Need to Know
16 : 05 : 22

Denmark – Multinational furniture company Ikea’s latest meatball will not be served in its cafeterias, but rather in the gardens of its customers. The seed ball is a re-invention of the company’s signature snack to boost insect biodiversity.

To raise awareness of the decline of wild habitats for endangered insects, Ikea Denmark partnered with WWF Denmark to create seed balls comprising soil, clay and wildflowers that can be readily planted to rewild a given environment. Corn cockles, chamomile and poppies are among the flowers selected for the seed balls, which were picked for their appealing qualities for endangered insects. According to the company’s press release, ‘Denmark is one of the most intensively cultivated countries in Europe,’ and ‘more than 60% of Danish nature is cultivated land’, leaving little room for wild nature.

Ikea’s seed balls coincide with the revival of guerrilla gardening, something which we recently explored in the Nature-hacking market. The initiative, which takes a hyper-local approach, demonstrates how companies can factor in a location's specific characteristics when promoting eco-initiatives.

US – Brand-building house Practice has unveiled an editorial project exploring social justice in collaboration with online anti-racism community Outer Work. The Outer Work Neswpaper features articles, worksheets and a poster – all offering tangible ways of engaging with anti-racist work in a format that Michelle Mattar, founder of Practice, says is ‘rooted in joy’.

Its visual style, featuring graphics of seedlings, soil and droplets, also plays reference to community gardens. Mattar says the publication uses ‘a joyful palette featuring a rich brown (soil) as opposed to an inky black typically used in offset print pieces’.

While online spaces are over-saturated with such content, the Outer Work Newspaper promotes the importance of physical materials when learning about such topics. It will be distributed across public spaces such as libraries, schools cafes and bookstores.

As more people seek to educate themselves on social issues, such projects align with the growth of Care-mmunities – a shift towards new structures of kinship that we explore in Neo-collectivism.

While podcasts remain a popular source of entertainment for many listeners, UK city-dwellers are also gaining career and lifestyle inspiration from the shows they’re tuning into. According to a survey by Vodafone, one in five people who live in inner UK cities say a podcast has inspired them to change careers.

Meanwhile, almost six in 10 inner-city Britons (57%) have been inspired to change something in their life after listening to a podcast. The research reveals that the biggest lifestyle changes people have undertaken after listening to a podcast include eating more healthily (17%), exercising more (16%) or learning a new skill (17%). These figures demonstrate the power that podcasts continue to have on people’s lives, beyond being a source of pleasure or education.

With traditional career journeys undergoing a drastic re-invention, work-related podcasts align with the youth-led shift of rebranding recruitment.