For methods of contextualising, my group and I were tasked with creating a more visually engaging way of digesting climate legislature. We initially started looking at climate legislation drafted by legislative bodies from around the world, first starting with the most ambitious (Finnish climate act, the US’s Green New Deal) and worked our way down to climate plans that were much smaller in scale. We thought it would be best to analyse a document that affected all of us as students of UAL: the UAL climate action plan.

Unfortunately, when we began to look through the document we were disappointed. Through it’s visual language and usage of imagery, UAL tries to establish its branding as revolutionary, using images of climate activists throughout the document, but under-delivering on action and hardline tasks to be completed to lower CO₂ emissions from UAL’s day to day operations.

This led us to become quite frustrated at the notion that this was a climate action plan in the slightest. The first two (out of four) action points are about changing non material processes; there is only one point, out of four about changing operations within UAL to emit less CO₂. Buried within the document, we thought about creating an improved document out the good parts of the document, but based off of feedback from the discussion, we decided to focus on “greenwashing”, which is roughly defined as using PR and marketing tactics to convince the public that what they’re consuming is more environmentally friendly than it actually is. There were extremely vague and off putting phrases and words used in this document which is what we intended on highlighting.

We initially wanted to create a guide to greenwashing within the climate action plan, but as we experimented with layout, type, and selected the words we had identified as greenwashed language, we realised that we would rather take these words completely out of context. By doing so, we wanted to emphasise the oddness of the language in the document. By taking the context away completely, the odd language becomes more clear, more evident.