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Instant Gratification for Collective Awareness and Sustainable Consumerism

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - ASSET (Instant Gratification for Collective Awareness and Sustainable Consumerism)

Reporting period: 2017-07-01 to 2018-11-30

In recent years, citizens are using their purchasing power to voice criticism on governmental actions by boycotting or buycotting (boosting purchases) of specific products in order to make a statement. When it comes to sustainable consumerism, for every individual the notion of sustainable consumption may be different, and no collective overall understanding might be found. On the contrary, certain individual actions of the individual might fit together, even though their understanding of sustainable consumption differs.

The ASSET project boosts collective consumerism by empowering the articulation of the individual.
ASSET emphasizes the power of collective purchase decisions, which originate by independent literate choices of the individual. ASSET shows that literate choices are not in vain, that there are lots of people who think the same and that their collective action does make a difference. This process generates collective awareness and facilitates sustainable consumption.

Collective Awareness and Sustainable Consumption
Within field tests, we involve existing communities of user. Doing so, we demonstrate how the new form of political consumerism forms a community, how it educates people and how it multiplies. Simply put, we demonstrate the formation of collective awareness and thereby facilitate sustainable consumption.
We scientifically investigate the pioneering approach, and provide better understanding of the processes of collective awareness. We study the outcome of the ASSET consumerism on how it affects retailers and users. The consequences of ASSET consumerism are not only monetarily addressing retailers and producers but also by raising awareness for their assets which address sustainability. Retailers and producers are encouraged to address qualities which go beyond GDP, such as social working conditions or showing ambition for a fairer economy.
Within the first reporting period of the ASSET project, we focuses on the technical developments to realize the ASSET pilot platform. These contain,(i) the ASSET database, which was set up and aggregated with product information from retailer and other external sources. (ii) The localization tool to position the user in the store and to present the right choice of product chategories to the user. (iii) The ASSET rating functionality to give the user a simple overview of how the products fit to the user's preferences. (iv) The ASSET application, to have a simple single point of interaction tool for users.
We are now just before the first field test to involve test users and to improve the ASSET pilot platform via their feedback.
The main effort of moving beyond state of the art in the ASSET project so far is by deriving and combining technological solutions from several disciplines.
Already, the overall concept together with the localization method was recognized as substantially new and published in a journal article.
The upcoming field tests are expected to give insight on how self-organizing and collective awareness processes can arise and how the introduced complexity reduction tool (the rating functionality) will improve the way of decision making amongst
Support systems in the decision making process for users are applicable to diverse facettes in society. We expect that the insights from the field tests in the ASSET project will encourage more initiatives to help citizens for informed decision making.
The ASSET pilot platform as it appears for the consumer.
The logo of the ASSET project