Educating consumers on buying outdoor gear mindfully through play.
Team Project • Experiential Campaign and Installation • 2022
Kathmandu with Media Design School
May — June 2022 (8 Weeks)
The Good Stuff is an experiential campaign for outdoor gear company Kathmandu that aims to empower consumers to adopt a benefit mindset and mindful consumer habits through interactive education.
Consumers learn the value of ethical labour practices and sustainable materials by assembling their own virtual Kathmandu jacket in the educational installation.
In my team, my main roles were project manager and co-UX designer, though we all worked closely together on research and more independently on development. Otherwise, the 3D renders shown were developed by our motion designer Irfan.
Help Kathmandu empower outdoor gear consumers to adopt a benefit mindset by becoming more conscious consumers
But the working conditions are horrible.
And the impacts on the environment are catastrophic.
In response to the disgraceful state of the clothing industry, Kathmandu delivered us this challenge;
"We now have “growthism” or growth for growth’s sake; the belief that growth is always good. This is killing us. The Benefit Mindset has been offered as a more life-giving way of seeing the world and doing business. How do we empower people to change their lens?"
The Benefit Mindset itself is a radical framework that recognises how we are connected to the world and have a responsibility to improve it.
In the words of Kathmandu itself, it’s about redefining success from best in the world - to best for the world. As a B Corp Kathmandu embodies this by using environmentally sustainable materials and employing ethical labour conditions.
If we wanted to empower consumers we needed to understand what the sentiment was towards Kathmandu and sustainability. We sent surveys out to a more general public crowd. Many only had a vague idea of Kathmandu’s sustainability efforts whose initiatives also seemed difficult to find.
This Kathmandu Instagram post below advertises the new Biodown jacket, which innovated the jacket’s ability to biodegrade in landfill. This wasn’t communicated quite clearly, however, since the comments were filled with people pushing back, seeing it as fake and greenwashing.
Through education, we could make Kathmandu’s initiatives more visible and avoid greenwashing by imparting this aspect of the Benefit Mindset to its consumers.
My co-UX designer Hannah spearheaded the educational framework for the campaign, using Bloom’s Taxonomy to introduce these Benefit Mindset concepts to participants and put them to practice.
The implementation of these educational concepts needed to be engaging in order to effectively instil these values in these consumers.
Through user testing of our early concepts, we found that gamification was effective in motivating people to read the information and learn about this complex topic, by giving them a task and a goal.
We integrated personalisation in the form of user-generated content to reward people for learning and playing through the game.
The shareability gained from personalisation would motivate participants to share what they learned with others on social media and spread the values of the Benefit Mindset even further.
With each iteration of the interactive installation, I eliminated many complex decision points over time which resulted in a more linear and coherent concept for participants to grasp.
Concurrently, I prototyped the installation floor plan to visualise the layout and flow of the game. After many iterations, I opted for a simple maze-like layout that reflected the linear user flow and minimised confusion for participants.
At its core, The Good Stuff would teach people how to shop sustainably through play by having people learn about the different layers and materials that go into a jacket.
People would take their knowledge to design their own jackets which they could virtually assemble and share.
Tags were developed as a simple way to identify and connect each participant with their virtual jacket. QR codes were chosen as a cost-effective and environmentally-friendly option over RFIDs. This QR code would be scanned at each game kiosk and on smartphones after the experience.
At each section of the installation, participants would learn about the purpose of the jacket layer and the different materials it might use.
Outlining the information that consumers would need to look out for, and balancing with pros and cons - this signage brought the realism of making decisions when shopping.
After learning about the jacket layers and materials in each section, participants would scan their tags at each kiosk and choose a material for their virtual jacket. As they progress through the sections of layers, participants would see their jacket come together after each choice.
Once every jacket layer had been picked, participants could see the final assembled jacket in the AR mirror.
They’d be shown a personalised evaluation of all the choices they made with explanations and ratings of each material chosen. Finally, participants could see themselves wearing their virtual jackets in augmented reality.
User testing revealed a need for a post-experience touchpoint to make use of the participants’ newfound knowledge and curiosity. We decided to use this momentum from the installation for the post-experience touchpoints.
Scanning the tag with a smartphone would direct people to the Tag Hub, complete with their virtual jacket, social media share cards and further resources on the Benefit Mindset.
A secondary objective of our project was to promote Kathmandu gear to participants. The Tag Hub gives people a selection of similar existing Kathmandu jackets to buy.
Signing up to the monthly Summit Club newsletter gives people a chance to join monthly track walks sponsored by Kathmandu. People are invited to take their gear out and socialise with others from the outdoor community.
The Good Stuff was a conceptual student project and thus wasn’t implemented. However, my team made some insightful discoveries for Kathmandu. Through interactive education, Kathmandu could become a shining example for other companies on how to implement aspects of the Benefit Mindset.
Working on this live brief from Kathmandu was quite fulfilling since I gained more insight into designing for a commercial company in a social good capacity. I really enjoyed working on such a socially conscious brief that embodied my goal to design for good.
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