Bloomer : a magazine promoting sustainable fashion

"Seasons” in the fashion world have little to do with temperature. Fashion’s increasingly rapid turnover is meant to boost producers’ profits and respond to consumers’ desire for novelty. On the down side, “fast fashion” comes with grave environmental and social costs. Bloomer is a magazine and an online platform that aims to slow down the conversation around fashion, and offer a platform for reflection and appreciation. In a throwaway culture, what does it mean when someone rebels by keeping and cherishing a garment for years? What makes people value some garments more than others? Is it the labor value in its creation, or sentimental value gained through lived experience, or the status value in its brand identity? The aura of a garment is a complex intersection of market forces, cultural ideals, and metaphysical subtleties. Rather than scolding or guilting people into adopting more sustainable wardrobes, Bloomer takes a positive approach to sustainability by featuring glamorous Austinites wearing their own clothes, sharing their stories of sustainable consumption, and promoting local thrift shops and sources of high-quality “slow fashion.” The first issue of Bloomer features a series of photos documenting how a variety of people practice sustainable fashion. Using the visual and written language of advertising and fashion, is it possible to cultivate an appreciation for the garments we already own, and for sustainable wardrobe practices? The goal of Bloomer as a magazine about sustainable fashion is to show pictures and tell stories of people who have unique and meaningful relationships with their clothes, and encourage the rest of us to ask ourselves “What is my relationship with my clothes?”Desig

Influencing interaction: Development of the design with intent method

Persuasive Technology has the potential to influence user behavior for social benefit, e.g. to reduce environmental impact, but designers are lacking guidance choosing among design techniques for influencing interaction. The Design with Intent Method, a ‘suggestion tool’ addressing this problem, is introduced in this paper, and applied to the briefs of reducing unnecessary household lighting use, and improving the efficiency of printing, primarily to evaluate the method’s usability and guide the direction of its development. The trial demonstrates that the DwI Method is quick to apply and leads to a range of relevant design concepts. With development, the DwI Method could be a useful tool for designers working on influencing user behavior

The Creative Planning Strategy and the Question of Social Advertising in Nigeria’s Democracy

This paper questions the efficacy of social adverts in promoting Nigeria’s democracy and proposes creative planning as a key strategy for designing effective media messages for effective democratic principles. Social advertising pleads a course through advocacy, social mobilization or behavior change communication. The business of democracy is to get the people involved in the business of leadership. Many media messages created to inform and educate the citizenry under democratic set-ups in Nigeria have been ineffective with regards to changing behavior of the citizens towards a particular course. The creative planning strategy under consideration in this paper involves the steps in the creation of media messages with focus on variables such as discourse, dramatic logic or arguments, signs and significations and the audience. Basic questions in this paper include: Why are social adverts used as tools in promoting democratic values? Are the social adverts used in Nigeria predicated on the creative planning strategy? To what extent have the social adverts contributed to the promotion of democratic principles in Nigeria? The paper examines some advertising theories as applied to message development and questions the basis for creating or designing most media messages in promoting democratic values in Nigeria. The methodology adopted in this paper is analysis and recommendations will be based on the finding

Environmental Innovations: Institutional Impacts on Co-operations for Sustainable Development

A suitable strategy for achieving sustainable development is to foster environmental innovations. Environmental innovations, however, suffer from so-called "double externalities", because apart from innovation spillovers they also improve the quality of public environmental goods, which can be used without cost by free riders. Those innovation spillovers can be avoided through co-operation. Furthermore co-operations can be considered as advantageous because environmental innovations often depend on interaction in research and development, production, selling and disposal. This paper analyzes as to what extent institutional factors impact co-operative arrangements of innovative organizations in the development of new environmental technologies. It applies a multi-dimensional institutional analysis focusing not only on institutional arrangements which exist among organizations but also on opportunities and constraints provided by the institutional environment in which these organizations are embedded. Expanding the existing research we will conclude what kind of policy measure may support the success within networks of environmental oriented innovators.Environmental innovation, Co-operation, Sustainability, Institutional analysis, Policy measures

Understanding sustainable diets: a descriptive analysis of the determinants and processes that influence diets and their impact on health, food security, and environmental sustainability

The confluence of population, economic development, and environmental pressures resulting from increased globalization and industrialization reveal an increasingly resource-constrained world in which predictions point to the need to do more with less and in a “better” way. The concept of sustainable diets presents an opportunity to successfully advance commitments to sustainable development and the elimination of poverty, food and nutrition insecurity, and poor health outcomes. This study examines the determinants of sustainable diets, offers a descriptive analysis of these areas, and presents a causal model and framework from which to build. The major determinants of sustainable diets fall into 5 categories: 1) agriculture, 2) health, 3) sociocultural, 4) environmental, and 5) socioeconomic. When factors or processes are changed in 1 determinant category, such changes affect other determinant categories and, in turn, the level of “sustainability” of a diet. The complex web of determinants of sustainable diets makes it challenging for policymakers to understand the benefits and considerations for promoting, processing, and consuming such diets. To advance this work, better measurements and indicators must be developed to assess the impact of the various determinants on the sustainability of a diet and the tradeoffs associated with any recommendations aimed at increasing the sustainability of our food system

