective meaning, which establishes a correspondence between it and the qualities associated with the other senses. Our experience contains numerous qualities that would be almost devoid of meaning if considered separately from the reactions they provoke in our bodies. The unity of the object does not lie behind its qualities, but is reaffirmed by each one of them: each of its qualities is the whole. The things of the world are not simply neutral objects, which stand before us for our contemplation. Each one of them symbolizes or recalls a particular way of behaving, provoking in us reactions that are either favorable or unfavorable (Ponty, 2004).

Our relationship with things is not a distant one: each speaks to our body and to the way we live.

When the aesthetic experience is in focus, the receiver is in focus, and the design product only has an effect, if it is relevant to the receiver. According to Kristine Harper (Harper, 2017), from a philosophical stance, there is a division between the beautiful and the sublime, seen as aesthetic experiences. The beautiful is connected to the symmetrical, harmonic, well-proportioned expression. The sublime, on the other hand, concerns the complexity, darkness, bordering on the unpleasant, in a challenging way - the sublime aesthetic experience momentarily breaks the comfort zone, in order to communicate deeper meanings, containing a prolonged time for detection and interpretation.

The aesthetic strategy is inspired by the beautiful and the sublime, and it can be used as a planning tool in the design process. Based on the phenomenological detection and semiotic decoding, a product or concept can be thought in terms of the pleasure of the familiar, on one end of the spectrum, and the pleasure of the unfamiliar on the other end. Therefore, the objects can be conceived to fit between Instant payoff - Instant presence, Pattern booster - Pattern breaker, Comfort booster - Breaking the comfort zone, Blending in - Standing out. These strategies are applied in tandem with the phenomenological perspective to design the critical design artifact.

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Touch - A sense of perception and communication In my research and design process, I found it necessary to bring an element that has the potential to communicate empathy, and the sense of touch has this ability. Physiologically, touch is a modality resulting from the combined information of the receptors and nerve endings concerned with pressure, temperature, pain and movement. But there is more to touch. It is a sense of communication. It is receptive, expressive, can communicate empathy. It can bring distant objects and people into proximity (Paterson, 2007). Touch is present within every single interaction with objects, and a considerable amount of interaction with people. According to Aristotle, the sight is the superior sense, while touch is relegated to the lowest, basest position in the hierarchy of the senses, from a philosophical viewpoint. Yet touch is crucial to embodied existence. The popular expression says “Seeing is believing, but feeling is the truth”, yet our current cultural perspective has favored one side of the equation, and “seeing is believing” is the oft-remembered and rehearsed part of the phrase. At least in Western industrialized cultures, such attitudes maintain the sensory stereotype whereby vision is predominant, is distanced and even deceitful, whereas touch seems more intimate, reassuring and proximal (ibid.). Touch is associated with verification, the connotations of tangibility being solid, foundational, undeceiving. Touch, like vision, articulates a rich, complex world, a world of movement and exploration, of nonverbal social communication.

It is a carnal world, with its pleasures of feeling and being felt, of tasting and touching the textures of flesh and food. And equally it is a profound world of philosophical verification, of the communication of presence and empathy with others, of the co-implication of body, flesh and world (ibid.).

The feeling of cutaneous touch when an object brushes our skin is simultaneously an awareness of the materiality of the object and awareness of the spatial limits and sensations of our lived body.

Reaching out to touch and caress an animate object, such as a familiar cat, or a warm-cheeked lover, the immediacy of sensation is affirmatory and comforting, involving a mutual co-implication of one’s own body and another’s presence. On the other hand, touch can cement an empathic of affective bond, opening an entirely new channel of communication.

The relationship between vision and touch is a complex one, that works in tandem with memory, learning and emotional associations. Touch is acknowledged not only as indispensable, but as prior to the other sensory modalities. Aesthesis (sense faculty – covering both perception and sensation) is an important notion in conceptualizing sensation, movement and affect, of thinking of the ambiguity of touching and feeling, and of expanding the notion of the “aesthetic” through the phenomenology of touch.

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Affect Theory and Facial Expressions Silvan Tomkins organized his work around the central concern of understanding human motivation: “What do human beings really want?” According to Tomkins, affect is what motivates us, making things urgent. Affects are the biological responses that attach meaning to the stimuli encountered from moment to moment. Affects are the origin of the experience of good and bad, telling us what to pay attention to. Tomkins is the only theorist to offer an account of how gradients or intensities of stimulation can be transformed into qualities of affective experience without invoking a cognitive interpretation (Tomkins, 1977).

There are nine affects, each containing its own unique experiential signature, each attaching a specific type of meaning to information as it is taken in, stored and recalled. Each of the nine innate affects has a characteristic feeling, facial display, and body experience. There are two positive affects: enjoyment-joy helps to pull us toward each other to form bonds of mutual advantage, and interest-excitement drives us toward discovering our world and our experiences, understanding and mastering their rules. On the negative side, we experience fear-terror, distress-anguish, anger-rage, shame-humiliation, disgust, and dissmell, and we try to avoid experiences that result in these affects. There is one neutral affect, surprise-startle, which serves as a reset button, getting our attention and making us look for the next stimulus. Tomkins describes most of the affects as if they were on a continuum to show that, while any given affect has a unique characteristic, there can be a great deal of variation in the intensity of an affective experience. Such nuance is characteristic of Tomkins’ theory, stating that this system is linked, not to static qualities, but to changes. Only a system that responds to the change in the intensity and quality of experience as an organism moves through time and space can serve its needs. Tomkins proposes that affects evolved to favor three outcomes: survival, affinity with people, and discovery of the new.

