TASK 5 - Social Design

"Waste is a design flaw." Kate Krebs, National Recycling Coalition, 2008.

The socially responsible apporach to design work is something that many designers are following. In a world where climate change is a serious problem, and natural fuels are running out, everyone needs to relook at their carbon footprint.

Greengaged, held at the UK Design Council, set out to examine the ecological crisis, explore the role of design and debate the consequential responsibility of designers.

It was claimed that as designers we are very good at producing waste, but we are all very bad at using it. Rob Holdway, Founder of Giraffe Innovation and Presenter of Channel 4's "Dumped" series, expressed his thoughts on the role of education to teach designers to contextualize their work, and further highlighted the individual responsibility that we, as designers, have to be more aware of what our clients and their briefs are asking of us. In a consumer culture, the ephemerality of design needs to be transformed and celebrated, by only designing consumer products from biodegradable materials.

So what designers have strong ethics and a responsible approach to their design work?

A Better World By Design

A Better World by Design brings a global community of innovators, to reach across disciplines and unite under a common goal. Presenters share engaging stories, workshops teach creative skills, and discussions reframe perspectives. A Better World by Design is an immersive experience that deepens our understanding of the power of design, technology, and enterprise to reshape our communities and sustain our environment.

The Designers Accord

The Designers Accord is a global coalition of designers, educators, and business leaders working together to create positive environmental and social impact. Their focus is on creating positive impact in the creative community by connecting a broad network throughout the creative community, inspiring and motivating our members to share best practices, bold ideas, and compelling case studies, and enabling new initiatives to grow from the foundation built by the Designers Accord.

They are working on many exiting projects, one of many is Fashion Futures

Slow is Beautiful from Alex Johnson on Vimeo.

Another project that I thought was about trying to get poeple to stop using plastic water bottles by changing the way people drank water

The most recent development for KOR includes artist series bottles, where graphics reinforce the cause-motivated colors: These bottles will sell for $5 more and that entire fee will go directly to the cause, another detail RKS hopes the consumer will proudly tell those around them.

IDEO

At the moment IDEO are hosting a competition inviting people to show a vision of a future shaped by climate change

Our Invitation To You from IDEO on Vimeo.

Sam and Dave Save the World from IDEO on Vimeo.

In “Sam and Dave Save the World,” the IDEO Chicago team elected to explore climate change through the constraints of a typical American city. Conceptually, they felt that if a city were a place to escape to (or from), or a place within which one could live without limits, then it would not be a workable city. So they decided to portray a city with limits, as a contained space, by way of a “single house” (as illustrated by the Foam core prototypes in the piece).

You’ll see two side-by-side stories about two neighbors who respond very differently to climate change. Sam reacts; Dave responds. Sam adapts; Dave searches for solutions. The split-screen storytelling technique is effective for calling out these distinctions.

TasK 3 V2 - Digital Design Festival

I want to the SAP Weekend: Digital Design Festival at the V&A, which had many talks, workshops and exhibitions, all centered around digital design. It was amazing!

Some of the work these guys are doing is way over my head, there use of open source programming to create digital images is out of this world. One of the talks that really interested me was by Memo Akten, whose company "The Mega Super Awesome Visuals Company" is doing some outstanding work.

Reincarnation from Memo Akten on Vimeo.

He creates programs with OpenFrameworks and Processing which use human interaction and music to make this beautiful animations, that are really quite surreal!

Depeche Mode - Fragile Tension from DJ Rigel on Vimeo.

The OpenFrameworks Lab was interesting too, with loads of hackers sitting around brainstorming about how to come up with the next best thing... like this...

Big Screams from prisonerjohn on Vimeo.

Where you control a character on screen using your phone! Scream as loud as you can to push everyone else off and be the last one standing!

The final workshop I went to a Recode Decode workshop with Karson Schmit, the creator of the Decode digital identity, which was a short workshop using open souse code. I found it rather complicated! A lot more reading and coding experience is needed to get to his level... I did manage to write a little programme (with his help!) to create an image of random coloured circles... very impressive I thought :-)

TASK 4 - Corporate Social Responsibility

Corporate Social Responsibility - A form of corporate self-regulation, integrated into a business model. A business needs to take into account its economic, social and environmental impacts in the way it operates, maximising benefits and minimising downsides. It seems nowadays most companies are jumping on the CSR bandwaggon, mainly to get greater trust from the public, and therefor increasing revenues.

Marks & Spencer

Marks & Spencer (M&S) is one of the UK's leading retailers of clothing, food, home products and financial services. Ten million people shop each week in over 375 M&S stores in the UK.n addition, Marks & Spencer has 155 stores managed under franchise in 28 territories, mostly in Europe, the Middle East, Asia and the Far East, as well as stores in the Republic of Ireland, Hong Kong and a US supermarket group, Kings Super Markets. The company is structured in business units covering food and general merchandise. The general merchandise unit is further divided into womens clothing, menswear, lingerie, beauty and home.

