Designers Sang Min Yu and Wong Sang Lee have an interesting proposal for your dental life. Their SavePaste design is meant to (a) eliminate the "dead space" in standard toothpaste tube design, minimizing toothpaste residue left inside the container; and (b) move from the the two-packages-one-recyclabe approach to a one-package-one-recyclabe one. Pretty neat!
| Tagged with: | Green Design, Packaging Design |
Philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah recently posed this challenge to readers of the Washington Post:
Once, pretty much everywhere, beating your wife and children was regarded as a father's duty, homosexuality was a hanging offense, and waterboarding was approved -- in fact, invented -- by the Catholic Church. Through the middle of the 19th century, the United States and other nations in the Americas condoned plantation slavery. Many of our grandparents were born in states where women were forbidden to vote. And well into the 20th century, lynch mobs in this country stripped, tortured, hanged and burned human beings at picnics.
Looking back at such horrors, it is easy to ask: What were people thinking?
Yet, the chances are that our own descendants will ask the same question, with the same incomprehension, about some of our practices today.
| Tagged with: | Design Ethics, Green Design, Responsibility |
| Tagged with: | Design, Green Design, Less is Better, Minimalism |
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.
| Tagged with: | Food, Four Design Links, Green Design, Social Enterprise, Swissmiss, Twitter, Typography |
| Tagged with: | Core77, Ecology, Green Design, Hypocrisy, Illustration, Marketing |
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.
| Tagged with: | Bullshit, Design Ethics, Green Design, Greenwashing, Marketing, Responsibility |
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.
