MultiTrust : Animating Multicriteria Decision-making Processes in the Organic Value Chain

When thinking about animations, an intuitive reaction could be to dismiss them as mere children’s pastime, but that is by no means the whole picture. Animated films featuring highly specialized knowledge from, say, the domains of science, technology and engineering are to be found all over the current media landscape. There is a tendency that they are predominantly used in one specific communicative constellation, i.e., when domain-specific knowledge is communicated from an expert or authority to a lay person. That, too, is the case when it comes to the animated film “MultiTrust” (to be found here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmoXYJAS8LY ). This animation stems from the research project “Multicriteria assessment and communication of effects of organic food systems” (http://multitrust.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/Description-of-MultiTrust-from-Status-report-2011-to-Organic-RDD.pdf), which was conducted under the auspices of ICROFS (i.e., the International Centre for Research in Organic Food Systems, for more information please visit: http://www.icrofs.org/index.html). The color animation film was produced in 2013 by the award-wining Danish production company and animation studio Tumblehead Aps (for more information please visit: http://www.tumblehead.com/).