The Decade in Design Ethics
A great new article at Good.is picks out the most important moments for design in the 'oughts.
The whole article is more than worth a read. Here, I’ve excerpted parts relevant to our interest (design ethics) below.
2000
No Logo, Naomi Klein’s treatise on anti-globalization, sets the tone for the decade’s debates about consumerism and branding.
American Apparel moves into its current factory in downtown Los Angeles. Under the leadership of Dov Charney, it becomes an incongruous champion of locally-produced fair-labor clothing, racy quasi-pornographic advertising, and Helvetica.
After a tight presidential election introduces the world to the Floridian hanging chad, AIGA’s Design for Democracy begins a massive effort to redesign and standardize voting across the nation.
2001
The Mini Cooper is launched in the United States, followed by the Toyota Prius, the first mass-produced hybrid vehicle. The SUV backlash begins.
2002
William McDonough publishes the sustainability manual Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things. An industry-wide call to make “cradle-to-cradle” products supersedes the more ambiguous movement of “going green.”
2003
The Droog Design Foundation opens its first retail store in Amsterdam, becoming the magnetic center for an era of witty, issue-oriented industrial design. A signature piece is a chair made from piles of bound-together rags.
2004
The first batch of city funding is allocated for what will become the High Line, a community effort to transform an abandoned railway into a New York City park, and the most talked-about public space project in years.
Massive Change by Bruce Mau is released, asking designers to think about their work within a greater global context.
The Dove Campaign for Real Beauty is launched by Ogilvy & Mather, featuring self-esteem messaging for young girls, an attack on glossy magazines, and imagery of real women shot by Rankin.
2005
The One Laptop Per Child project announced by Nicholas Negroponte. The lime-green laptop is later designed by Yves Béhar.
2006
Architecture for Humanity’s TED Prize winnings are put towards the launch of the Open Architecture Network, allowing architects to easily share best practices for building affordable, sustainable structures in communities around the world.
The Council for Fashion Designers of America introduces legislation to copyright their designs, lead by new president Diane von Furstenberg.
Widely considered to be the first green skyscraper, the Hearst Tower opens as a Gold LEED-certified building that tops a 1928 structure with a glittering, pixelated bouffant by Norman Foster.
An Inconvenient Truth changes the way we think about global warming, Power Point-style presentations, and Al Gore.
2007
Design for the Other 90% opens at the Cooper-Hewitt, showcasing hundreds of products and initiatives that designers are creating for the rest of the world’s population.
The 2012 London Olympic logo by Wolff Olins is revealed, sparking a international scandal as more than 50,000 British citizens sign a petition against its design. An animated version is said to cause seizures.
The I-35 bridge collapses in Minneapolis, killing 13, injuring 145, and forcing inspections of the United States’ deteriorating infrastructure.
2008
Shepard Fairey creates the “Hope” poster to support Barack Obama’s presidential run. It becomes the single most representative image of any political campaign, ever. Fairey spends the next year in a heated fair-use battle with the Associated Press. No one wins. Oh, except Obama.
The Designers Accord, dubbed the “Kyoto Treaty of design,” sees 120,000 firms and individuals sign on as adopters.
Brad Pitt hires a bevy of starchitects including Thom Mayne, David Adjaye, and Shigeru Ban to design flood-proof houses for Hurricane Katrina victims and raises millions of dollars through his foundation, Make it Right.
2009
The Aspen Design Summit, previously the 58-year-old International Design Conference at Aspen, relaunches under the guidance of the Winterhouse Institute, AIGA, and Change Observer, a new social change-focused division of the blog Design Observer.
William Kamkwamba, a Malawi inventor who built a wind farm for his village from scrap metal when he was 14, publishes his book The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind.
CityCenter, the United States’ largest privately-funded development in history and one of the largest starchitect collaborations in the world, opens in Las Vegas with aspirations of “green superdevelopment” cred.
A meeting with Washington officials and a multi-disciplinary group of designers forming the United States Design Policy advocacy group solidifies a plan for designers and policymakers to begin working more closely together in 2010.
It is worth reiterating: the whole article is more than recommended. All due props to Alissa Walker and Keith Scharwath for their fine research and reporting.
| Tagged with: | Design, Design Ethics, Reminiscence |
Post a comment
Want to know more?
You're reading BlogLESS, a daily blog about the ethics of advertising, branding, design, social media and business. We are also fans of zen, although this itself is perhaps not so zen.
No Comments