According to Tomkins, a central characteristic of affects is affective resonance, which refers to a person’s tendency to resonate and experience the same affect in response to viewing a display of that affect by another person, sometimes thought to be “contagion”. Affective resonance is considered to be the original basis for all human communication (Tomkins, 1977).

Tomkins played a critical role in the emergence of research on the face and facial expressions.

He inspired and enabled Paul Ekman to undertake his groundbreaking research that proved the universality of certain facial expressions. Tomkins placed his observations in a coherent framework of affect and emotion. In so doing, he made it possible for observed facial behavior to yield an enormous amount of information. Tomkins believed that studying the face would reveal humanity itself. He emphasized that the study of faces should not be debated on what is innate versus learned, spontaneous versus voluntary. He said, “It is always both and has to be”.

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Voluntary enactments of facial expressions would have no meaning if the innate meanings of facial expressions weren’t already understood (Tomkins.org, 2004). In design, facial expressions can be used and applied when testing an object/concept, giving hints as to what users/consumers truly feel when interacting with it, despite of what they say about it.

Meat eating and the biology of disgust Going back to the problem I am addressing, and moving further with my research, is needed to understand, from a scientific stance, the human nature when it comes to meat eating, and if we are really supposed to eat meat or not. The lecture given by Milton Mills MD in 2012 on Meat Eating and the Biology of Disgust, in Rochester, NY, gives valuable information and builds up the hypothesis that humans are herbivores by nature. His lecture explores what our biology and psychology are trying to tell us about who we are as a species, and what we should eat as opposed to what many of us choose to eat.

He is arguing that humans have the palate of an herbivore, and that we love and crave the tastes, textures, colors and varieties of plant foods. Although people often eat meat, he says that we really don’t like it, and that’s why we are compelled to change its form, taste, and texture to make it acceptable and palatable. In his lecture, he is talking about the psychology and neurobiology of disgust. (Additionally, he explains how we are different from the carnivores in terms of how we see and perceive food, and how the “beauty paradigm” is influencing our food choices - this part is supplementary information, therefore is described in Appendix 6).

Disgust is a universal human emotion with a characteristic facial expression recognized across cultures (Appendix 7). The disgust reflex is present in infants and is one of the six basic human emotions, the other five emotions being happiness, sadness, fear, anger and surprise, and they all mediate appropriate interactions between individuals and the environment, and among individuals within the social group. Disgust is therefore a “hard-wired” neural phenomenon that is an important survival reflex. Disgust is distinguishable from fear in that while fear heightens activity in preparation for “fight or flight”, disgust promotes suspension of activity. Thus, the biological origin and purpose of the disgust facial expression and reflex is to cause us to reject and eject potentially harmful items before they cause ill health, and to rapidly transfer that learned avoidance behavior to the larger social group (Mills, 2012).

There is a wide personal and cultural variation in what is found to be disgusting. Disgust not only encompasses dietary issues, but also has a very strong social component (sexual disgust and

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moral disgust). However, studies have shown there are elicitors of pathogen disgust2 that are consistent across cultures: moist, slimy, wet, soft, sticky, greasy/oily, squishy, putrid/foul, asymmetry, amorphous shapes, flies, blood, decay/rot, animal effluent and flesh, hair/fur, gore, worms, maggots (ibid.).

Food Choices and Disgust Animal flesh in its “unaltered” form has many – if not most – of the characteristics all humans find disgusting. If you were to offer a ragged, squishy, wet, slimy, bloody piece of raw flesh to most humans, they would not eat it – but carnivores love it. If people attempted to eat unpreserved, un-butchered raw flesh without cutlery, many would die from choking or food poisoning and/ or parasitic infections. Our innate aversion to raw and/or putrid animal flesh is surely a survival mechanism meant to protect us from ingesting things we are not designed to eat and that could kill us by causing us to choke to death or die from infections caused by pathogens such as bacteria, viruses and parasites. Carnivores, by contrast, are drawn to decaying flesh and will dine on it for several days with no ill effects (ibid.).

