Design 21: Social Design Network

Loz Ives, of the awe-inspiring Because Studio, has updated his website this week!

Lots of new socially-minded projects to flick through, including work for Carbon Co-op, Communities for Change and The New Economics Foundation.

Congratulations Loz, hope you still have an archive of the previous folio somewhere online for us!

The Cafe of Equivalent$ has been nominated for a Design Award and will therefore be on show alongside 99 other nominated international projects at the Design Museum in London from mid february till june.

kennardphillipps' Cafe of Equivalent$ - a lunch food stall selling food at cost equivocal to food affordability in the producing countries - sought to highlight the relative price of food in producer countries compared to consumer countries. A lunch food stall was set up in the City of London asking diners how much they thought they should pay for their food. For example, soup and bread in Mozambique for a worker earning $2 a day costs 20 cents, which is 10% of their daily wage. If this was applied to the earnings of the average bonus-earning-banker, soup and bread, they calculated, should cost £111.20. Which is what it was priced at on their stall.

via. kennardphillipps and CRblog

Design is a powerful tool. Its impact and fundamental role in politics were the focus of an exhibition at the V&A in London last year, “Cold War Modern: Design 1945–1970,” which explored how designers used Cold War technologies, products and aspects of popular culture to envision imagined utopias. The overall analysis illustrated how design may be understood as “a species of military uniform, a powerful method of signalling allegiances and aspirations, of rallying ones own side, and intimidating the perceived enemy.”

Recently, however, design has developed another political role. This arrives at a time where the so-called threat of terrorism has successfully created risk societies within the major democracies; speculations about the latest conspiracy to blow up buildings, sabotage commercial airliners and poison water supplies still dominate the headlines. This has also opened up a new playground for designers. Tobias Wong, for example, has created a range of products that reference the 9/11 attacks, including Boxcutter and NY Pocketbook. He has resorted to this type of work because he is “frustrated that other designers don’t.

A series of projects has also emerged in response to the recent debate about climate change. British design duo &Made adopted this theme for their self-initiated project Climatised Objects, addressing the dangers presented by global warming. The flagship piece Either Oar is a timber dining table inspired by recent spates of flas...

“We can recognize random logos of corporations but cannot identify a tree in our front yard.” I was inspired by this from the documentary “11th Hour” by Leonardo DiCaprio. It reinforces the idea that nature is not relevant to our daily lives. If it is not a part of our culture and daily interactions, then how do we expect to understand the magnitude of what we have done to the planet. In “Blessed Unrest” Paul Hawken describes how much we miss if we are not looking for it. Right now we are looking for corporate logos because we feel they have more relevance in our lives than the tree you stare at everyday outside your window. It makes sense because we have been trained to think and look at things this way. The abstract symbolism of a corporation we buy products from becomes ingrained in how we look at ourselves. Thanks to designers and brand strategists like myself, the force of brands connecting to individuals is powerful. Gutterleaf

The tree outside, while it lives in our physical environment it does not actively try to interact with us. It does not send you emails or connect to you on Facebook. It does not know about the latest trends or best buys. What that tree does is far greater. It takes the carbon dioxide we produce and turns it into oxygen that we breath. It prevents the foundation of your residence from being flooded. It traps moisture in our environment to help support a water rich ecosystem. We do not see these things happening. These processes are no...

Recently, I participated in a logo design competition sponsored by DESIGN 21. Designers were challenged to create a logo for the UNESCO DREAM Center, a project with the goal of providing underprivileged children, especially in post-conflict regions, the opportunities and tools to express themselves creatively through the arts. DREAM Center

My entry, “Bringing the Arts into Focus” was one of over 1500 entries from designers around the world. Submissions represented all parts of the logo design spectrum: simple to intricate, serious to playful, large, small, good, bad, and everything in between. However, this article is not about logo design. (For principles of effective logo design, check out this short article by Jacob Cass.)

Before this competition, I had never given much thought to how I presented a logo or identity design to a client after it was completed. Looking through hundreds of submissions during the voting period, I realized that presenting an identity design is much more than providing a color and greyscale version of your logo.

The best designs in the competition stood out for more than just their conceptual strength or creativity – they had an effective presentation. Below are the aspects I believe contributed to this professional feel, with examples selected from this competition and several others sponsored by Design 21.

1. Negative Space

Many entries uploaded an image that left empty space around the logo at the center. This minimalist desig...

In a recent article, aptly named The Price of D&AD New Blood, Graphic Designer Dave Cuvelot comments on his experience of D&AD New Blood - 'The Creative Talent Show' and offers an well written opinion on its true value to today's graduate designers:

"If our top-level conferences are ‘just’ lining up celebrity designers to show off their own work, then is that what graduate showcases are setting us up for – to become the celebrity? With such significant influence and positioning in the design industry, I’d like to think design ‘celebrities’ could not better use their time in the public eye and communicate the power of design to other areas of society, maybe they could share what they have learnt about design, share issues which matter to us all and fight to change the discourse away from stardom, and back to a discourse focused on where design is going and more importantly how it can be used to better society."

Read Dave's full article here: The Price of D&AD New Blood.

"I was wandering through a narrow Madras alley on a very hot morning in January. The sun was beating and colors appeared especially vibrant within the bright light. The streets were crowded, Bollywood tunes blasting, and intense aromas of spices and sewage filled the air. Amid the chaos, it was beautiful."

Every so often, I’ll shoot a particular photo that ends up becoming a great source of inspiration. This inspiration can root from a variety of things, such as the color palette, the composition, the content, or even simply the memory of the moment.

In this article, I have presented a particular photo that inspires me, followed up with a few design exercises, and then showed how the particular theme is reflected around the world by presenting work from other photographers.

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What challenges will the next decade bring?

And how are we going to overcome them?

So asked the The Institute for the Future of thousands of participants via its progressive Superstruct online interface to co-create its Ten Year Forecast. Density Design was asked by Italy's Wired magazine to devise a visual synthesis of the forecast which could be used to stimulate onwards discussion by a wider audience.

Density Design is a research lab at the Politecnico di Miano which explores the emergent relationships between communication design, information visualisation and complex systems. It supports the use of communication design to facilitate dialogue within participatory decision making.

Creatively combined with an exquisite concoction of allegorical illustrations, the resulting Map of the Future provides a common visualisation on which to base discussions and analysis of what may lie ahead. The map has already been put to use at the Capitale Digitale collaborative sessions held by Wired & Telecom Italia. Hard to imagine going back to a paltry powerpoint pie-chart after being served up this flavorsome infographic feast.

Download a original (largest) version of the map on Flickr

In today's fast paced world of information overload, have we lost the ability to truly devote ourselves to the ultimate mastery of a single art? Read Article »

Photo by: Carlos Bohorquez Nassar

“We envision a select group of 60 designers, change leaders, NGOs, foundations and experts coming together to engage actively in opportunities to demonstrate design thinking in crafting solutions for large social problems, as well as to use existing networks and programs to accelerate change.”

The impressive list of attendees of the Aspen Design Summit next week will be collaborating to come up with design solutions and create concrete two-year implementation plans for 5-6 new projects. The themes include poverty, health care and education and collaborating organizations include UNICEF, the Mayo Clinic, and the Center for Disease Control. The Summit will include considerable dialogue and discussion of role of the design industry in leading social change initiatives.

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