Merry Christmas
Have a happy and restful holiday. Thanks for reading BlogLESS.
Melbourne-based architect Mick Frazzetto's 'Pop Tree', an eco-friendly (and spectacularly minimal) Christmas tree is constructed from water-cut ecopanel.
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I caught James Reynolds's Far Foods, an updated design for produce packaging, on Swissmiss. I think the boarding-pass styling might be too clever visually, but I very much like the idea of prominently displaying point-of-origin, distance traveled, and resulting CO2.
Cliff Kuang recently wrote a piece at GOOD Magazine that takes after my own heart.
He tells a nice story about his recent experience at a "green" themed consumer electronics show in New York. At the show, he was offered an application for a green credit card. The card awarded one ton of carbon offsets for every $1000 spent by the card holder. One ton of carbon offsets is worth $8-12 dollars.
Most credit card holders will recognize that a $10 return (on average) per thousand spent is a very cheap reward relative to most other (airline mileage or cash-based) credit card reward programs. (For those who don't: most programs return $25-50 of value per thousand spent.) The response of the booth's attendant, when questioned: "...it doesn't really matter what it costs, for people that care about green."
This kind of emotional blackmail is just what I hate about the green design movement: It uses an important value (ecology) as a way to take advantage of unthinking consumers. It's bad enough that the value itself is cheapened in the process, but it's truly awful to consider that the consumer actually ends up paying to cheapen it.
The reason that the green credit card provides such a potent example of this phenomenon is because it's not just more bullsh*t -- it's actually internally contradictory. It incentivizes people to increase their consumption level, a behavior which in all likelihood negatively overcompensates for the relatively negligible good of the reward.
In other words, it rewards you (and relatively poorly, remember, you're subsidizing this reward) to engage in ecologically destructive behavior with less potent ecologically beneficial dividends.
Kuang's lesson here is an important one: "being 'green' is chiefly about your behavior and daily habits." Rest assured that no credit card is sufficiently motivated to help you with those.
So I spent a fair part of my weekend trolling the internet for information about the BP rebrand. But there was something that's been really bothering me: why does BP's clearly hypocritical branding strategy seem to be working (and indeed even on me)?
This was really sticking in my craw, not because I think the world of corporate branding is morally comprehensible, but because I honestly believed that brand hypocrisy didn't work. So BP's rebrand was chewing at me. Did I just miss the boat here?
The answer hit me in an unlikely place: the in the comments of an article about BP's recent technical woes at America's largest oil field. Let's read the comment that was my lightning rod.
The focus of the article was the numerous challenges faced by the oil industry in general. They even specifically mentioned that in an overview of the story. Guess it's easy and popular to take shots at BP.
Hold on. Why is it easy and popular?
Back in July of 2000, British Petroleum, the world's third largest global energy company, launched a massive $200 million public relations and advertising campaign, unveiling their current "green" brand image, in an attempt to win over environmentally aware consumers. The campaign was created by the British advertising agency Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide, who later the PRWeek 2001 "Campaign of the Year" award in the 'product brand development'. All told, BP spent around $200m on the rebrand.
The heart of the rebrand involved changing the company's name to BP (back from BP-Amoco, the result of a recent mega-merger), creating a wordmark in which small letters were used ("bp" was thought to have fewer imperialist associations than the erstwhile "BP"), and finally implementing a new corporate tagline, "beyond petroleum."
BP's then CEO John Browne said: "It's all about increasing sales, increasing margins and reducing costs at the retail sites." And it apparently did: During more than a decade with Browne as chief executive (ending last year), BP's market value rose fivefold and its share price rose 250 percent.
It's Monday, and as we're all getting ready to start our weeks, getting ready to start working on our products, or with our clients – anyway, going out there and designing stuff – I'm going to try to keep it short and sweet. What I'm going to do specifically is lay a little aphorism on you, which I hope you'll think about as you go about your business. Here it is:
The way we talk about design changes what design is.
And if that's too Zen or Heideggerian for you, let's get practical. Why are all of our clients coming to us now talking about the power of social networking? It's because we've been talking about it for so long. Thousands upon thousands of blog posts have for years now been extolling the virtues of tribe-building, grass-roots social marketing, and the post-brand branding strategies to business decision makers.
And all the talking worked. Now, non-designers and non-technorati have been convinced that indeed the social media revolution has changed the way all of these important design activities need to be conducted, and have done so, I believe, swept up in a fervor emergent from the blog-level discussions of designers and technology advocates.
You can draw a parallel to most social phenomena here: from green design revolution to the French Revolution. These things took off precisely because people kept giving reasons why they should, compelling others until critical mass was reached.
If the way we talk about things influences the way things are, then every blog post is a vote: A vote for one of the possible ways that design could be. And if we don't just love the current state of the nation, we need to be casting our votes every day for the future shape of the discipline.
I recently read Jennifer van der Meer's thought-provoking piece, The Crowd Will Save Us: How the green movement taps participatory networks to drive innovation at Core77.
TCWSU is an appeal to marry up two significant and recent cultural developments which have affected nearly everyone in the design profession, namely, the "green movement" and design strategies employing social networking. The first really compelling bit of her argument is this:
Over 50% of consumers want greener, more natural [e.g.] housing cleaners, but only 5% actually purchase this category of product: consumers do not want tradeoffs. ...green-leaning consumers are looking for proven efficacy, broad availability, comparable price, and a brand they know and trust. They're not willing to settle for a product that performs less than a more eco-unfriendly alternative.
This statistic offers up something deep for us to think about: The (relatively) recent groundswell of interest in environmentally friendly product design is, while certainly "real," nevertheless only marginally capable of altering whatever practical or psychological norms motivate individuals to actually buy things.
The rest of TCWSU deals with some practical strategies about how social innovations in design might help us solve this complicated psychological problem afflicting products and brands, and rightly so. In addition to her practical conclusions, though, this strange statistic should certainly tell us something theoretical or psychological.
Namely, I wonder why, exactly, the psychological dependence on extant brands as the guarantor of quality isn't overcome by people's self-professed desire for greener products?
Several possible reasons occurred to me:
