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Roman Bleichenbacher

Awarded

Roman Bleichenbacher

'Codecheck.ch'

Graphic Design

Jury report

Decoding barcodes
Who knows what the ab­bre­vi­a­tion E250 means? Who un­der­stands all the food la­belling in­for­ma­tion? Stud­ies have shown that scarcely any users bother to read it through. The 'Codecheck.​ch' web pro­ject by the Basel in­ter­ac­tion spe­cial­ist Roman Ble­ichen­bacher in­tends to deal with this prob­lem: con­sumers and ex­perts are to be brought closer to each other. The pro­ject uses a data­base ac­cessed via the web, and that can thus be con­stantly ex­panded and brought up to date. In­for­ma­tion about prod­ucts can be re­quested on­line with the help of prod­uct names, or, even more sim­ply, by scan­ning in bar­codes on a home PC. But con­sumers do not have to re­main pas­sive in their role, they can take part ac­tively, reg­is­ter new prod­ucts or re­port things like al­ler­gies trig­gered by food to www.​codecheck.​ch.
The 'Codecheck.​ch' pro­ject in­tends to re­in­force con­sumer power in­tel­li­gently. Not just by de­nounc­ing prod­ucts that could be dam­ag­ing to health, but by cre­at­ing an in­formed 'com­mu­nity' of aware con­sumers. Be­cause in­formed con­sumers soon stop buy­ing the less trust­wor­thy prod­ucts, and so they dis­ap­pear from the shelves. But the de­signer ar­gues con­vinc­ingly that 'Codecheck.​ch' is not just a one-sided busi­ness. Man­u­fac­tur­ers could also make peo­ple trust their prod­ucts more by mak­ing more trans­par­ent in­for­ma­tion avail­able.
The elo­quent graphic de­sign and good links with other web­sites make this in­no­v­a­tive pro­ject a ser­vice fa­cil­ity with a fu­ture, which con­sumers and man­u­fac­tur­ers alike should em­brace. In­ci­den­tally: www.​codecheck.​ch will tell you that E250 is sodium ni­trite, used as a pos­si­bly car­cino­genic pick­ling salt when pre­serv­ing ham.
Peter Stohler

Biography

Roman Bleichenbacher
Born in
1975
Education
Dipl. Interaktionsleiter FH

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