It's Nice that
The Only Way is Ethics:
What are the moral obligations of a graphic designer ?
by Tim Abrahams 13th October 2016
"Designers themselves might behave professionally, designers frame three questions not around themselves but around those of the client. what would the client do? is it ethically acceptable or not, is it politically acceptable or not "
"The liberating qualities of political work for graphic designers are only so in comparison to other forms of work. Freedom is the great virtue that graphic designers possess. In other professions such as architecture one can see how ineffectual and technocratic ethical decisions become when they are made by a professional body. The freedom to take a more open-minded attitude to the clients is one of many. In taking a responsibility for their outputs rather those of their clients, designers are then free to make good work as well as political decisions which are not bound by the tendency to sloganeering that graphic design led politics creates."
" the care for good quality design is self-referential and nostaligic, perhaps that is what we need to fuel the fire until we have a more benign, less fearful corporate climate."
I wanted to read this article to understand what was expected of a graphic designer is the sense of ethics and what moral obligations are expected to be followed when designing, and if that was being followed by some of the brands i was looking at for my case studies for my COP question which is to do with the branding of certain products and climate change.
PacificStandard
Designers Can Help Save the Planet
Ellen McMahon 20th June 2014
"if humanity is going to survive climate change, it will be in part, I think, because designers applied their skills to help us visualize what's really at stake."
"The U.S. public needs climate change illustrated and explained in all of the ways we know how. Though 67 percent of Americans believe global warming is happening, a January Pew poll found that we as a nation ranked it 19th on a list of 20 priorities for Congress and the president to handle (ahead of only dealing with global trade issues). "
"A more recent Gallup pollfound that less than one-third of Americans worry about the environment—the lowest level of concern since Gallup began measuring it in 2001. Clearly, the data alone isn't making a difference. And that's in part because it hasn't been communicated in a way that makes us care."
Students need to learn to be proactive about finding or creating situations where they can put their knowledge, skills, and values into practise.
"Scientists have a critical message, but now more than ever messages need to be packaged and branded. Consider that most information comes to us through various forms of communication design, from the postage stamp to the nutrition label—and how design has the power to make it meaningful. Modern life has meant replacing the “natural” with designed messages, objects, and experiences, which means that the people doing the designing play, now more than ever, a critical role. "
"In fact, if we as a culture have become more aware of our role in wasting the planet, it is thanks in some small part to a successful collaboration between a passionate environmentalist and a designer that went viral several years ago; the short video “The Story of Stuff,” has been seen by over 12 million people, and was translated into 15 languages within the first three years of its launch in 2007."
That passionate environmentalist, Annie Leonard, was recently named the new director for Greenpeace USA. That designer, Jonah Sachs, is the founder of Free Range Studios and is now a driving force for bringing environmental issues into the national debate.
"designers who can work effectively with scientists and make environmental issues engaging to a broad audience are still on the margins of a field that hasn’t fully embraced its potential impact and responsibility. There are notable exceptions, such as Stamen Design, creators of an app that predicts sea level rise, and the National Climate Data Center, which was behind the transformation of the most recent National Climate Assessment website. But in truth, most professional design is still in the service of selling us stuff—much of it we don't really need, with ingredients that aren't good for us, and made of materials that end up polluting our land, air, and water."
"Design education is at the root of this problem. While sustainability permeates every aspect of architectural education, most communication and graphic design programs still focus on formal and technical skills without any connection to social and environmental impact."
The Guardian
Can Graphic Design Save your Life?
"If Graphic Design can save your life, it is eminently capable of killing you too."
This is the conflicted message at the heart of a powerfulness exhibition at the wellcome Collection, which explores Graphic Designs complex relationship with health, medicine, and the world of big pharma, and the different ethical positions that designers choose to take.
Initially it opens with sections on how creatives have tried to sell tobacco overs the years and also how they have tried to get people to kick the habit. I wanted to really concentrate on this area as i planned to look at smoking packets as case studies so what to get as much information of the process of going from a lucrative, seductive product to being frowned upon and radically branded(ugly by design).
The first example it uses was the iconic Lucky Strike roundel by Raymond Loewry, This was reproduced on t shirts caps the lot mate.