The reason humans first skin, pluck, and “bleed”, and then cut and shape animal flesh, into smooth, rounded, hand-sized objects is so that it will mimic edible plant parts and thereby circumvent our innate disgust response. Why is smooth, annular “symmetry” so attractive and important to us? Because “asymmetry” in plant tissues is usually a sign or signal of disease and, hence, equates with poor nutritive value. When plants are well-watered and receive adequate sun light, Nitrogen and minerals, their tissues, fruits and seed pods are usually symmetrical and well formed. This symmetry or “beauty” signals that these items are likely packed with nutrients, are health promoting and, therefore, are most desirable. When, however, plants are stressed by drought, nutrient-poor soil, inadequate sunlight or are infected/infested with insect or fungal parasites, their tissues and products (i.e. fruits, leaves, seed pods etc.) tend to be shrunken, shriveled, misshapen and/or discolored which are signs that these tissues are very likely nutrient deficient. By contrast, true predators actually desire and actively look for “asymmetry” in their prey because those animals are likely to be defective in some way and, therefore, easier to catch and eat. Furthermore, the reason we season and cook flesh is because these manipulations dry it out and give it the firm texture and taste of plants. Cooking is an entirely unnatural behavior. Thus, the only way humans can tolerate flesh is by consuming it in an “unnatural” fashion. We grill, smoke, and barbecue because wood smoke is a flavoring created when intense heat breaks plant tissues

2. Pathogen disgust is concerned with protecting the individual and the social group from agents or behaviors that represent a proximal and imminent threat to life, limb or health, and possibly, social order (Mills, 2012).

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down into some of the same aromatics found in true spices. Roasting often does not sterilize meat, therefore the origin and purpose of cooking flesh was probably not “hygienic”. More likely, its purpose was to impart taste and texture of plants to flesh. Our manipulations of animal flesh are all designed to circumvent our disgust reflex (ibid.).

Why did humans develop a disgust response to animal flesh?

For an herbivorous species in a primitive environment, eating flesh carries a significant risk of death from choking or gastro-intestinal infection. In Equatorial regions plant foods are abundant year round, and attempting to hunt is energetically wasteful because the energy content of wild plant foods and wild game are nearly equal such that expending energy hunting does not improve survival. Furthermore, hunting carries a risk of serious injury and/or premature death, which would significantly reduce the chances of successfully raising young and propagating one’s genes.

Wild plant foods are more nutritious than wild game due to their higher content of vitamins, antioxidants, phytochemicals and fiber, and their lack of pathogenic bacteria and viruses. Lastly, distaste for violence and killing is a necessary prerequisite for a social species whose survival was dependent upon cooperation, interdependence and the sharing of food resources. Killing is so antithetical to our nature that in every human society all killing – whether animal or human – must be considered justifiable. “Killing for the sake of killing” is universally viewed as reprehensible. Out of our “inherited” aversion to bloodletting and violence grows our sense of morality and ethics, which cause us to create laws and judicial systems. It also leads us to reject and ostracize selfish, violence-prone individuals, and to promote the “greater good” through philanthropy, cooperation, caring and sharing (Mills, 2012).

The psychology and moral value of disgust In order to grasp a higher understanding of how disgust goes beyond the bodily visceral reactions, and to see how this emotion works in creating and sustaining our social and cultural reality, I employed Kolnai’s views on visceral values and disgust. He assumes that affective responses are the means by which the human mind apprehends certain qualities in the world, most importantly, those qualities that pertain to the value or disvalue of objects. Beyond the aversive response as the body’s protective mechanisms, disgust helps us to grasp hierarchies of values, to cope with morally sensitive situations, and to discern and maintain cultural order. At the same time, the fact that the emotion is quick and reactive may serve to cancel out the certain grounds by leading one to reflect on the reasons why disgust is aroused. Thus the experience of disgust both grounds moral perspectives and casts doubt upon their validity. It is therefore by no means a simple, visceral reaction whose cause is obvious and whose meaning is transparent (Kolnai, 2004).

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Disgust is an emotion with highly complex psychology, highly cognitive, which provides information about features of the outer world not readily available by other means, revealing something about the complexities and shadows of our inner psychic life. It is one of the aversive emotions, together with fear, contempt, horror and loathing.

Max Scheler3 developed the idea that feelings serve to provide a cognitive basis for ethics in the same sort of way that thinking provides the cognitive basis for logic. Feelings are a way of coming to know certain entities called values, just as thinking is a way of coming to know certain other entities called facts. For Scheler, emotions “are absolutely and unproblematically sensitive to value.

Feelings ought to be accorded equal rights with thinking as a route to or source of knowledge” (Kolnai, 2004, p.7). He thereby extended the phenomenological method from the rather intellectualistic realms into the more intuitive territories of feeling and emotion. Kolnai echoes some of his trust in the ability of emotions to reveal the world in his treatment of disgust. For him, emotions are not mere feelings, agitations or commotions that occur in the mind, and aren’t sensations such as pleasures or pains; emotions “reach out” towards their objects; are “about” something, directed towards some object (real, imaginary, or state of affairs). In this way, emotions yield a type of cognition that is unavailable by any means other than emotional experience itself.

When we are disgusted by an object, we have an immediate understanding of its qualities and an intuition of its nature to which unaided reason would be blind. Additionally, cognition leads to beliefs, which leads to emotions. The involuntary component of disgust leads to consideration of the powerful and central role of the bodily senses in the activation of this emotion, leading to discerning of values that are innate and sometimes shaped by the social and cultural contexts, and sometimes goes even further back, to our human nature and survival of the species.

