Colour Me Clean is a fun and friendly brand that is designed to implement an empathetic and enthusiastic attitude towards marine life and cleanliness of the environment. This exhibition was developed in Kefalonia, Greece and exhibited to the community there in their local art gallery.

As a team of mixed design disciplines, (Visual Communications, Architecture, Product Design and Fashion) we aim to develop this attitude through the youth of Kefalonia by providing a mascot which will guide the children through various assets of the brand and encourage them to create a relationship with the environment instead of being told to clean it without any further explanation. The brand targets children because of their ability to empathise and adapt their attitudes with the world around them. By creating a relationship with the environment at an early stage, they are more likely to grow up with a different perspective towards protecting the environment if they are given fond memories or are introduced to something that inspired them. Our aim is to provide a mascot ‘Dimi the Dolphin’, whose overarching role is to show that the way in which plastic and other found waste can harm the natural world and change the current attitude towards plastic.

THE CONCEPT

The concept of our brand further develops into a seasonal excursion to both parks and beaches, where they bring colour back to the environment by cleaning up the space in celebration of Dimi’s mission to save the ocean. In preparation of this event - where the children are encouraged to dress up in colourful garments or costumes - as a group project they will craft their own bins into forms of marine life creatures of their own choice and take them to their clean up locations and compete against other groups to see who can fill up their bins the most. This allows the children to engage in their environment in a fun and youthful way and develop a connection with the bins that they crafted.

With further emphasis on the open-minded nature of children through their early education, Colour Me Clean focuses on building an emotional connection towards wildlife. This is seen in the children’s colouring book where the children are confronted with multiple saddening scenarios of plastic amongst sea life. The brand’s mascot is introduced in this colouring book to act as an inspiration for young children and inspire them as a fictional role model to help protect the environment by putting the plastic away wisely.

Simultaneously to the colouring book, several posters are designed to expose the intense number of waste found within our oceans that act as a puzzle in search of marine life. The posters range in levels of complexity so that children roughly between the ages of 6-12 are able to solve them.

As a brand, Colour Me Clean aims to educate the serious nature of the issue of the impact of plastic on marine life in a fun, memorable and engaging way. An interactive animation was designed as an appropriation from the infamous game 'Flappy Bird', using processing code to build a frame so that when an icon of a fish attempts to swim through the ocean, pillars of plastic interrupt its path. The aim of the interactive animation is to get the fish to swim as far as possible without hitting the plastic. The difficulty of the game exposes the lifestyle that fish are currently living and that the plastic found in the sea is so harmful that it can destroy their lives.

Lastly, in order to fully grasp the idea of what Colour Me Clean stands for, we designed a temporary installation to mimic the mouth of a fish in a cubby house-like form, entangled with plastic suspended from the roof of the mouth inside the structure. The open mouth acts as a doorway for the audience to enter. The small space forcing one to bend down serves to bring the audience to a child’s height and expose the small and suffocating atmosphere of animals living amongst plastic. The installation invites the audience to take action on this problem by removing the plastic from within the fish’s mouth and placing it inside the prototype of the craft made bin. The action of freeing the claustrophobic space from plastic is intended to be both satisfying and rewarding. Once the audience which is predominately adults is able to fully grasp the concept, only then will it be fully supported and invited to be brought home by the children who will learn to celebrate the land around them.