UNTITLED (I SHOP THEREFORE IAM),1987.
At the edge of the Atacama Desert, one of the driest places on earth, Lima, Peru, receives almost no rainfall. About 700,000 people have no access to clean water for drinking or bathing. Another 600,000 of the city's 7.5 million residents rely on cisterns for their water, which must be filled by pumps or by hand and cleaned regularly. But Lima's Pacific Coast location experiences humidity of more than 90 percent on summer days, from December to February. So engineers from Peru's University of Engineering and Technology (UTEC) have devised a way to turn that humid air into usable water. Last December, they erected a billboard in the Bujama District of Lima that by early March had produced 9450 liters (about 2500 gallons) of water. The idea came about because UTEC was facing a slump in enrollment as the new semester approached; the engineering department wanted a way to attract more engineering students to the university. They went to Peruvian ad agency Mayo Publicidad, and the partnership of engineers and marketers crafted an advertisement that would provide a very visible demonstration of the university's engineering projects. The water-collecting billboard was born. Electricity from the city's power lines runs the five condensers inside the billboard. Like the condenser in your home air conditioner, the ones in the UTEC billboard are cooler than the air outside. When air contacts the cooled surfaces of the condensers, the air also cools, and the water vapor in the air condenses into liquid water. After reverse-osmosis purification, the water flows down into a 20-liter storage tank at the base of the billboard. The billboard generates about 96 liters of water each day, and a simple faucet gives local residents access to the water. UTEC has not yet announced whether the water will be available for free, but the billboard reportedly cost only about $1200 to install.
Peru is in the middle of a construction boom that generates a lot of unhealthy pollution. Peruvian engineering university UTEC and its ad agency, FCB Mayo, decided to create an air-purifying billboard designed to mitigate the environmental damage the school causes as it builds a new campus. The billboard has the added advantage of promoting the new campus, boosted by the claim that the school will help students learn how to do things like create billboards that filter about 100,000 cubic meters of clean air a day, reaching as far as five blocks away and equivalent to what some 1,200 trees would do. The environmentally friendly campaign is part of a tried-and-true strategy for UTEC and FCB Mayo. Last year they famously created a billboard that helped address a rainfall shortage in Lima by converting atmospheric humidity into clean drinking water. (That work earned numerous accolades, including Adweek's Isaac Gravity Award and a gold Lion in Outdoor at Cannes.) The new one is a welcome follow-up, possibly even more powerful—though perhaps less so—as it addresses a problem the school helped create. In fact, the thing that may be most wrong with it is that it makes every other billboard in the world look bad by comparison.
Graphic design serves as a filter through which much of our communication is disseminated. Graphic designers find themselves in the unique position of being gatekeepers of information as well as providing a mirror that reflects contemporary culture. The influence that graphic designers have on how communication is delivered may not always be apparent to them. Often they are embroiled in the details of a project and don’t even realize the impact their work has had or will have until some time has passed and the work is seen in retrospect. Other times they are faced with a decision where the implications are apparent and they may be torn about whether or not they should create propaganda for a party whose politics they don’t believe in. They also know that if they don’t take the job and benefit financially from it, someone else will.
During a “Big Think” interview with designer Milton Glaser says that the ultimate challenge for designers is to create beautiful, not just sustainable, design. Glaser believes that we respond to beauty as a species; beauty is the means by which we move towards the attentiveness that protects our species as a survival mechanism. Glaser thinks that ultimately it’s the responsibility of the graphic designer to inform and delight by creating beautiful designs. Social responsibility in graphic design has advocates in both the private sector and the public sector, in large organizations and small, and on an individual basis. Since 1942 the Ad Council has been addressing critical social issues. Campaigns like “Rosie the Riveter,” “Smokey the Bear,” and “Crash Test Dummies” have delivered critical messages to the American public. A private, non-profit organization, the Ad Council uses volunteer talent from the advertising and communications industries, the facilities of the media, and the resources of the business and non-profit communities. Graphic designers like Tibor Kalman prodded fellow designers to take responsibility for their work as designer-citizens. Throughout his career he urged designers to question the effects of their work and refuse to accept any client’s product at face value. Kalman inspired graphic designers to use their work to increase public awareness of a variety of social issues. Across the globe as well as on an individual level, graphic designers are being challenged to create work that’s socially responsible. Read about “Water for India,” an example of teaching social responsibility.