A unique feature of disgust is its requirement that there be a sensory experience, a trigger to activate it. Researchers who are interested in disgust as a mechanism that has evolved for protective responses tend to place the sense of taste at the center of the emotion. Darwin, for instance, saw disgust as a response that indicates the opposite of gustatory pleasure, linking it with the rejection of objects that are considered inappropriate to eat. Further on, Darwin claims that emotions are responses that have evolved for certain purposes to ensure the wellbeing of the species – this perspective tends to minimize the cognitive aspects of emotions and to emphasize their mechanical features. Disgust, as a fundamentally rejection emotion, reduces sensory contact with distasteful substances in the mouth cavity and tends toward expelling those substances. Taste, with its role in eating and drinking, is also “the sense closest to the most powerful visceral response to what is disgusting: vomiting” (Kolnai, 2004, p.15). Other theorists of disgust are more inclined to

3. German philosopher known for his work in phenomenology, ethics, and philosophical anthropology, the most notorious and influential member of the Munich school.

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emphasize smell, and Kolnai belongs to this group. Smell occurs with a degree of distance between the experiencing subject and the object of perception, and therefore it has a larger compass than does taste. Seeing, touching, and smelling all grasp the materiality of objects, which is where the central quality of the disgusting reside. Proximity is also a feature of the experience of disgust, for by being near a disgusting object one risks contamination. Like infection, disgust spreads – from the disgusting object to the disgusted subject.

The role of the proximity of the disgusting object engenders speculation about the meaning of the object and why it triggers this particular emotion: whether it threatens, contaminates, scares, or just plain revolts. Kolnai analyzes the intentional objects of disgust and those features of objects that typically inspire the peculiar revulsion that is characteristic of this emotion. He enumerates some exemplary traits of what he terms the materially disgusting, beginning with “putrefaction, excrement, bodily secretions, and dirt, and continuing with disgusting animals, foods in certain conditions, exaggerated fertility, disease and deformation” (Kolnai, 2004, p.16). The objects of material disgust share the impression of life gone bad. Kolnai notes the borderline that disgust walks between life and death. Certainly, in experiencing disgust we perceive also the threat of the disgusting; but this threat does not present itself with the kind of power that would trigger fear. The object of disgust lingers in consciousness as something disturbing, yet “less than I.” Fear and disgust are twin emotions that together comprise horror. Even though fear and disgust occur together so frequently that they sometimes appear to be a unified experience, Kolnai’s meticulous separation of the two that he derives from the application of his phenomenological approach is confirmed by certain physiological studies of these emotions: psychologists note that a subject experiencing fear, for instance, has an elevated pulse, while with disgust the heart rate slows.

Neurological investigation indicates that recognition of the two emotions is processed at different areas of the brain: the amygdala for fear, the insula and basal ganglia for disgust (ibid.).

Disgust and Moral Suspicion Moral disgust is an important part of an ethical sensibility, and it helps us to grasp and to feel aversion towards certain character and behavior flaws that require serious attention. Although Kolnai treats disgust as at least a reliable starting point for moral condemnation, other theorists are more cautious. William Ian Miller notes the dangerous quality of disgust, which not only recoils from, but degrades its object, indicating the peculiar power of this emotion. He has in mind the origin of this emotion in responses to material objects and their sensible features; as Miller puts it “Disgust makes beauty and ugliness a matter of morals” (Kolnai, 2004, p.23). Moreover, for Kolnai, the notions of excess and redundancy are also sources of disgust, and encompass things like sentimentality, as an emotional distortion of the value of an intentional object. Some other categories of moral disgust in Kolnai’s views are the lies, falsehood, and betrayal as corruption of

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the truth in all its forms. All these are interpreted as varieties of the decay of character. This by no means implies that disgust is a route to moral or normative certainty; there are situations in which it is morally requisite to overcome initial disgust and readjust one’s judgment of a situation.

At the same time, disgust is attuned to certain values, a way to discover those real properties that the world presents. Surely disgust may be misdirected, and it requires reflection and judgments of reason. Just as impressions of the senses may mislead, so emotions are not free from error. Yet this does not remove the importance of disgust as an indicator and measure of qualities and values in the world (Kolnai, 2004).

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Solution

The research and the analysis led me to reconceive the meat packaging as an instrument of communication (Appendix 8). Because critical design needs to be made physical, and the physical presence of the artifact can engage our senses through phenomenological detection, I decided to change the materiality of the packaging, setting the scene for a tactile experience. Therefore, I redesigned the meat packaging, and instead of using plastic, I decided to use fur to cover the meat trays, inviting the presence of the animal in the interaction between the subject and the object.

This way, I intend to appeal to people’s sense of touch and emotional memory, to remind them that meat is coming from an animal (Appendix 9). I decided to keep the existing shape of the package, so people relate easier with what they are used to, and to have an impact afterwards, when they will see the real package in the supermarket.

