Love Is Free

“Only when the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know peace”

-       Jimmy Hendrix

So this is where our project starts. The quote above encompasses what we aimed to do beautifully. When we heard of what was being asked from us for this assessment we knew straight away what we wanted to do. Both Nora and I are extremely moved by this concept of ‘love’, and the ways in which whilst it is free to give, so few of us choose to give it or allow ourselves to receive (ß The inspiration for the name of our website).

In the creation of our project, we collated a list of ideas to describe what we were really wanting to achieve:

-       Inspire people to be kind and perform acts of kindness

-       Show that the only way to fight negativity in the world is through positivity

-       Why do we hate with conviction but love so so?

-       Could we show the effect of embracing positivity and honesty?

-       Could we imagine a world that functioned in this way? How can we get others to imagine this too?

The most prominent thing we found when researching this idea of love is that there simply isn’t enough of it. A quick Google search of ‘hate statistics in Europe’ lead us to this:

Funnily enough, when we googled ‘love statistics in Europe’, we found nothing.

Nora and I quickly realised the world was lacking love, and we set ourselves the challenge of changing this. With social media at the forefront of this generation, we created a website:

www.loveisfree2017.wordpress.com

Using several persuasion techniques including social proof, similarity heuristics, repetition, availability heuristics and emotional narratives, we wrote a series of blog posts all of which praised this crazy idea of love.  The blog posts share stories from both Nora and I, along with friends and family who were kind enough to share their stories with us, and some other narratives we felt the need to expose to our readers.

In order to get our website ‘out there’ we also created 4 different posters which we distributed around campus. Our main poster visually presented our website name ‘Love is Free’, and the other 3 sub posters presented the opening picture from our website along with some quotes we felt encompassed our website image perfectly:

Main Poster = 

Sub Poster 1 = 

Sub Poster 2 = 

Sub Poster 3 = 

These posters were created in the hope that they would be recognised all over campus, the repetition and the way in which they all followed the same salient formats would subsequently lead people to stumble across our website and give it a read.

I suppose the main goal of our project is presented in our website introduction – to inspire others. By creating a platform whereby readers could unlock their own potential to spread kindness throughout the world we aimed to fight hate with love.

Megan Bowers and Nora Popova.

Choose to Reuse

The aim of our project was to reduce the waste of coffee cups on campus. Only 1/1000 takeaway coffee cups get recycled due to a difficult recycling process. With over 8,000,000 of these cups used every day in the UK alone; this has lead to an enormous amount of unnecessary waste.

To start our project, we emailed Warwick retail to see how many coffee cups are actually used on campus. They responded that 4500 cups are used each week in university run cafes.

After receiving this information we asked over 200 students in the library the following questions:

1. Is the environment important to you?
2. Are disposable coffee cups recycled? We then explained only 1/1000 coffee cups are actually recycled
3. Would you consider bringing your own travel mug if you were charged for a takeaway cup? We then informed them that in university run cafes they are in fact charged 10p for the use of a takeaway cup.

Here are the results:

After collecting this data we decided to make an Instagram account to inform people about the lack of recycling on campus and encourage them to use travel mugs.

We created and posted infographics as a visual aid to display some of the consequences of coffee cup waste. We used natural frequencies to persuade people to reduce waste and use a travel mug.
In addition, we encouraged people to post selfies with travel mugs on their personal instagram accounts and we also shared the ones we were aware of on our instagram page. Our captions either generally encouraged people to #choosetoreuse, framed the 10p price difference for using a travel mug in campus cafes as a charge or emphasised that other people were making the decision to use a travel mug (social proof).
The instagram page was shared on other social media sites and was also circulated within societies of the university to try to reach a wider audience.

We got in touch with Emily Grieve, the president of Her Campus society at Warwick. Her Campus is the #1 global community for college women, written entirely by the nation'a top college journalists from 300+ Universities around the world. We were interviewed about our project and an article was posted on the Her Campus website. Here is the link to the article:http://www.hercampus.com/school/warwick/warwick-choosing-reuse

Overall, our Instagram page gained over 300 followers and posts were seen by more than 500 people on other media sites. In addition, at least 30 students posted photos of themselves using travel mugs to their social media pages. Therefore, we believe that our message to reduce coffee cup waste on campus reached 1000 individuals. Furthermore, we have spoken to students who said they've changed their behaviour and bought a travel mug since the campaign!

Victoria Hill, Victoria Gilbert, Holly Brazier, and Peter Carr