For The Long Time
From climate change to Covid-19 to continued racial injustice, 2020 has been a poignant reminder that we need longer-term thinking to tackle the existential risks we face and create a better world for future generations.
Currently, much of society isn’t prepared for longer-term thinking. Limiting our thinking to short timeframes leaves us helpless for long-term risks like climate change. The result is that we often end up making choices which harm, rather than help, future generations. Our capacity to care about the future is crucial to our ability to safeguard it; we need to feel an emotional connection to future generations.
Art, design and culture are crucial to cultivating long-term attitudes and behaviours. They inform our collective direction of travel, from the kinds of laws we make, to the technology we develop, to the way we think about our role in shaping the future.
Brief set by
RSA Student Design Awards Brief 2020-21
Discipline
Branding, Marketing, Illustration
The challenge
How might we encourage people and communities to think and act for the long-term?
Research shows that 50% of mental health problems are established by age 14, a lot of this is due to excessive use of smartphones, as teenagers are spending an average of 7 hours and 22 minutes on their phone a day.
My aim was to find a solution that reduces the average daily time spent on phones by teenagers, and instead put more focus into doing physical activities that can benefit them in the long-term.
Work Bucket is a volunteering service designed to get people between the ages of 12-16 to spend less time on their phones and put more focus into doing physical activities which are productive and help them learn valuable, personal skills. Volunteers will hand in their phones in a bucket for the day, to prevent distractions while they work.
There will be a reward system in place for extrinsic motivation, where every month a group of volunteers will get the chance to receive a prize at the end, such as tickets to Thorpe Park. They will wear different coloured bracelets each month for group identity.
