Written Response
This project examines how UAL addresses Scope 3 commuting emissions primarily through advice rather than structural change. While the Net Zero plan recognises that student and staff travel is a major contributor to the university’s carbon footprint, the proposed solutions tend to focus on individual behaviour. Students are encouraged to walk, cycle, or make more sustainable choices, yet the institutional conditions that shape commuting remain largely unchanged.
Through a fictional institutional training film set in the style of the 1980s, we exaggerate the language of corporate sustainability to expose a central contradiction. Personal carbon numbers can be calculated and presented with apparent precision, but the systems that determine commuting patterns are far less visible. Timetables, campus centralisation, room allocation policies, and housing affordability all influence how often and how far students travel. These are institutional decisions, yet responsibility is framed as individual choice.
Rather than presenting the network as a harmonious system of shared responsibility, the project reveals it as a complex web in which power and accountability are unevenly distributed. By staging overly optimistic messaging alongside impractical solutions, the film highlights the gap between recommendation and action. Instead of proposing another behavioural adjustment, the work asks what might change if commuting were treated as a structural design issue. In doing so, it shifts the focus from individual guilt to institutional responsibility within sustainability governance.
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