By interacting with this object, the experience is split in two phases: first one, the phenomenological detection, where the person is touching, holding and identifying the object by engaging the sense of touch, involving the pleasure of touch and the familiarity of the material, and the second phase, the semiotic decoding of the object, when the package is opened and the meat is found inside, producing a visceral reaction. In this instance, by the juxtaposition of the two materials, fur and meat, in one object, the interpretation of the symbols lays at the level of our understanding and experience with the “other”, and the sudden realization that what one is holding in his hands are parts of an animal. The aesthetic strategies used to create the concept and to redesign the package are following the sublime experience; from a phenomenological stance, the object is Instant Present, characterized by ambiguity and prolonged detection; is Pattern Breaker, disrupting routines, challenging physical expectations, breaking habits, creating confusing product usage, where functionality is challenged by the unconventional use of materials. From a semiotic stance, the object receives an added symbolic value, by Breaking the Comfort Zone: basic assumptions are challenged, contains a surprise element where “Something happens” (unexpected and unpredictable), uncanny discomfort, forced self-awareness (Appendix 10). By discovering the meat inside the furry package, the person receives the connotations of this material, that in this instance (juxtaposition with fur), receives the meaning of flesh (the muscle body of the animal), and not meat (food), leading to what Norman identified as the reflective level of interaction with the object.

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This object is a critical design artifact and its main purpose is to engage people to think about the fact that meat is coming from an animal, to involve the affect as a communication instrument, provoking disgust (physical and moral), and leading to reflection on our nature, our practices and habits around meat eating. The context for this object to be experienced is an unconventional testing environment, where the aim is to research through design, and practically showing what is supported by the scientific data, in accordance with the social and ideological studies: that we are disgusted by meat, but we are conditioned to eat it due to the cognitive dissonance sustained by the meat industry (and institutions alike). The testing is aimed to invite people to interact with the object, and their reactions and attitudes to be recorded, and afterwards interpreted using a facial expression analyzer (e.g. Affectiva - Facial Expression Analysis Engine Integrated in iMotions). The results will be used to test the proposed hypothesis, and to verify the design concept and its emotional function.

Additionally, for this design concept to reach a wider audience, I decided that Anima is a relevant and appropriate sender for this communication. This way, the communication is supported by an authority, increasing the viability of the prototype to reach its scope. Anima is a Danish animal rights organization founded in 2000, and its core focus is on factory farms and the fur industry.

Anima works by organizing protests, raising awareness about animal abuse, and providing information and advice on vegan/vegetarian eating (Anima, 2017). Therefore, a communication product, designed as a strategy using guerilla marketing, through the medium of an exhibition (pop-up event), and the advertising media, where video content of the people’s interaction with the redesigned package could be imagined to follow a certain narrative and scenario; the strategy could imply two levels of interaction and reaction with the prototype: the first one is at the personal level, where a person interacts with the object - the sense of touch (empathy) together with the sense of sight (surprise, disgust) communicating the presence of the animal, leading to reflection and questioning; a second level would be when the first scene is recorded, and used as video content distributed to reach a wider audience, where the facial expressions and body reactions communicate through what Tomkins defined as affective resonance.

For instance, PETA is using product design, as a critical design prototyping, to address the problem of the use of leather to produce luxury items, and by changing the appearance and functionality of various accessories (bags, shoes, gloves, belts), the customers are confronted with the cruel reality of where the skins are coming from. Using the setup of a pop-up luxury store - which conceptualized and created by Ogilvy & Mather Advertising Bangkok, the customers are shocked by a snake’s or a crocodile’s still-beating heart or an alligator’s intestines that contract and expand, where blood-like and other disgusting materials are used, hidden in the items that apparently are commercialized in the shop. This event is used for a video advertising - Behind the leather (2016) (Appendix 11). This is an example of how the meat packaging could be used as a critical design prototype to communicate, by using visceral emotions, in a media such as a pop-up event or exhibition, and contextualized in an advertising video to reach a wider audience.

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Conclusion

“The biggest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance; is the illusion of knowledge.”

- Daniel J. Boorstin

Design can help raise awareness of the consequences of our actions as citizen-consumers. By presenting people with a critical design product, which is improbable, but charged with sublime aesthetic experience, semiotic value, and emotional function, people can engage critically with it as citizen-consumers. Being faced with a complex mix of contradictory emotions and responses opens up new perspectives on the debate about meat eating. In a consumer society like ours, it is through buying goods that reality takes shape. Not just physical reality or cultural, but psychological, ethical, and behavioral. One of the purposes of the critical design artifact I am proposing is to help us become more discerning consumers, to encourage people to demand more from the industry and society as critical consumers.

The key insights found in conducting this report and analysis is that we are conditioned by carnism to consume animal products, when in fact we have the palate of an herbivore, and we are disgusted by meat in its unaltered form. Because of the way meat and animal products are presented, and the way the meat industry is using communication design to sell their products, there is a high cognitive dissonance towards meat eating, reducing empathy and disgust, making it easier to choose to eat meat. Disgust is a strong emotional reaction that helps us survive and discern moral values; by changing the materiality of the meat packaging, and through the juxtaposition of fur and flesh, I am exploring the potential of the critical design artifact to communicate the link between animal and meat; moreover, I am exploring how the aesthetic experience given by phenomenological detection through the sense of touch, and through semiotic decoding can communicate that disgust and empathy are necessary to change our perceptions, values and beliefs, and consequently our behaviour, through awareness.

