The Big Idea

over the past two weeks we have been working on a brief looking at 'The Big Idea', which is a timely idea that disrupts and creates impact to achieve the stated aim. We decided as a group to look at water pollution caused by the textiles industry, targeting NTU students to make them aware of this issue; after watching the true cost documentary we started to think of a number are ways in which we can create awareness of this issue, thinking of what young people are own age would interact with, but before we started to develop on these ideas we collected more facts and data about water pollution, information that I would not have known before this brief.

These are some of the key facts that we used moving forward; (facts gathered from articles on the internet)

1). "It takes 2,700 litres of water to produce the average cotton shirt and 11,000 to 20,000 litres of water to produce a pair of jeans" - this was one of the first shocking facts that we discovered and along side the true cost documentary this inspired us to think about the impact of fashion on water.

2). "Thanks to the irrigation needed for giant cotton plantations in Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, the Aral sea has lost more than 90% of its water in the last 50 years - from this fact we realised that the consumer is sheltered from the true reality of the impact that (fast) fashion has on the environment.

3). "Altogether, more than a half trillion gallons of fresh water are used in the dyeing of textiles each year. The dye wastewater is discharged often untreated, into nearby rivers, where it reaches the sea, eventually spreading around the globe. China, according to Yale environment 360, discharges roughy 40% of these chemicals." - from a lot of the fact we learnt that the growing of cotton is one of the main damages to the water system.

4). "The average amount of clothes (55kg per year) we buy makes each of us indirectly responsible for 3,300 kilograms of water waste every year." - we thought as a group that this is quite a key fact as we are all guilty of buying clothes; it gives you a greater sense than you already thought of how damaging the clothing industry is.

Based on these facts and other fast, we came up with the main idea of 'Making water surprising', the idea behind this is that in are daily lives we (as students) are quite unaware of how much water we use/ waste, it's something that doesn't really concern the vast majority of us in this country we've always had excess to it; it become a part of daily lives. To make the water surprising we will use a variety of methods one of the main ideas we had was to put colouring in the water fountains around campus, so that when people so to use them they are taken back as to why it not normal along side this we will have posters to point are message/ points across, we also thought about putting a graphic design on water bottles so that the water looks dirty. Behind every idea we had one thought to consider, although we want to highlight water pollution we also didn't want to waste any water through this process.