IMAGINE
TRANSPARENCY
ARCHWAYS
BUILDING BRIDGES BETWEEN YOU AND YOUR PRODUCTS
One of the things Blockchain does is store data about each transaction made; date, time, amount, location, transferrer and transferee. This data makes up a ledger that allows anyone to track the movement of money. However, what it also technically allows is the tracking of the supply chain, if you can locate the place associated with each transaction.
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Archways is a speculative app that utilizes blockchain data and visualises those spreadsheets making it instantly accessible to the consumer. This would allow for instant access to information concerning materiality, locality, and ethical principles used by brands making the market transparent and maneuverable for the consumer.
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What if you could scan your pack of eggs and realise those “free range” hens don’t have a field to roam, as pictured on the packet, but rather you see the building that they all reside inside. It doesn’t take much investigation to find an activist video for what really goes on behind closed doors of our factory farm system.
This was a personal project in HTML & Java scipt but complications with accessibility of confident information made this app futile.
What if you could see which Bangladeshi, Vietnamese, Uzbekistani… textile factory was being used to sew the pieces of your shoe together? Maybe it would give people the incentive to do some research about what they’re buying, it could quite easily change your consumer behaviour to buy the cereal that uses wheat from local farms, or choose the tomatoes from local farms. It could change market dynamics and give companies incentives to make ethical choices, massively decreasing the carbon footprint of our consumption and potentially necessitating better working rights of our factory workers across all industries.
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This could be used by Governments to better regulate global companies and more easily tax foreign trade, it could also be used by NGO’s and ethical companies to guarantee the sustainability of their materials and ethics of their production, but also fact check their suppliers.
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Transparency shouldn’t be considered a crazy or radical, in essence it is simply being honest. A global company would argue that such transparency would damage their competitive edge because competitors would find out their trade secrets; cheap factories, cheap materials, cheap labour, ultimately where the easiest places are to exploit people for their time, land and resources. Even still, competition protection laws could exist alongside basic consumer knowledge.
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Market dynamics would change drastically if this were possible because it would allow the underprivileged to competitively price themselves due to a mass boycott by the consumer. But would the consumer actually care, or do we really just want our products quick and cheap?
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