As Dr. Joy says, “awareness is the greatest threat to carnism, because with awareness, we can make choices that reflect what we authentically think and feel, rather than what we have been taught to think and feel. Without awareness there is no free choice.” The opposite to carnism is veganism, the fastest growing social justice movements in the world today, due to the demand of

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democratization and transparency in food production, and the psychological and ethical dimensions of this ideology. This is the ultimate solution to the problem of meat eating, and for a better world we need to understand that our tastes and habits need to change.

Perspectives

The approach for this report is from a critical design perspective, and focused on the ability of human beings to respond emotionally to the impact that meat industry has on our relationship with the environment and other non-human beings. It explores how an everyday object, found in every supermarket, once its materiality changed, has the ability to communicate through emotional design the visceral values, which are necessary to spark reflection and debate. Additionally, this report is conceived based on empirical data gathered from surveys, and supported by the chosen theories; taking an audience’s perspective into the analysis could also have been applied. This perspective is taken into account for future investigation, where the recording of people interacting with the object could be analyzed and contextualized in a coherent narrative.

As a hypothetical perspective, affirmative design could have been applied to address the meat eating problem, in the context where other entities and institutions concluded that a carnistic diet is affecting our health, is destroying the environment and is creating unnecessary suffering for the animals. Institutions like medicine, education, and law could suggest and implement a paradigm shift in the way society is perceiving our relationship with other living beings, and regulate the meat industry, as a first step, by reducing the production, and eventually stop the practice. For this approach, I suggest that the meat packaging display facts and information about the impact it has on our health, and more than that, to display messages that persuade people to eat less meat (Appendix 12). Of course, this proposal defies the scope of the industry, therefore is not a realistic solution, unless is compelled by governmental decisions (as in the case of tobacco industry).

In any of the perspectives, information, awareness, and empathy are not only necessary, but vital elements to build a better future, a more sustainable existence, that can lead to a peaceful and thriving society, for all the inhabitants of this planet.

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Bastian, B., Loughnan, S., Haslam, N., Radke, H. R. M. (2011). Don’t Mind Meat? The Denial of Mind to Animals Used for Human Consumption. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. Xx, SAGE (-), 1-10.

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Castricano, J. (Editor), Simonsen, R. R. (Editor). (2016). Critical Perspectives on Veganism - Forward. CH: Palgrave Macmillan Animal Ethics.

DesignKit. (2014). How Might We. [Online] Available: http://www.designkit.org/methods/3. Last accessed 15th Oct 2017.

Dunne, A., Raby, F. (2013). Critical Design FAQ. [Online] Available: http://www.dunneandraby.co.uk/content/bydandr/13/0.

Last accessed 17th Oct 2017.

Dunne, A. (2013). Speculative Everything Anthony Dunne at Resonate 2013. [Online] Available: https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=QbVHXrCBFBE&t=252s. Last accessed 29th Oct 2017.

Dunne, A., Raby, F. (2013). Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming. Massachusetts Institute of Technology: MIT Press.

Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. (2006). Livestock a major threat to environment. [Online] Available: http://www.fao.org/newsroom/en/news/2006/1000448/index.html. Last accessed 24th Oct 2017.

Francesca Zampollo. (2017). What is Food Design?. [Online] Available: http://francesca-zampollo.com/food-design/. Last accessed 1st Nov 2017.

Harper, K. H. (2017). Aesthetic Sustainability: Product Design and Sustainable Usage. New York: Routledge.

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Joy, M. (2015). Toward Rational, Authentic Food Choices | Melanie Joy | TEDxMĂźnchen. [Online] Available: https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=o0VrZPBskpg&t=7s. Last accessed 10th Oct 2017.

Kolko, J. (2017). Wicked Problems. [Online] Available: https://www.wickedproblems.com/1_wicked_problems.php. Last accessed 1st Nov 2017.

Kolnai, A., Smith, B. (Editor), Korsmeyer, C. (Editor). (2004). On Disgust - Visceral Values. USA: Carus Publishing Company.

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Kunst, J. R., Hohle, S. M. (2016). Meat eaters by dissociation: How we present, prepare and talk about meat increases willingness to eat meat by reducing empathy and disgust. Appetite. 105 (-), 758-774.

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Mills, M. (2012). Meat Eating and the Biology of Disgust, November 18, 2012, Rochester, NY [online] Available: https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=W6HrEkPrLx0&t=4s. Last accessed 29th Oct 2017.

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Appendix Appendix 1

A - Meat packages displaying a simplified depiction of the animal

Images Source: Self taken photos in various supermarkets in Copenhagen

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Appendix 1

A - Meat packages displaying a simplified depiction of the animal

Images Source: Self taken photos in various supermarkets in Copenhagen

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Appendix 1

B - Meat packages displaying an idealized farm image

Images Source: Self taken photos in various supermarkets in Copenhagen

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Appendix 1

C - Meat packages displaying cooked meat as a plated dish

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Appendix 2 A/B Manifesto by Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby

38

Appendix 3 Survey #1 results (1/3)

39

Appendix 3 Survey #1 results (2/3)

40

Appendix 3 Survey #1 results (3/3)

41

Appendix 3 Survey #2 results (1/3)

What is your gender?

75 out of 75 people answered this question 1

Female

51 / 68%

2

Male

23 / 31%

3

Other

1 / 1%

What is your age group?

