Alterenergy is a strategic project of energy sustainability for small Adriatic communities being realised by Primorsko-goranska County in the context of AdriaticIPA, a European project. As a part of the project, lectures for elementary school children on the subject of renewable energy sources will be organized. The goal of the project is to additionally educate children on the topic of the ecological use of energy and more generally, on efficient energy consumption. Kombinat is employed to design the educational brochure and the poster.
The brochure is filled with illustrations made not only considering the content of the texts, but also their mutual connections and effect on one another. Given that the brochure is about the information regarding renewable and nonrenewable sources of energy, illustrations follow the text by stressing the cyclic nature of the process while illustrating particular energy element.
The first page features the introductory text about energy, as well as the switched-on light bulb which releases energy formed in many ways that continues to wander throughout the whole brochure. The brochure opens horizontally into 10 pages – 5 at each side of the long row. The installations for the activation of the light in the light bulb are first powered by biomass, then by wind, water, sun and finally the energy from the inside of the Earth. Wind and water are additionally defined by anthropomorphic personifications – by a girl blowing out the wind that makes the windmill turn, and by a boy fishing in a paper boat. On the other side of the brochure, energy continues to transform, and evenutally, as the text about nonrenewable sources of energy informs us, turns into a thick, viscous vortex pulling in a dead fish, namely the one the boy on the previous page was trying to catch. This is how two different kinds of energy directly connect through the flux linearly shown on the brochure.
They also intertwine indirectly, allowing for the implicit accounts of deficiencies of one type of energy and positive aspects of the other, ecologically acceptable, type of energy. The next page features the energy ondulating and participating in the schematic image of loss and acquisition of energy in living beings – a girl doing sports sits down to eat an apple that restores her energy. This energy row connects on the front page into a great whirl of lines atop of which there is a light switch. The girl is pressing the switch and smiling, with her head turned to the right. The previous page features the very light bulb from the beginning. This is how every page of the brochure is connected – not only in the view of the first and the last page but also with respect to the opening of the brochure and the complete experience of it. The consumer (a child) first notices the whirl with a switch and opens the brochure to find the lit bulb – thus immediately focusing on the cause and effect relation of energy and its use, information which is to be found in the brochure. Content-wise, what follows is the part about loss and restoration of energy, and the part about the relation of renewable and nonrenewable sources of energy. The brochure ends with a detailed overview of the positive aspects of renewable sources and their effect on the environment.
The last page of the brochure features a quiz with which children can find out wether they are they eco-beginners, eco-helpers or eco-experts. The whole story is followed by a presentation poster which shows the first two pages of the brochure intertwined, making the relation between energy and the appliance more explicit, next to the whirl with the switch and a girl in close proximity to the lit bulb.