Each business unit develops its own CSR strategy based around the brand value of trust. The issues tackled in the strategies are identified from a combination of customer research, understanding within the business and by talking with other key stakeholders, government etc.

For each issue an action plan is developed which balances customer and stakeholder expectations and other commercial pressures. For example, for food, 16 issues have been identified ranging from pesticides to labour standards.

The issues are grouped into three general areas: people, its own employees, and those employed in its supply chain; products, with an emphasis on producing high quality, value for money goods that have positive environmental and social benefits; and community, this category recognises the companys role in helping to create and maintain places within which to work and live. For each of the three areas M&S has a programme of work.

The founders of M&S believed that building good relationships with employees, suppliers and wider society was the best guarantee of long-term success. This remains the backbone of its approach to CSR. Since those early days M&S has built up a reputation as a trustworthy company. Trust is one of its core values and its approach to CSR focuses on maintaining and enhancing trust. In the past, before CSR was a defined concept, much of M&Ss work on environmental and social issues was through philanthropic gifts to charity work. However more recently there has been a move away from this traditional philanthropic giving as the company wanted to be more involved in the impact of its funding, with more of a focus on customers, staff and those producing its goods. This was a key driver for the launch of several CSR initiatives on health, employability and the environment in the last 5 years.

Starbucks

Starbucks Coffee is widely known for its social responsibility and fairtrade coffee. From the way they buy there coffee, to minimising the environmental impact, they seems to do a lot.

Starbucks bought 385 million pounds of coffee in 2008. Seventy-seven percent of that – 295 million pounds – was responsibly grown and ethically traded. By 2015, their goal is to buy 100 percent of our coffee this way. Last year, their ethical sourcing principles for coffee impacted more than one million farmers and workers.

In 2008, they expanded their on-the-ground presence in Africa, hiring a director of agronomy to oversee the new Farmer Support Center in Rwanda. They also remain committed to opening a Farmer Support Center in Ethiopia in the future.

In addition to their work with Conservation International and Starbucks ethical coffee buying guidelines, here are some other ways Starbucks is working with coffee-growing communities:

· Supporting farmers with small-scale farms and who grow Fair Trade coffee

· Paying the prices that high quality coffee commands

· Buying Certified Organic coffee

· Helping conserve wildlife and biodiversity in Africa's coffee regions through theAfrican Wildlife Foundation (AWF)

· Investing in a better future for farmers through loan programs

· Involving our partners and customers in our work with coffee farmers in Costa Ricawith Earthwatch Expeditions

TASK 3 - Animation

When thinking about the pioneers of animation, its hard to ignore Walt Disney. Disney is particulary noted for being a film producer, as well as an innovator in animation. He created one of the worlds most famous fictional characters including Micky Mouse, a character for which he was the original voice.

The first animated short with Mickey in it was titled, Plane Crazy, which was, like all of Disney's previous works, a silent film. After failing to find a distributor for Plane Crazy or its follow-up, The Gallopin' Gaucho, Disney created a Mickey cartoon with sound called Steamboat Willie. A businessman named Pat Powers provided Disney with both distribution and Cinephone, a sound-synchronization process.

Below is a short sequence from the Mickey Mouse Cartoon - The Moving Day (1936) (Co-starring Donald and Goofy)

Moving onto the 21 Century, animation has gone to strength to strength with companies like Pixar and Dreamworks

The Incredibles, released in 2004, released by Pixar was a success both critically and at the box office. The film grossed $70.2 million in its first weekend of release in the United States and performed similarly throughout the rest of the world. The film earned more than $620 million worldwide, elevating it to the second highest grossing Pixar film and amongst the 25 highest grossing film of all time. In addition to a multitude of prestigious accolades, praise for The Incredibles has culiminated in a Pixar-record: four Academy Award nominations.

Animation is being used more and more for advertising purposes, with Why Not Associates doing some amazing work in motion graphics, branding & identity and print. The one that really caught my eye was the identity for a series of films for V¡rgin Records, with the likes of Mick Jagger and Lenny Kravits Talking over a series of moving images and animation. Why Not Associates are a British Design company that have done campaigns for brands like Nike and the BBC. There work seems to be quite experimental with a strong typographic base, as can be seen with the First Direct adverts. All in all, a funky comapany!

TASK 2 - Wayfinding

Whilst researching wayfinding, I have found a very innovative way of signposting an underground carpark in Melbourne. It is a very clever use of perspective, with massive colourful letters which are impossible to miss.

The designer Axel Peermoller has a great way of using typography. It is very bold and interesting, and could work in so many other ways than just in a carpark.

NEW TERM NEW TASK - 1

So its a New Year... New Term and New Module!

This task... Typefaces. I know which one is my favorite family.. GOTHAM. A sans serif typeface designed by Horfler & Frere-Jones. It has such lovely round letters, and a very large family, suitable for any occasion.

FUTURA is another geometric sans-serif typeface, although I dont like this one at all. It seems to be quite child-like, and ironically, it is the roundness of the letters that creates this feel. Why do I like one and not the other? probably just a force of habbit, as I cant find any logical reason.

Below is one good use of futura