74 out of 75 people answered this question 1

20 ­ 29

43 / 58%

2

30 ­ 39

20 / 27%

3

40 ­ 49

8 / 11%

4

50 ­ 59

2 / 3%

5

14 ­ 19

1 / 1%

6

60 ­ 69

0 / 0%

7

70+

0 / 0%

Do you eat meat?

75 out of 75 people answered this question 1

Not anymore

26 / 35%

2

Yes, a few times a week

26 / 35%

3

Yes, every day

12 / 16%

4

Yes, but very rarely

11 / 15%

5

No, never did

0 / 0%

If yes, why do you eat meat?

54 out of 75 people answered this question

42

1

I like the taste

37 / 69%

2

It's part of my culture/tradition

19 / 35%

3

I don't know what else to eat

13 / 24%

Appendix 3 Survey #2 results (2/3)

4

I think I need it (protein)

13 / 24%

5

Other

13 / 24%

6

I think we are omnivores and we are supposed to eat meat

12 / 22%

7

I think is healthy

11 / 20%

8

I like the texture, I like how it feels to eat it (chew, swallow)

0 / 0%

If you don't eat meat, why is that?

43 out of 75 people answered this question 1

I think is bad for the environment to sustain the meat industry

38 / 88%

2

I think is bad for my health

27 / 63%

3

I think is cruel to kill and eat animals

26 / 60%

4

I don't like the taste

10 / 23%

5

Other

4 / 9%

6

I grew up vegetarian

0 / 0%

When you buy meat, what are you looking for?

52 out of 75 people answered this question 1

Quality ­ appearance (colour, fat, blood)

34 / 65%

2

Free range / "Happy meat"

24 / 46%

3

Organic, Ecologic

24 / 46%

4

Price

19 / 37%

5

Other

3 / 6%

What would discourage you from eating meat?

61 out of 75 people answered this question 1

Facts about the impact it has on the environment

36 / 59%

2

Facts about the impact it has on my health

29 / 48%

3

Origin of the meat (cow, pig, dog, horse, etc.)

27 / 44%

4

Smell

24 / 39%

continues next page >>

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Appendix 3 Survey #2 results (3/3) >> from previous page 5

To see the animal where the meat is coming from

20 / 33%

6

To see footage from an animal farm

19 / 31%

7

Price

15 / 25%

8

Taste

15 / 25%

9

Other

4 / 7%

When you see this picture, what do you see?

74 out of 75 people answered this question

1

2

Dead animal

50 / 68%

Food

24 / 32%

When you see this picture, what do you see?

72 out of 75 people answered this question

1

2

Food

41 / 57%

Dead animal

31 / 43%

When you see this picture, what do you see?

73 out of 75 people answered this question

1

2

44

Food

50 / 68%

Dead animal

23 / 32%

Appendix 4 Survey #2 results - picture test

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Appendix 5 Food Design Diagram by Dr. Francesca Zampollo

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Appendix 6

How humans see and perceive food To understand how we recognize and identify things that are disgusting, we must understand how our brains “see” and “perceive”. Before we become “consciously” aware of something, our “sub-conscious” brain recognizes the salient features of the object we are looking at and automatically routes the visual information to the appropriate “conscious” brain recognition centers. This is illustrated by how we see and perceive faces. Our propensity to see faces is so strong we are able to see “faces” in line drawings and abstract shapes. Correctly identifying and appropriately responding to potentially nutritious food items is critically important because an “inappropriate” disgust response to food leads to an eating disorder, which leads to starvation, which leads to death. The mechanisms we use to recognize faces are similar to those we use to identify “food”.

To avoid evoking a “disgust response” to potentially nutritious food, our brain uses “preconscious” visual cues to invoke “food-interest attention” in appropriate items. The brain is able to do this because of the perceptive properties of the human eye and the neural wiring of our visual cortex. The human eye is designed to perceive color and fine detail (10x>carnivores), which helps us, find and recognize edible plants and plant parts. Much of our incredible visual processing and ability comes from the computing power of our visual cortex. 70% of the neurons in the brain are connected in some way to the visual cortex. Humans can “see“ a range of 10 million hues. We can rapidly shift from “deep” to “near” focus, as well as easily switch from “panoramic viewing” to looking for the “fine detail”. This kind of vision is helpful when looking for food from plant sources since plants tend to package edible parts in “showy” and/or stereotypical forms (i.e. fruits, seeds, pods, leaves, roots, tubers, etc.) (Mills, 2012).

Edible plant parts are generally brightly colored, smooth-edged, discretely shaped objects, small enough to be held in the hand. In order for the items to be perceived as potential food, therefore, they must be smooth-edged, discretely shaped, symmetrical and, preferably hand-sized and colorful. These characteristics are the visual cues that signal “food” or “good food” to our subconscious brain and thereby stimulate “food interest attention” in humans. Moreover, to perceive an object as “food”, it must not only have the aforementioned characteristics, but it must also have the smell, taste, and texture of plants and/or plant parts – and it must NOT move (ibid.).

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How carnivores see and perceive food Carnivores see in a black and white “pixelated mosaic” that is geared towards detecting movement. Thus “motion” is the visual cue that stimulates “food-interest attention” in carnivores.

