An interesting â??Dispatchesâ?? programme on Channel 4 last night was built around footage smuggled out of North Korea, on the pains of death for the filmmakers, if caught. It captured the appaling repression of a Stalinist state where corruption, starvation, and summary executions are everyday experiences. What it really brought home was the power of the graphic image, both for good and bad, and the fear repressive regimes have of visual communication. On one hand it is used by the state to project a colourful image of the all-seeing all-powerful leader, Kim Jong Il. On the other, there are instances of fearless grass-roots dissent with images of the leader written over and posters calling for popular revolution. Layered ontop of this is the use of new cheap technology to digitally record these fairly primative and small scale acts of dissent, then disseminate them to the wider world.
There is also an interesting burgeoning black market in video’s of soap operas and game shows smuggled in from the South and China, again on pains of death. It’s fascinating how a form of trash culture, images and lifestyles depicted in adverts and chat shows, could become part of a catalyst to bring down a repressive regime.
This brought to mind a story an old tutor of mine told me about the turning point in the debate about slavery coming with the mass production and distribution of an illustration of a slave ship, and the conditions in which slaves were being transported. When confronted with this visual evidence of a scenario, which could otherwise be either ignored or belittled, popular opinion started to turn in favour of ending slavery.
It really puts into perspective the work we do on a day to day basis, and a lot of the so-called graphic activism which exists in our western culture, (and I hold myself as guilty as anyone on this count).
A recent social-graphics project of mine (bearing in mind all of the above) can be seen â??hereâ??
Published on October 18, 2005 12:20 pm.
Filed under: Design, General, Society + Politics
Yesterday I spent a very pleasant afternoon in the company of â??Demosâ?? and some very nice people who are running a project called â??Glasgow2020â??.
Glasgow 2020 is looking at the future of Glasgow (or, as the name suggests, how Glasgow will be in 2020) and this particular event was asking us to consider the future of the workplace by taking us out of the office and on a boat ride down the Clyde. The event finished with a presentation by â??Robb Mitchellâ?? of the Chateau and New Media Scotland, and Pat Kane, formerly (and currently I think) of â??Hue and Cryâ??, and now a thinker on the future of work and creativity and the author of â??The Play Ethicâ??
This unlikely double act made some nice, if slightly incoherant, observations about social space and the blurring line between work and the rest of the world. Pat did seem to get a little carried away by his own rhetoric around the democratisation of technology, and the need for us all to have access to the technology which will (apparently) free us all to be independent networked workers in this brave new world. His point about access to emerging technology is an important one in that the ‘city’ should strive towards equality of access, but there was a general consensus that society needs to also encourage non-technical social innovations if we’re going to head towards a nicer city to live in, and away from a world of techno-haves and techno-have not’s, (or away from a world where that matters).
Anyway, as we docked at the end of the day one certainty was foremost in my mind. In Glasgow in the year 2020 it will probably, more likely than not, be raining.
Published on October 12, 2005 6:00 pm.
Filed under: Design, General, Society + Politics, Work
The environmental impact of our consumer lifestyles is tied to a very simple idea – companies want to us to spend more money, so they try to make more and more stuff for us to buy, at a cheaper and cheaper production price, which is why environmental concerns in the manufacturing process come, (with a couple of notable exceptions), a lot lower than they should.
If companies could convince us to pay more in return for less (physical stuff) and more ‘experience’ this would surely be the way out of this mess. Think about anything you buy or use regularly and consider how you could re-design it as a service or as a lighter-impact product, yet at the same time add value in the process and be able to leverage a premium price for it. This is surely the golden formula which would satisfy the markets rapacious need to make money, and the planets need to not get filled up with shit.
Service design is an emerging sector which any designer (of any discipline) worth her salt should be thinking about, if only to have an opinion on it. The RCA’s interaction course, and similar courses throughout the world have produced a generation of designers of ‘experience’, rather than ‘product’. Having seen the output of a couple of professional service design projects, my only concern is that if we try to merely replace product with service, we are missing a massive opportunity. The sucess of design for a product-light world lies in creating something from little or nothing, which is an infinitely more attractive and seductive alternative to more ‘stuff’, not just a replacement.
> More on service design at teko / live|work / and the excellent doors of perception
Published on October 6, 2005 3:49 pm.
Filed under: Design, Environment, General, Society + Politics
Although this happened a while ago, and Ms Beers has long since departed the Pentagon, her thankless mission unfulfilled, I think this is a useful story in terms of some of the misunderstandings that constantly plague organsiations about brand design and communication.
(You can read a full transcript of a radio interview on the subject â??hereâ?? – it’s very funny and worth a look).
The major problem with this initiative is thinking that what America does, and the American ‘Brand’ are two seperate things and that through advertising alone you can become the thing you want people to see. To think you can communicate a message about the benevolent, caring USA, while 24hr news channels broadcast footage of American carpet bombing of Iraq and Afghanistan demonstrates the most amazing nievity. America is MacDonalds and Democracy, Bruce Springsteen and Imperialism, Disney and Capitalism, Hummers and Freedom, all rolled in to one self-contradictory whole, all at once. If, (with particular reference to this article and the ‘branding’ of America’s foreign policy), there is a desire to shift people’s perception, that is going to have to start with a change in behaviour. Perhaps America could develop a new foreign policy built around the famous ‘have a nice day’ mantra. The essence of this policy would be to ‘out-nice’ other nations through a strategic combination of displays of overwhelming generosity and kindness, thus shaming countries of the world into better behaviour towards their citizens and each other. While this is only a ‘top-of-the-head’ suggestion, I am adamant that creative thought needs to be applied to what America is actually doing, long before they think about ‘selling it’, (their words, not mine), to the rest of the world.
