On "Fun" and Sustainability

There are no real right or wrong answers when it comes to involvement; for the most part at least. The end goal is always to get the largest amount of people to participate in your activities, or at least in the conversation in order to create an active presence as well as create awareness of the situation at hand. There are various was in getting to participate in whatever it is you want them to participate in. You can cater to their interest, give them incentives for participating, stress the importance of participating, and use many other strategies to entice. Something that needs to be mentioned however is the power of fun, and how you can harness that power for the greater good. For all intensive purposes let up combine the concept of "fun" with the topic of sustainability. In the simplest concept of this approach I introduce you to this:

Not particularly exciting, but to be honest, the whole topic of sustainability is not exactly a thrilling subject, especially when you attend a school who forces that subject with every class you take, but I digress. Point being this is probably the simplest example of trying to make sustainability fun, by making your trash a potential free throw competition against your friends, at least until you get bored of it and do something else. What happens if you set people with the task of making sustainability more entertaining? Creativity is probably an accurate answer.

The Fun Theory was a competition host by the Volkswagen company as an attempt to push the conversation of sustainability. By introducing game mechanics to everyday activities the Volkswagen company hoped to change the attitudes of these activities for the better by making the experience more enjoyable. The above video features one concept for the competition introduced, where in order to decrease the amount of speeders on the streets, this group planted speed radars to both catch the speeders, and take note of those following the speed limit. Introducing a lottery systems those noted following the speed limit are entered into a drawing in which the winner get a percentage of the money collected from the speeder. There are other concepts that were introduced in the competition such as the bottomless trashcan, the bottle bank arcade, and anyone looking for a throw back to the classic Tom Hanks film Big, the piano stairs. You have to ask yourself however if this tactic is an effective one.

In all honesty, I probably do not think that such tactics can be implemented in a large enough scale as to make it effective enough to be an option. The fact of the matter is that sustainability, as previously stated, is not all that interesting to the general population. Rather than looking at these as a solution, we should look at this as a possibility, and as an inspiration to try and make the action of being sustainable appealing, that way we can implement sustainable behavior on a wide enough scale to do real good in the world.