In such a drought city as Beijing, I even saw my friend use bottled water to wash his car in order to show his wealth. This unbelievable behavior really shocked me, I realized that people don’t have awareness of water-saving. Actually, there are many water-saving products around us. However, when using water, we always think about other things. This means existing designs are not awakening people’s attention to water issues.

Instead of trying to get people to use water-saving products, I got inspiration from traditional Chinese military strategy. The idea of using a soft approach to subdue a tough opponent. I interpreted this as taking on the tough issue of wasting water with a playful soft method, which would be the best way to get it into people’s mindset.

Only in the process of playing with water 
can people fully pay attention to water and realize the importance of water. I want to let people enjoy the happiness of water, using water freely, and at the end, see the wastage directly. I was also inspired by the traditional Chinese Dai ethnicity rain-praying ceremony and activities called the water-sprinkling festival, in which people are fully aware of the water. In the festival, the more water you are sprinkled with, the more blessings you receive.

I redesigned the festival activity and its costume, using four factors to let them realize the waste through the festival.

• Visual: The costume collects water, and guides it into a water balloon. During the game, the balloon will become bigger and bigger. At the end, seeing the huge water balloon behind us, we feel surprised by how much water has been used.
• Acoustical: Girl’s skirts have a half cup shape and men’s shirts have a
blind like structure that flaps slightly on an axis. This will produce an interesting sound when receiving water.
• Data: The water balloons can be weighed to show the amount of water collected. It has a sensor and a battery at the bottom of the ball.
• Internet: Data can be uploaded to Facebook and other similar websites, which people can see and make comparisons and form a kind of new fashion.

Structure | The clothes are designed to collect water. There are bulging devices designed at the bottom of the heel, which act as a pump to push the water into the balloon.