Catherine Riney proposes a creative and sustainable project to record our travels. An interesting idea to remember them and have them whenever we want. Who doesn’t like the idea of capture the stages of our travels? With this small booklet you will have the opportunity to do so, without being a burden on the environment. This object has a particular feature: is produced in a sustainable way. Let’s read the words of the creator of Our World Travel Logs.
Oliver Camponovo
In this blog, I would like to take the opportunity to share with you a little about what lies behind Our World Travel Logs. I am going to take you through several sections split into two parts, please feel free to jump around to the topics that interest you the most.
As a mother of two children and a keen traveller I wanted to capture the memories of our travels in a fun, educational way. As someone committed to the sustainability of our world, I wanted to make sure I did this in an environmentally aware way. Thus Our World Travel Logs was born. My products & packaging are all made from sustainably sourced paper. Adding a blog about travel and the environment I feel am contributing to the wider conversation about how we can enjoy and protect Our World. And I love the fact that I am doing this through the medium of a physical product – a booklet – that doesn’t need a battery, to be plugged in or need wifi.
I started designing the flight log when I ran out of space in a little booklet I had been using for both my children from when they were born, they are teenagers now. Needing something to continue recording their journey, I did a lot of research about flight logs and found that they had been around in various forms for over 30 years.
I, unfortunately, never had one as a child, to record my journeys. When I was 2 years old my father got a job with the now long gone, Eastern Airlines, in the United States. This meant an eventual move to Florida from New York, when my sister and I were 3 and 1 years old, where we knew no one. My father’s family live mostly in New York and mother’s family, even farther away, in Australia.
Really all my travel and what has led me to design this book starts from when my parents met on the island of Mykonos in a long-gone hostel in the 60s. Now it is seen as a very chic destination, definitely not as affordable for a backpacking traveller. They had both been travelling extensively around Europe, Turkey and Greece. A very Australian thing to do but slightly more unusual for an American at that time.
Back in the 1960s and 70s air travel was a bit more luxurious, rare and slower. I started flying just at the end of the Golden Age of flying. As my Australian family had not yet met me or my father, my mother was very keen to take advantage of the airline’s travel passes for employees and took me to Australia, my first ever flight.
I was a 2-year-old, and what a journey that was, no direct flights, that’s for sure, making 5 stops, over 48 hours and across the international dateline. I even made the local paper in my mother’s home town of NSW, Australia!
My favourite, always the long slow travel as a backpacker.
And yes, I have instilled this in my own children. For them they have three home countries as I now do. As a teenager my family moved again this time from Florida to Newcastle, Australia where my parents still live surrounded by beaches, bush and all manner of relatives and friends.
My sister and I live in Europe. My sister is in Germany and I am in London. My children are true Londoners born in a hospital facing Westminster Palace and the river Thames. Part of me is a Londoner too. Same for my husband who is from Nottingham, in the Midlands of England.
My daughters have made many journeys, like my sister and I, visiting family in the USA and Australia from a young age as well as enjoying many adventures closer to home, particularly at the moment.
They have recorded every flight and I am now working on my next log book to record more than just the flights to ensure their full journey in our world is captured. My Our World Flight Log was designed for personal use, first and foremost, it wasn’t until I decided to enter a competition that I really thought about sharing it with the wider world, more on that shortly.
I developed the design through a combination of research and my own thoughts about what I wanted my girls to think about when they travelled. I also trialled it with other families and friends. I had to learn how to use design software and where to find the right printers who could support my sustainable goal.
The Our World Flight Log is designed to take you on a journey as you turn through the pages, from who you are, to how far you flew, to the countries you are going to before moving onto your total journey distance and whether you have made it all the way round the world or, maybe even to the moon and back! There is also what I call the secret column for you to record who you were with on your journey and other bits and pieces of short information to jog your memory. The size was also important, I decided on a passport sized booklet for ease of taking with you. Roughly 90mm x 125mm.
My favorite pages are the flags and world map, hoping to inspire the user to ask questions about the places they are visiting. A flag is such a good visual to start.
I deliberately did not want an electronic product, books are a first love of mine enabling you to share and remember the experience of your journey in a tactile way. We have had amazing interactions with pilots and crew when asking for the details of our journeys for our flight logs.
It became very clear to me, very quickly that the only way to print a product was to do so in as sustainable a way as possible. Therefore, I researched sustainable paper and printers who could provide this service and who were working themselves in sustainable ways. In the UK that meant I used Forestry Stewardship Council (FSC) paper which is harvested in a sustainable manner.
The first print run was in October 2018 and as things have moved on I will definitely make a few more demands of myself to make the next print run and product even more sustainable. I have learnt a lot through all the development phases I went through and intend to put them into practice.
My professional career has always been in the world of business as an accountant and business change consultant working with all manner of organisations big and small in Australia and the UK. I have never done anything like this before, although I have always been creative but more with my camera or a paint brush. It was a new challenge for me.
In Part Two, I will take you through the competition and where my business is today.
