Arts & Culture
New Clothes: Tracing the Industrial Food Apparatus
Shopping for food is a task few people can afford to ignore, and for most, the grocery store is a veritable war zone of persuasive design, with few opportunities for the consumer to recognize the extent of a product's source, or the greater implications of its production. New Clothes is social tool that is designed to enable consumers to crack the carefully crafted veneer of the food industry, by mapping the corporate landscape of the American supermarket.
In its initial phase, New Clothes will act as an interactive database that maps known supermarket brands to corporate holdings, with browsable metadata on their social or environmental impact. Eventually this will be augmented to allow users to search via barcode, paving the way for mobile applications that consumers can run right at the shelf. In this way, New Clothes will be a tool for peering back into the source, bringing a renewed sense of transparency to the consumer in an age where we find ourselves at ever greater distance from the externalities of production.
A surprising amount of information can be found on brands and their manufacturers by searching Wikipedia. What this project will do is to index as much of this information as possible within a particular environment – the supermarket – so that this process can be make automatable, and eventually mobile. I envision a future where shoppers can put store-bought items under the scrutiny of collective knowledge, and put their true social and environmental aesthetics in full view.
The first phase of this project is going to need elbow grease more than anything. My intial source of brand data will be collected from Safeway stores, and more or less painstakingly aggregating them with relevant data from Wikipedia and potentially other sources. At some point I will need to commit to a simple database format, and for now I am planning on using XML, though I would appreciate feedback on potential alternatives. I am also unsure as to how to go about reliably decoding UPC barcodes for these purposes, though I've looked at GEPIR as well as the unofficial UPC Database. My questions in that area are more about how much information I can get from barcodes (product names, distribution information, etc) other than the manufacturing or branding entity, and how one might go about scanning barcodes using a mobile device.