Greening through schooling:Understanding the link between education and pro-environmental behavior in the Philippines

In recent years, changing lifestyle, consumption and mobility patterns have contributed to a global rise in greenhouse gases responsible for the warming of the planet. Despite its increasing relevance, there is a lack of understanding of factors influencing the environmental behavior of people from emerging economies. In this study, we focus on the role of formal education for pro-environmental behavior in the Philippines and study three potentially underlying mechanisms explaining the education effects: differential knowledge about climate change, risk perceptions, and awareness. Whilst there is some evidence showing that education is associated with pro-environmental behavior, little is known about the actual mechanisms through which it influences decision-making. Using propensity score methods, we find that an additional year of schooling significantly increases the probability of pro-environmental actions, e.g. planting trees, recycling, and proper waste management, by 3.3%. Further decomposing the education effects, it is found that education influences behavior mainly by increasing awareness about the anthropogenic causes of climate change, which may consequently affect the perception of self-efficacy in reducing human impacts on the environment. Knowledge and perceptions about climate risks also explain the education effect on pro-environmental behavior, but to a lesser extent

A validity and reliability study of the Attitudes toward Sustainable Development scale

This article describes the development and validation of the Attitudes toward Sustainable Development scale, a quantitative 20-item scale that measures Italian university students\u2019 attitudes toward sustainable development. A total of 484 undergraduate students completed the questionnaire. The validity and reliability of the scale was statistically tested by computing the KMO and Bartlett tests and via an exploratory factor analysis, descriptive statistics, Cronbach\u2019s alpha, a confirmatory factor analysis and a multi-group invariance testing. The results of the principal components factor analysis show that the scale consists of the following four dimensions, with five items in each: environment, economy, society and education. The overall structure and measurement of the scale are confirmed by the confirmatory factor analysis and by the multi-group invariance testing. Internal reliability, which was found using Cronbach\u2019s alpha, varies between .660 and .854. The results show that the instrument meets the validity and reliability criteria. To demonstrate its utility, the scale was applied to detect differences in sustainable development attitudes among students pursuing degrees in psychology and in agriculture. Relevant differences were detected for the dimensions of environment and society. The Attitudes toward Sustainable Development scale could be useful for understanding the ways in which students think about sustainability issues and could be used to investigate the relationship between sustainability attitudes and other variables

New Outlooks on Reshaping and Revitalizing Post-Conflict Regions: Strategies, Principles and Models of Reconstruction

Within societies recently recovering from war, people operating at the community or national levels are pressed to deal with reconciliation, development, reintegration and security. Changes and advancements are already at our front door in political philosophy, technology, communications, infrastructure, and shifts in attitudes and behavior of people. All of this will affect regions and communities, and basically alter the requisites for future planning and roles of professionals. Planning in the new millennium is needed to assist people and communities to manage change by all the techniques and skills that it possesses. In progressive crisis situations there is a need for progressive methods and new approaches, especially if the systems in use are not producing necessary results and changes. The situation where the primary objective is the rebuilding of livelihoods and rebuilding a community in a traumatized setting, a holistic way of looking at the ''big picture'' is a condicio sine qua non for any sustainable development effort. The paper draws attention to situations, which require interdisciplinary approaches and the collaboration of different professional actors. In order to structure the complex question of post-conflict reconstruction in a more systematic way, a conceptual interdisciplinary model called Sustainable Communities in Post-Conflict Environments (SCOPE) could be developed for rebuilding communities. This presentation looks at how such a model, applied to places like Bosnia and Herzegovina and Kosovo, can effectively conceptualize and design policies, programs and projects that efficiently address the above-mentioned issues, giving at the same time a new strategic and innovative approach.

Prospects for radical emissions reduction through behaviour and lifestyle change

Over the past two decades, scholars and practitioners across the social sciences, in policy and beyond have proposed, trialled and developed a wide range of theoretical and practical approaches designed to bring about changes in behaviours and lifestyles that contribute to climate change. With the exception of the establishment of a small number of iconic behaviours such as recycling, it has however proved extremely difficult to bring about meaningful transformations in personal greenhouse gas emissions at either the individual or societal level, with multiple reviews now pointing to the limited efficacy of current approaches. We argue that the majority of approaches designed to achieve mitigation have been constrained by the need to operate within prevailing social scientific, economic and political orthodoxies which have precluded the possibility of non-marginal change. In this paper we ask what a truly radical approach to reducing personal emissions would look like from social science perspectives which challenge the unstated assumptions severely limiting action to date, and which explore new alternatives for change. We emphasise the difficulties likely to impede the instituting of genuinely radical societal change regarding climate change mitigation, whilst proposing ways that the ground could be prepared for such a transformation to take place