You don’t need me to spell out the parallels here between branding a nation through communication, and the numerous occurances of organisations trying to project a new image through communication alone, rather than looking at the fundamentals of what they are doing. Rather than thinking about Re-Brand’s, I always urge people to think about a â??Re-Doâ??
Published on October 4, 2005 3:46 pm.
Filed under: Brand, Design, General, Society + Politics
Trevor Phillips, Head of the Racial Equality Commission made some shrewd remarks in his recent â??speechâ?? on race relations in Britain in 2005, and flagged up some important warning signs about â??sleepwalking into a ghetto cultureâ?. He also hinted at a solution to our problems being a better shared understanding of British-ness. There are two important questions here. 1. What would Britishness be? 2. How would we learn this Britishness? It seems that whenever there are problems regarding communication and understanding, whether it be in corporate communications or these slightly more weighty issues of natinal identity, that the default response is to say we all need to be â??on-messageâ??, â??on-brandâ?? and â??singing from the same song sheetâ??. Not only is this unrealistic, but it imposes a rather sinister subtext of the answer to our differences being an imposed mono-culture. Business and society in general would do well to learn from examples where different view points are tolerated and can even be a very creative force for good. So long as the lines of communication are open, strong and honest we should be able to tolerate (and maybe even enjoy) strongly opposing views, whether this relates to being â??onbrandâ?? in corporate life or â??onbrandâ?? as a citizen of the UK.
Published on October 3, 2005 4:36 pm.
Filed under: Brand, Design, General, Society + Politics
This week Justin King, Chief Exec of the Sainsbury group, called for a check on the dominance of Tescoâ??s in the UK Supermarket market. (â??More Hereâ??) His claims, which seemed to some to be a case of sour overpriced organic grapes, lay around the power Tesco weilds as market leader when it comes to developing new sites, to the exclusion of Sainsburies and Adsa et al. Of course Tesco rebutted these allegations, claiming â??mostâ?? British consumers had access to at least two or three supermarkets therefore Tescoâ??s position as number 1 was a result of the consumers â??free choiceâ?? and not something they would ever take for granted. The issue of choice is an interesting one here in that choice only really exists from a very small range of possible options – the big companies having run local independant traders out of town a long time ago, and the factors determining that choice being a tightly controlled combination of value for money, cost and â??perceived qualityâ??. We are now all aware that supermarkets run to their own internal logic which results in some appaling products reaching our shelves, produced via intensive farming methods which are bad for the environment, and probably bad for us. The emphasis placed on superficial appearance at the expense of nutritional value is worrying. But that internal logic which specialises in making something from nothing can even make money from this, producing nicely (and wastefully) packaged â??Qualityâ?? ranges – the leverage leading consumers to chose these premium products being the shoddy quality of the rest of their ranges.
An interesting gap currently exists for a â??goodâ?? alternative to the supermarket. This means more than producing heavily packaged â??organicâ?? potatoes (40% of the crop being rejected because theyâ??re not round enough), or putting a miniscule fraction of your massive profits back into â??community causesâ??. It would mean redesigning the way a supermarket works, creating value for the consumer in something resource-light and sustainable, and eschewing the current logic of the market which results in broiler house chickens spending their steroid fuelled short lives sitting about in their own excrement. The supermarkets can argue all day about whether theyâ??re benignly just giving consumers what they want or whether those â??wantsâ?? are created in a system that has reduced the possible choices in such a way to create a demand for what theyâ??re offering. Sainsburies and Tescoâ??s can scrap about whether one has better access to new developments than the other but the fact is if youâ??re going to play in that particular market youâ??ll sooner or later get dragged into working by itâ??s own rules. The only route out seems to be to create a different market with different needs and different products and services, which can play by a different (better) set of rules.
Published on October 3, 2005 4:22 pm.
Filed under: Brand, Design, Environment, General, Society + Politics
In an associated incident of Brand Tyranny, news reaches us of a school fundraising endeavour hampered by the Live Aid foundation brand police. Pupils at Stewarton Academy were all set for their â??Live Tradeâ?? event to encourage and promote Fair Trade in their school and community and timed to coincide with the G8 conference in Gleneagles and the Live8 concerts in London and Edinburgh. Unfortunately news of the event reached Geldof Towers and a request was made to change the events name for fear of damaging the Live Aid brand.
Published on October 3, 2005 4:01 pm.
Filed under: Brand, General, Society + Politics
One phenomenon of the recent â??Make Poverty Historyâ?? campaign was the emergence of conspicuous consumption as a means of political protest. Attending the G8 demonstration on the 2nd July (2005) in Edinburgh, it was interesting to view the number of branding and merchandising opportunities exploited by the organisers and associated groups. The most bizarre of these was the â??Scottish Socialist Partyâ?? stall selling red â??make capitalism historyâ?? wristbands, demonstrating either a profound economic nievety or well developed sense of irony – (I rather uncharitably suspect the former rather than the latter). The white wristbands have been in themselves an interesting way of communicating and disseminating an idea. By using the endorsement of every wearer of the causes of the campaign, a wearable advert has been created, like a physical manifestation of a viral campaign.
Of course this was originally hit upon by â??Nikeâ?? with their livestrong campaign, who for all their dubious operating methods, are amongst the shrewdest of operators when exploiting new marketing channels in the most effective ways.
While it would be easy to criticise the percieved dumbing down of political causes for mass consumption, the interesting question would be whether this (and other) campaigns have more impact and effect by drawing in a bigger constituency through modern marketing methods. Is the environmental and social impact of the production of all these pieces of merchandise justified by a bigger voice for the campaign and its causes. So do the ends justify the means? Answers on a recycled postcard….
Published on October 3, 2005 3:42 pm.
Filed under: Brand, Design, Environment, General, Society + Politics