This Alongside in the exhibition the silk cut campaign of the early 1990s masterminded by Charles Saatchi. The billboards featured luscious photographs of Skeins of purple silk being slashed and sliced, were and ingenious response to the growing constraints on tobacco advertising, which explicitly prohibited the naming of brands. Instead the increasingly surreal and impenetrable compositions of silk and polished metal offered a reward to the cognoscenti capable of deciphering the coded message. Silk cuts sales soared, their loyal customers enticed by the prospect of collecting the artworks as miniature cards along the way.
By contrast you are then shown Market research agency Gfk's quest to find the 'ugliest colour possible' which to wrap Australia's new plain cigarette packets in, following the governments 2012 ruling prohibiting the branded packaging of tobacco. They settled on Pantone 448C AKA "opaque couche" a queasy shade of greenish brown. the shade is used to cover 25 percent of cigarette packets not already taken up by gory images of tar riddled lungs and rotting gums.It seemed to have worked with the Australian Government realising stats that the three years after smokers fell by 100,000.
"The World Health Organisation has called on every government to take up the plain packaging pledge, thereby firmly cementing graphic design as a key battleground in the war on smoking. design sells, but can it equally put you off picking up a cancer stick ever again"
I liked this quote as it fitted in with argument and approach I wanted to make with in my essay, that if it is proven that ugly by design can work on a product that is bad and t can have results then why would it not work on products like diary and meat. Is it because smoking is to do with destroying th human body whereas meat and meat products is to do with the destruction of the planet and people only care about there personal well being. However from what the facts and stats show about Animal Agriculture and the affects it is having on our planet then branding like this must surely be implemented or even just a warning of the affects of the product.
The Guardian Interview
Naomi Klein: 'We tried it your way and we don't have another decade to waste'
The Guardian Interview
Naomi Klein: 'We tried it your way and we don't have another decade to waste'
By Suzanne Goldenberg
Her first book, No Logo, about the power of brands over sweatshop workers in Asia who made the products (and the consumers in America and Europe who consumed them), politicised a generation of twentysomethings. It became the handbook of the anti- globalisation protests, and inspired two Radiohead albums
Seven years later, her second book, Shock Doctrine, analysed how wars, coups and natural disasters were used as a pretext to impose so-called “free market” measures. Now Klein is back, writing about capitalism, only this time the fate of the entire planet is at stake. With her new book, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs The Climate, Klein hopes to set off the kind of powerful mass movement that could – finally – produce the radical changes needed to avoid a global warming catastrophe and fix capitalism at the same time. She argues that we have all been thinking about the climate crisis the wrong way around: it’s about capitalism – not carbon – the extreme anti-regulatory version that has seized global economies since the 1980s and has set us on a course of destruction and deepening inequality.
Capitalism, since it was unshackled by the deregulation of the 1980s, has widened the gap between rich and poor. The top 3% held 55% of all wealth last year, up from 45% in 1989. The bottom 90% controlled 24.7% of wealth, according to statistics released this month by the Federal Reserve.“It is not like everything is fine except for the problem that the temperature is going up a little bit,” Klein says. “If the only problem with capitalism was this slight temperature increase, we would really be cooked. But the fact is that there are lots of problems with this system, and on top of all of those problems, it is destabilising our planet’s life support system.”
Klein believes the gap between the 1% and everyone else and the powerlessness of local governments to take control are casualties of global capital. To follow the course of action she prescribes would require a hostile takeover of large parts of the environmental movement. But that would be entirely warranted, it seems. Environmental groups have wasted time trying to recruit big business and billionaires to adopt pro-climate measures, she says. In the meantime, economies have continued to spew out carbon pollution, making a climate fix far more difficult.
“We need an ideological battle. It is still considered politically unthinkable just to introduce straight-up, polluter-pays punitive measures – particularly in the US.” To Klein, environmentalists should have just gone to war on business, and on the whole concept of capitalism.
In truth, Klein is vague in her book and our conversation about exactly how this would come about. In the book she talks about “an effervescent moment” – when popular protests converge to bring about real change – which comes after a section in the book titled “Magical Thinking”. There is a curious failure to really get to grips with questions about a real-world solution – Klein must have anticipated being asked. Especially given that she has often been acutely focused on what popular movements need to do to bring about concrete change; her message to Occupy, for instance, was that the movement needed to impose clear structures and institutions. If capitalism is going to destroy the world, why wouldn’t capitalism fix itself – if only for its own survival?
