Moving beyond eco clichés | Aspirations and issues

First published by EN Magazine

Moving Beyond Eco Clichés

Part 1: Aspirations and Issues

How many times in exhibition design have you seen eco messaging expressed through the use of the colour green, backed up by planting and visuals ranging from photos of planet earth to illustrations of footprints, fingerprints and flowers - or portraits of appealing-looking children to embody a sense of the future?

The same words and phrases will inevitably be in evidence too: ‘eco’, ‘green’, ‘sustainable’, ‘carbon-neutral’ and talk of hope ‘for a positive future’. Climate change is without doubt the most pressing issue facing us - and yet there’s a sense of audience fatigue. If it’s true that visitors are succumbing to word and image blindness, they’re no longer hearing very important messaging. And, in the long term, that affects us all!

The exhibition industry needs to take responsibility for presenting so many eco cliches. It’s high time we stepped back and made messaging fresher by devising more original and convincing words and images - as well, of course, as continuing to walk the walk by creating more sustainable builds and improving the disposal and re-use of materials. There’s still a huge progress gap to be closed.

These grand aims do not come without challenges, however. By far the easiest to address is the question of graphics and messaging. Colour is a powerful and an easily-understood universal language, yet nature isn’t all green-for-grass, blue-for-sky and yellow-for-sunshine. Nature contains every imaginable hue, from the greys and browns of rocks and trees to the rainbow examples of flora, so there’s just no need to use the most obvious colours. As for imagery and language, there are so many talented illustrators, graphic designers and copywriters out there. Set them a brief to combat the cliches! The risk of not being listened to is too high not to be taken seriously.

The challenge of moving beyond eco cliches gets tougher after that. Take biophilia for example. This much-used word translates as the tendency of humans to focus on and affiliate with nature and other life-forms and, in the built environment, to the study of how people are affected by nature indoors too, encompassing everything from natural light and circadian rhythms to the blurring of outdoor and inside lines. Unfortunately, this vast subject is often reduced to lip service in exhibition design in the form of plastic planting, with even Astroturf being used on occasion to ‘represent’ nature.

Why is this happening? The practical answer is that live plants and living walls are near- impossible to maintain on a temporary basis. They fall apart readily and get damaged in transit. Neither can they be shipped easily internationally because of import restrictions. Once installed, exhibit teams on site, not always fully briefed, often fail to water them and, set inside enclosed spaces with no natural daylight, the plants often wither and die. Dried moss – a living material which enters a dormant state without water - is a good alternative option, but even that has to be treated with great care to look good enough for client requirements.

A creative and pragmatic answer to planting, without embodying the single-use-plastic issue it’s supposed to be arguing against, has come out of the festival scene this year. At a leading British festival this year, an on-site machine processed waste plastic into sheets, which were then used to make ‘prop’ plants. Yes, they’re still plastic, but they’re not new or single use and the plastic is endlessly recyclable this way, with props teams manually making moulds and then painting the leaves to look like plants. Of course, at a festival scale, planting doesn’t need to look as real as at exhibition scale, but mightn’t a more ‘theatrical presentation’ using waste plastic be a better message for clients than off-the-shelf plastic plants?

When it comes to other materials in the build, there are still very few clients prepared to pay for more experimental new sustainable products. The resistance is partly because they’re untested – presenting something of a vicious circle - but mostly because of the high price ticket.

In the materials field, it’s hard to find anything more natural or high-quality than timber, but even the best FSC-certified timber doesn’t come without issues. Many companies only use wood-based stands twice, with the timber facing a different way each time, simply because it’s too labour-intensive to clean or take out the nails each time. Timber costs have also gone through the roof in the last few years. A sheet of ply that would have cost £30 pre-pandemic now costs £80. When clients compare timber costs with man-made boards or ‘timber effect’ finishes - cheaper, more durable, and requiring less care or skill to manufacture - it’s hard to blame them for choosing option two.

So how exactly can we make progress? Part 2 of Moving Beyond Eco Cliches will be post to our blog shortly.