It's time to lock up your wallets and purses, cut up your credit cards and dump the love of your life - shopping.
Saturday November 29th 2014 is Buy Nothing Day (UK). It's a day where you challenge yourself, your family and friends to switch off from shopping and tune into life. The rules are simple, for 24 hours you will detox from shopping and anyone can take part provided they spend a day without spending!
Everything we buy has an impact on the environment, Buy Nothing Day highlights the environmental and ethical consequences of consumerism. The developed countries - only 20% of the world population are consuming over 80% of the earth's natural resources, causing a disproportionate level of environmental damage, and an unfair distribution of wealth.
Designers were generally seen as tools of capitalism. Creating brands, packaging, and marketing for consumer goods, graphic designers became an integral part of the free market system by contributing to the creation of wealth in society. Free market supporters believe that this creates peaceful relations and moral behavior. Opponents feel that our unbridled spending and greedy consumerism has led society to the state of recession where we find ourselves today. The free market system is seen to be contradictory to issues of sustainability and encouraging social and community awareness. All over the world consumption rates are soaring. At the same time millions of people consume barely enough to survive. Poverty is often blamed for environmental degradation. Poverty does tend to affect local environments; however, overconsumption is threatening the entire planet. Watch the Story of Stuff for an illustrated presentation about mass consumerism. Sources: http://www.dmi.org/dmi/html/publications/news/ebulletin/ebvsepmm.htm http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/warning/themes/greenspan.html - See more at: http://www.ethicsingraphicdesign.org/integrity/mass-consumerism/#sthash.sCruT4Qu.dpuf
Graphic design is built upon relationships—relationships between the designer and the client as well as the designer and other members of the design team. Creative directors, illustrators, photographers, art directors, videographers, programmers, developers, copywriters, copy editors, project managers, and graphic designers are all collaborators in determining the success of a project. Not all projects require all roles and these roles often overlap or are filled by the same person, the designer. The most successful projects happen when there is a bond of trust between the client and the designer. The most effective way to assure that the expectations of all the parties is met is to validate the relationship with a written agreement.
'Sustainable practices for graphic designers include a wide range of issues. When creating traditional print materials the toxicity of ink and paper and the sheer quantity of paper produced need to be considered. In addition to these factors there are other phases of the life cycle of products that need to be examined. To really determine the sustainability or carbon footprint of a product, one needs to follow it through its entire life cycle. Questions need to be raised about how much fuel is being used for shipping, what the final end product is, how long the life cycle is, and how long before the product ends up as waste.'
The carbon emissions created today from creating millions of pieces of design a year from print on paper to large installations. These pieces of design produced on a mass scale are greatly affecting the environment as stated above.
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Connor
There's a bad mood rising against the corporate brands. No Logo is the warning on the label.
"Pieing doesn’t replace other forms of action, but it is a creative tool in a toolbox of resistance to corporate crime. People are sick to death of writing letters, voting, complaining and just being ignored."
How much damage does a company have to do before we question its existence?
“Factories can be very evasive in how they present themselves to external visitors, what you see is not always what you get. From my own experience of visiting these factories in locations such as Italy and Portugal I have found that workers often have to hide certain conditions or aspects of the factory from paying clients; so it wouldn’t surprise me if factories such as these have young children working for them. However there are other aspects to think about in the situation, such as some children are the only members of their family's able to work, therefore the family's only source of income comes from this child. I am not supporting illegal child labour, however China has a completely different set of values from the United Kingdom; at one time it was socially accepted for children to work in similar factories in this country. I have worked for many prestigious fashion brands who spend more money on their factories, which makes it less likely that they have children on their staff. Where I work at the moment, the company owns their own factory, meaning if they did have children illegally working for them, the company itself would get in trouble. If I knew I was working for a company that hired young children as labourers, I don’t think I would feel comfortable working there. I would never apply for a job with a company I knew used child labourers to construct their designs.”