Predators are hard-wired to chase anything that moves because if something is moving, it can likely be eaten, and often carnivores begin feeding on prey while it is still alive and moving. Natural meat eaters are stimulated by bloody, raw flesh, and willingly eat putrid, rotting flesh; these animals will kill without reservation or remorse, especially if the prey is perceived to be weak, sick or vulnerable (e.g. young, old or disabled) (Mills, 2012).

We are natural herbivores It has long been recognized that humans have an innate aversion (i.e. “disgust response”) to the sight of blood and dismemberment. Lightheadedness or fainting at the sight of blood and/ or dismemberment is equally common in both men and women. Studies show that this loss of consciousness or lightheadedness is the result of a Central Nervous System (CNS) reflex that causes a drop in heart rate and blood pressure leading to decreased perfusion of the brain. A likely reason for the existence of the blood/injury/violence phobia reflex is to serve as a “brake” on interpersonal conflict in a social species that does not have instinctual “ritualized behaviors” that regulate and limit such conflicts. Unfortunately, research and experience have consistently shown that humans can become inured to the sight of blood, and our aversion to violence and dismemberment can be overcome by conditioning, training and socialization. This ability to overcome our innate nature has both good and bad aspects. For example, it has allowed society to train surgeons, nurses and paramedics. Tragically, however, it has also allowed us to create soldiers, weapons, and the atrocity of war. Humankind’s distaste for blood, bloodletting and violence is probably why we have created specific professional classes such as soldiers, butchers and executioners to perform tasks we find repellant, and then leave them to deal with the PTSD’s and other negative psychological fallout that stem from violating our intrinsic nature. The bottom line is that a blood/injury/violence phobia reflex could NOT exist in a true predator species. It will clearly be maladaptive for a predator to pass out or become lightheaded and nauseous at the point at which it begin to kill its prey. Hence, the human aversion to blood, violence and dismemberment shows that we are NOT “natural” predators. Human anatomy, physiology, disease susceptibilities and psychology unequivocally demonstrate that we are natural herbivores (Mills, 2012).

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The “Beauty Paradigm” Species survival in nature is fundamentally a question of “energy out vs energy in”. If animals expend more energy procuring their food than they can extract from the food they obtain, they will starve to death and cease to exist as a species. For this reason, all true predator species seek “ugly” food. That is, they desire food that requires a minimum expenditure of energy to obtain. This means they will not and do not waste time and energy pursuing the strongest and healthiest (i.e. “fittest”) members of prey species. Instead, they pursue the sick, old, lame, stupid or very young; and/or they look for food that is already dead (carrion). Behaving in this manner ensures that they will ultimately strengthen the gene pool of their prey species by weeding out the “less fit”. By contrast, herbivores seek “beautiful” food (i.e. fresh, verdant, vibrant foliage and fruit etc.) because it is the most nutritious. When we, because of our “herbivore mindset”, select the most beautiful and robust members of species we choose to prey on, we weaken the gene pool of those species and drive them towards extinction (Mills, 2012).

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Appendix 7 Disgust and facial expressions

Eyebrows In extreme disgust, the eyebrows are lowered forming a ‘V’ above the nose and producing wrinkles on the forehead. In mild disgust, the eyebrows may only be slightly lowered or not lowered at all.

Eyes Eyes are made as narrow as possible by bringing the eyelids together. In extreme disgust, it appears as if the eyes are almost completely shut. This is the mind’s attempt to block out the disgusting thing from our sight. Out of sight, out of mind.

Nose The nostrils are pulled straight up producing wrinkles on the bridge and sides of the nose. This action also raises the cheeks forming an inverted ‘U’ type wrinkle on the sides of the nose.

Lips In extreme disgust, both the lips- upper and lower- are raised as high as possible with the lip corners turned down as in sadness. This is the expression that we make when we are about to vomit. That which disgusts us makes us want to puke. In mild disgust, both the lips are only slightly raised and the lip corners may not be turned down.

Chin Chin may be pulled back because we are often threatened by the things that disgust us. A circular wrinkle appears on the chin, easily observed in women and clean-shaven men but concealed in bearded men.

Source: Parvez, H.. (2015). Facial expressions: Disgust. Available: http://www.psychmechanics. com/2015/06/facial-expressions-disgust.html. Last accessed 29th Oct 2017.

Images Source: gettyimages.com

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Appendix 7 Disgust and facial expressions

51

Appendix 8

Mindmap

52

Appendix 9

Packaging prototype - sketches

53

Appendix 9

Packaging prototype - Proposed solution

54

Appendix 9

Packaging prototype - thinkering in the maker lab

55

Appendix 10

Aesthetic Strategy Model

Based on and inspired from: Harper, K. H. (2017). Aesthetic Sustainability: Product Design and Sustainable Usage. New York: Routledge

56

Appendix 11 PETA commercial - Behind the leather PETA. (2016). Behind the Leather. [Online] Available: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qs8yqcrqo1s.

57

Appendix 12

Affirmative Design Proposal - Meat Packaging - prototype

58

“The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated.�

- Mahatma Gandhi

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