Abstract:

Plastic pollution and environmental sustainability are topics that today is fundamental to approach in every disciplines. As designers, our aim is to deal with global problems and try to envision solutions in order not only to solve but also to prevent problems and future scenarios.

"#souvenirdamare - fifteen stories returned by the waves" is a graphic/visual academic project that aims to involve an audience of adults and children on environmental issues, in particular those related to the pollution of seas and oceans. It proposes new visual and narrative languages to create environmental awareness. The project comes from the collaboration between the students of the Master in Visual Brand Design of the Domus Academy with the support of Elisa Chiodo (Communication Designer and Program Leader of the Master) and Angela Ponzini (Designer and collaborator of Studiolabo).

The project was inspired by an archive of photographs called "souvenirdamare"created and shared by Angela Ponzini in the summer of 2019. The pictures represent fifteen plastic objects, "treasures of the sea", found and collected from the beaches of Vasto, within the Punta Aderci Regional Nature Reserve in Abruzzo, specifically between the beaches of Mottagrossa and Punta Sinello. It was a portion of uncontaminated land, about 300 meters, literally covered with debris, rubbish, plastic of all kinds.

Fifteen students of Domus Academy adopted these “treasures”, fifteen objects that come from different times and different part of the world. They had the brief to design short magazines with stories (text and visual contents) aimed to suggest the readers to change their behaviors in relation with plastic and ocean pollution. Storytelling is a powerful tool and the paper presents how, starting from a real issue and objects, we can design narrations creating awareness and pushing good behaviors.

Keywords:

Design, plastic, pollution, graphic, visual, communication, illustration, sea, ocean, sustainability.