“Between the Heartlanders who recognise that climate change is a profound threat to our economic and social systems and therefore deny its scientific reality, and those who claim climate change requires only minor tweaks to business-as-usual and therefore allow themselves to believe in its reality, it’s not clear who is more deluded,”
She says she sees a new breed of climate activist, ready to go after corporate power in a way that Big Green is not. “They are going after the fossil fuel companies directly as opposed to just trying to go into business with them and gently cajole them into doing the right thing,” she says.At the same time she argues there has been a shift in attitudes about how people treat one another.“I am not in despair. I am excited by what I am seeing. I think that the task is enormous. I think we are nowhere close to where we need to be, but I think we are on a track. There is a track,” she says.
Her first book, No Logo, about the power of brands over sweatshop workers in Asia who made the products (and the consumers in America and Europe who consumed them), politicised a generation of twentysomethings. It became the handbook of the anti- globalisation protests, and inspired two Radiohead albums
Seven years later, her second book, Shock Doctrine, analysed how wars, coups and natural disasters were used as a pretext to impose so-called “free market” measures. Now Klein is back, writing about capitalism, only this time the fate of the entire planet is at stake. With her new book, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs The Climate, Klein hopes to set off the kind of powerful mass movement that could – finally – produce the radical changes needed to avoid a global warming catastrophe and fix capitalism at the same time. She argues that we have all been thinking about the climate crisis the wrong way around: it’s about capitalism – not carbon – the extreme anti-regulatory version that has seized global economies since the 1980s and has set us on a course of destruction and deepening inequality.
Capitalism, since it was unshackled by the deregulation of the 1980s, has widened the gap between rich and poor. The top 3% held 55% of all wealth last year, up from 45% in 1989. The bottom 90% controlled 24.7% of wealth, according to statistics released this month by the Federal Reserve.“It is not like everything is fine except for the problem that the temperature is going up a little bit,” Klein says. “If the only problem with capitalism was this slight temperature increase, we would really be cooked. But the fact is that there are lots of problems with this system, and on top of all of those problems, it is destabilising our planet’s life support system.”
Klein believes the gap between the 1% and everyone else and the powerlessness of local governments to take control are casualties of global capital. To follow the course of action she prescribes would require a hostile takeover of large parts of the environmental movement. But that would be entirely warranted, it seems. Environmental groups have wasted time trying to recruit big business and billionaires to adopt pro-climate measures, she says. In the meantime, economies have continued to spew out carbon pollution, making a climate fix far more difficult.
“We need an ideological battle. It is still considered politically unthinkable just to introduce straight-up, polluter-pays punitive measures – particularly in the US.” To Klein, environmentalists should have just gone to war on business, and on the whole concept of capitalism.
In truth, Klein is vague in her book and our conversation about exactly how this would come about. In the book she talks about “an effervescent moment” – when popular protests converge to bring about real change – which comes after a section in the book titled “Magical Thinking”. There is a curious failure to really get to grips with questions about a real-world solution – Klein must have anticipated being asked. Especially given that she has often been acutely focused on what popular movements need to do to bring about concrete change; her message to Occupy, for instance, was that the movement needed to impose clear structures and institutions. If capitalism is going to destroy the world, why wouldn’t capitalism fix itself – if only for its own survival?
“Between the Heartlanders who recognise that climate change is a profound threat to our economic and social systems and therefore deny its scientific reality, and those who claim climate change requires only minor tweaks to business-as-usual and therefore allow themselves to believe in its reality, it’s not clear who is more deluded,”
She says she sees a new breed of climate activist, ready to go after corporate power in a way that Big Green is not. “They are going after the fossil fuel companies directly as opposed to just trying to go into business with them and gently cajole them into doing the right thing,” she says.At the same time she argues there has been a shift in attitudes about how people treat one another.“I am not in despair. I am excited by what I am seeing. I think that the task is enormous. I think we are nowhere close to where we need to be, but I think we are on a track. There is a track,” she says.
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