Jason C. Cheah

Every day we make decisions on what to buy and who to buy it from, motivated by two key factors – finance and emotion: can I afford it and do I want it? However in today’s world, where a corporate scandal can become global knowledge in seconds, there is a third factor filtering into our everyday decisions – morality: should I buy it? When the world’s largest food brand Nestlé can successfully ignore child labour in its production process and banks like Barclays can push up global grain prices merely for speculation, do they deserve our money, do they deserve our vote? After all this is the essence of a free market economy, 1 purchase = 1 vote, those who can convince us to buy win, and those who cannot do so fail. But in the face of a $3 billion advertising budget can our fragmented, unorganised and singular votes really make a difference?

My project, 'Hecaton' aims to galvanise a small proportion of the trillion everyday transactions into a force for harmonic change within the rules of our free market system. It achieves this by translating our moral/political/social beliefs into a universally understood piece of data – money.

It is a tool that allows a new form of ethical consumerism, one motivated by sharing and backed up by financial consequence.