Consider the design of a package for a single piece of food. Is this practice wasteful or does this reduce waste?
Your moment of Zen for the day:
The New York based furniture concern creates furniture from recycled cardboard. Their campaign, The Cardboard Speaks, serves both an advertising and an advocacy function.
These little signs are cost-effective and attention-getting way to promote awareness of their laudable (although a little expensive) products. They also serve the purpose of slapping a scarlet letter on non-recycling businesses in the boroughs. Nice!
Finally, not to get too meta, but I can’t help wondering if the ads themselves are eventually turned into bookshelves and playhouses.
Imagine that a small startup exists, and that they provide off-site customer service infrastructure for companies that make software, web apps, etc. Pretty good idea, right? Many companies don’t provide this service, or don’t provide it well.
Now imagine that they create pages on their site for thousands of companies without their consent. They use the companies’ logos, look and feel, etc. to make their page look like an sanctioned location to get official support for these products. The only indication on the page that you’re not at an official support site is a badge that tells users that the company in question is “not yet committed to an open conversation.” They also sell ads to competitors’ websites on your page, unless you buy a plan for $100 a month. Pretty bad ideas, right? In fact, they sound downright malicious, and if they’re not, they’re horribly negligent design decisions.
Now imagine you’re an a-list blogger, that your company provides great (famous) customer service and support, and that you find out about your page on this off-site help resource. You’re obviously pretty upset. You write a blog post lambasting the company for their obviously shady practices, which ends up effecting change in the product. (Many of you will be aware by this point that this is a true story - it happened at the end of March.) Pretty good idea, right? I’m not so sure.
First off, let me say that in my opinion, the design decisions made on behalf of the startup in question were clearly unethical, and I believe that they should be held accountable for them. I personally will never use their service precisely because this incident showed me that they make decisions in a way that is at best cavalier and at worst only concerned with their own self-interest. Either way, I don’t want them making decisions about my information.
So what’s the problem? Didn’t the a-list blog post make sure justice was served? Not really. Why?
Once they were called out, the startup people were compliant to the point of obsequiousness. Of course! They were being taken to task on one of the most popular blogs in the design world. They did what anyone would have done who wanted to save their business and reputation. They made changes quickly in response to the criticism and were polite and professional in a very hostile environment. Their shamefaced behavior was first class. The problem is that this seems to have actually made them some friends.
Next to the startup’s deferential attitude, the a-listers started to look like bullies. This generalizes: If you’re big enough to be on the a-list, your criticism is probably always going to look like bullying. This is true even if you’re right, and even if, as in this case, it is pretty well-reasoned and even-handed. Since people incline to feel sympathy for the victims of bullying, especially when they’re “nice guys,” you’re helping them as much as you’re hurting them. When the blog post in question came out, it gave the startup a great opportunity to adopt what a BP PR advisor once called the reformed sinner persona. Ick.
In sum, the a-listers gave the startup what was probably the biggest moment of publicity in their company’s life, and it was a real softball.
From the site description:
“Consumption is a word used to describe acts of acquisition – generally, the acquisition of things, in exchange for money. Unconsumption is a word used to describe everything that happens after an act of acquisition.”
This is a philosophy Design Less Better stands firmly behind. Creating less waste and getting more use and enjoyment out of the things we have is a fine example of good design ethics.
To their advice about re-purposing and recycling used things, we would also add, from an earlier post:
The Zimbabwean is a newspaper produced by a group of exiled Zimbabwean journalists. It is sold in the UK, South Africa and Zimbabwe but in the latter it attracts an import tax that renders the average Zimbabwean unable to afford a copy.
The newspaper and South African creative agency TBWA Hunt Lascaris have created a series of ads — wall murals, billboards and flyers — in Johannesburg using the Z$100 trillion dollar note. This incredible denomination is a poignant symbol of the country’s world record inflation.
The campaign hopes to encourage more sales of the paper in South Africa, thereby subsidizing the cost of the paper to Zimbabweans, while simultaneously raising awareness of the dire situation in the country under the Mugabe regime.
Via the Creative Review and Veer: Ideas.
The idea is pretty simple: It’s a zero-kerning dingbats font where the characters combine to form modular illustrations. Here, for example, is the string “Design Less Better”:
Neat!
Way back in November of last year, we noted that economic signs all pointed to a foreseeable future in which designers were going to have to start thinking about ways to do more with less. We noted that “[s]chematically, a more challenging climate for business tends to mean a more challenging climate for design.” We also wondered if this was necessarily the case.
If the economic downturn was looming then, it’s nearly in full bloom now, and a lot of fine pieces have since been written about its effect on design to come. I thought it might be nice today to do a brief review of the literature which has helped my clarify my answer to our earlier pondering (in the affirmative).
In January, Michael Cannell suggested in the New York Times that with the recent “giddy” economic period coming to an end, so must end the era of design in which “form followed frivolity [and] function was left off the guest list.” Designers, he thought, should take this as a call to arms, a design challenge worthy of the name: do more with less. He also notes that historically that’s just what has happened, and since “design thrives in a depression,” that’s what we can expect to happen again.
A week later in Design Observer, Murray Moss noted that design, of course, does not actually thrive in a depression. Design hates a recession, he said: in a depression, “new ideas do not get championed or realized. Leadership turns to market-driven accommodation.” Moss also chided Cannell for his apparent disinterest in the aesthetic dimension of design, noting that if design in the new depression “will be about finding the sweet spot between affordability and durability,” as Mr. Cannell has it, then Ikea and Target may as well be our “official standards-bearers of good design”.
Some subsequent rounds of back and forth ensued; good points were made by both sides. Allison Arieff recently attempted to synthesize the two points of view, noting that “work that springs from [a more depression-style consumer economic mindset] does not have to sacrifice beauty for utility, vision for practicality.” Which is of course the case, at least theoretically.
But in order to achieve this synthesis, designers will have to solve problems within a manifold of severe and often conflicting economic demands. Consumers will often be forced to choose between the long-view value of well-designed “heirloom” style items and the instant gratification of Target or Ikea. Choosing the former is neither common nor easy even in good economic times. This means that designers will have the perhaps even harder task of convincing clients that a given design has the requisite persuasive power.
Cannell’s point was that these incredibly tough constraints often spur design innovation. After all, designers are problem solvers. Of course, suggesting that “design loves a recession” is malapropos. Design hates a recession, and has to work incredibly hard to survive one. If that’s the case, then on my view, it is not clear that we ought to take the cavalier stance that design will necessarily survive this recession, at least not in a desirable form.
Perhaps, “in a recession, design fights for its life.” So, I guess, get back to work.
