Features
Planned Features to End User
Introduction
In the starting phase of the project it is important to chart the possible features so that the demand analysis can be done as precisely as possible before work is begun on the markup language that describes products and their production process and on the software components.
Below is a preliminary list of features and data to be delivered to the consumer. Each consumer can define to their Consumer Agent what information they wish to browse in an everyday situation and what criteria the Agent checks and compares automatically.
All product analyses done by the system should yield such results that can be automatically compared against each other by the Agent. The agent bases its overall analysis on those precalculated analyses that the consumer has chosen as points of interest. This necessarily implies having trusted mediators (NGOs mainly) who the consumer has chosen to trust, and which makes moral distinctions that the consumer cares about.
Information that has to be gathered about products and production processes and analyses and indicators based on the raw data (for all types of products eg. foodstuffs, clothing, household items etc.):
Raw data
- Comments and scores given by other consumers to this product and its qualities. (In this store -> In this country -> In the whole World) Possibility to compose comments and scores.
- NGOs' knowledge on the manufacturer
- Traders (exporter,importer, wholesaler etc.)
- Point-of-Production (Exact location of manufacture country -> village -> factory)
- Exact listing of raw materials
- Manufacturers of raw materials
- Locations of raw material manufacturing (PoP)
- Is a raw material gene manipulated (GM)
- Organic raw materials? (where applicable)
- Reuse, Recycling or waste disposal instructions
- Is the product suitable for vegans?
- Ownership relations of the manufacturing chain (Companies participating in production or trading), if available. See Research for efforts in figuring out how feasible this is
- Monopoly: is the company now or has it ever been in a monopoly situation? Has it come to a market where someone holds an monopoly?
- Does an Oligopoly situation exist in the market of some product group? This is important for evaluating price information in the correct context.
Indicators of Environmental Friendliness
- Recyclability Assessment of product packaging (packaging material weight per product weight, information on usage of recycled materials and future recyclability of packaging material). For optimal results it'd be best to distinguish between functional packaging and decorative packaging. Building a packaging matrix to automatically assess pros and cons of different alterenative styles of packaging for some product group should be done
- Energy Assesment (includes production and transport) (types and amounts of energies)
- Materials Assessment - materials consumption in manufacturing (types and amounts of materials)
- Emissions during production
- Waste generated during production
- Assessment of environmental effects of the product group. Attempts to describe environmental effects common to all products of same product group. This is necessary, because it'll be very difficult to aquire this information for a reasonable amount of products so we must do with generic assesments.
- Assessment of environmental effects of the product comparable to other products in same category (Automatic Product Comparison). This is rather depracated due to the Revised Design Paradigm.
Indicators of ethical aspects and social responsibility
- Is the product or parts of it fairly traded?
- Is the Point-of-Production SA8000 certified?
- Company size: The ratio of assets of the producer compared to average assets of all known producers of same type of product. (Is the company a small, medium, or huge one?) In Finland information on LLC's assets from the previous fiscal period are publicly available from The Board of Patents and Registry. If you have knowledge of the public availability or inavailability of this information in other coutries, please help us on our Research
- Workers' rights - Information about how well or how badly the production chain treats it's employees. This information has quite different meanings in countries of different development stages. For example in Finland the right to and the ability to belong to a trade union can be taken for granted. Also laws exist to ensure equality and work place safety, prohibit discrimination and granted is also the right to have maternal and parental leaves without the fear of losing one's job and so forth. In less developed coutries such laws may not exist or they are not upheld. If this is the case, then examination of these matters should be conducted on a regional or per company level. Due to the radically varying worker's rights situation in different parts of the world it seems impossible to form a unified, comparable indictor.
- Greedy lay offs: Information about massive lay offs during a profitable fiscal period. (Supposing that the data is available, a numeric, comparable indicator can be calculated. Different formulas for calculating this are being discussed) This is a quite common practise in industrialised economies to boost stock value to yield valueble bonuses and greater stock option gains to the highest management.
- Assessment of ethicality of the product group
- Information about how animals are treated, if the product contains animal based raw materials.
- Track record of Charitable contributions or Social services done by the company. For example some Jordanian merchants donated 40 truckloads of food and other supplies to Iraq after the war, which could be used as a reason for endorsement of the companies responsible
Other services
- Automatic Product Comparison - price, grading, ecologicality and ethicality comparison to other similar products sold in the same store. This is rather depracated due to the Revised Design Paradigm.
- Intra-shop navigation in the store. The consumer can choose a product from a tree-like menu or enter it's name and the system tells on what row, on which side of the row, on what part of the row and on which shelf the desired product can be found. This feature can have a small effect on employment provided by the store since customers require less service from the store staff.
- Inter-shop navigation. If a product group you require is not sold at this store the system can instruct you to the geographically closest store that sells what you need.
- Possibility to watch Advertisement Videos and Informational Videos on the product and producer created by the producer, importer or marketer. This requires terminals equipped with color displays and powerful video decoding features, which are projected to hit the mass markets in the first decennium of the 21st century. Big producers can utilize their tv-adverts with minor changes, so that they can be streamed to mobile terminals. Small producers enjoy the benfits of being able to convey marketing materials to consumers in a video-form with extremely low cost. Informational videos could deal with eg. working conditions, treatment of production animals and the enviromental and other principles of the company.
- Internationalization. Foreigners and travellers can use the system in their own language, which is a big help when doing shopping in a foreign store.
- Multi-language support - Immigrants can have the system function in two languages simultaneously, which makes adapting to their new homeland and language swifter and less troublesome.
- Information on consumption endorsements or boycotts (campaigns) targeted at companies in the production chain, or their owners.
- Sending feedback to the producer. (I bought / I didn't buy your product because... arguments prepared by NGOs, opinions for and against. Of course there is the possibility to compose your own text, but it takes time and effort on a mobile telephone. Bluetooth keyboards are emerging to markets at the moment. If retailers offer these for use, then it makes feedback more versatile.
- You can give feed-back anonymously or with your e-mail address included.) Delievery method of the feed-back is e-mail or direct transfer to the company's database if this has been arranged.
- You can give feedback on your user experience (after you've bought the product). This can accelerate the product development.
- Product substitution information: Information on what less destructive alternatives there are for some Product or Product Group.
Special group: Food stuffs
- Connection to the databases containing Recipies.
- Is the product suitable for vegetarians, vegans, people with allergies, lactose intolerants or people with religious dietary customs etc.
- Calculation of nutritional value of the product
- Calculation of nutritional value of recipies
- Calculation of material-costs for recepies