A report from our Berlin correspondent on design and society.

The Post-Materialist has been in London this week, searching — as I like to do, being a serious type who believes the world is entering a serious moment — for signs of ethical seriousness in the young. Among the work of student designers on display at summer degree shows across the city, I found much to like.

Take, for example, the work of Emma Weber, a student at the London College of Communication. Emma has made an ethical labeling project combining a bar code sticker that consumers at the supermarket can read with their cellphone cameras, an Ethical Facts Web site and a ratings system which measures, from zero to nine, how the people who made the product are treated, how the product affects the environment and how harmlessly it can be dumped or recycled. The result is a combined “ethiscore”; the pomegranate smoothie in Emma’s example got a ethiscore of 24 out of a possible 27 — a rating likely to impart a righteous glow to consumer and producer alike.

Across town at the Royal College of Art, Andrew Stordy has invented a Fair Roaster; a machine that extends the remit of the coffee machine to include roasting the raw green coffee beans. “The Fair Roaster,” Andrew explains, “aims to bring the farmer closer to the consumer, thereby cutting out dependency on the middle man” — namely, multi-national roasting companies. The result is “the ultimate fresh cup of coffee” supplied by small organizations which can offer “alternative flavors based on the origins of the coffee”.

You can’t save the world with a typeface, but you might be able to improve the aesthetics of the “Evil Empire” of meh-standard design, Microsoft. “It’s so incredible that so many people love Comic Sans,” says Valerio Di Lucente, one of the four creators of the font’s sibling-rival, Serious Sans. “At the same time it’s one of the typefaces most hated by designers.”

Struggling to understand what could possibly be good about Comic Sans, Valerio — together with partners Hugo Timm, Filip Tydén and Erwan Lhussier — found that the doggedly goofy font’s irregular forms made it one of the easiest typefaces for dyslexics to read. The designers also liked how it undermined the authority — and changed the meaning — of texts set in it.

Serious Sans sees Microsoft’s silly, inescapable font called to heel and given a shampoo and style. The designers even made a spoof crest in which the Microsoft dog gets replaced by a “serious fox.” One small step for ethics, perhaps, but a giant leap for aesthetics.

Read previous columns of The Post-Materialist by Nick Currie.