Design Observer: Ethics Podcast

Design Observer Podcast: Ethics

'there's a transactional nature to what designers bring to the world' - Jessica Helfand, Design Observatory Podcast. 5:34 - 6:00

Jessica discusses that capitalism is at the source of a lot of what we do because we have clients etc. putting forward the idea that what designers do for a living is inevitably going to be a case of producing work for those clients who have the money to pay for it, as opposed to participating in creating ideas that better our environment and society, which may not always pay as well or even at all. 

https://designobserver.com/feature/episode-66-ethics/39667/

Practical Ideas

Initial Ideas

Idea 1

Given that manifestos were something that was discussed and analysed in section 2 of my essay, I felt that this could be a good starting point for ideas in response to my written piece.

A manifesto is usually created as a way of communicating a set of aims, intentions or opinions, be it that of an individual or a group, political or social.

My essay explores social responsibility in relation to the designer as an individual and what they can and are prepared to do about their responsibilities within their practice. Currently, there is no universal framework or set of guidelines for creatives that can point them in the right direction in terms of ensuring ethical design practice. 

My first idea, in short, is to create a manifesto (of sorts) that aims to give designers a starting point of how they can become more ethically inclined within their careers.

In the same way that the United Nations created the 'Paris Agreement' so that it ensured all nations involved would stick to the principles of the agreement.

The UN proposed that the agreement:

'brings all nations into a common cause to undertake ambitious efforts to combat climate change and adapt to its effects, with enhanced support to assist developing countries to do so. As such, it charts a new course in the global climate effort.'

Given how much of an issue climate change has become over the years since our industrial development, temperature levels are getting progressively higher and as a result, putting out planet in danger. As such this agreement is there to help prevent this and hopefully even reduce the effects of it.

If something like this can be put into place to tackle a global issue that affects us all, I believe that the same can be done for the ever-expanding issues that design poses to the well being of both our society, our environment and everyone within it. By this, I refer to the effects a designer's work, whether individually or collectively, can have on the outside world when the consequences of what they produced are not fully considered.

My manifesto will aim to: Provide a baseline standard of considerations, which designers involved should aim to achieve, throughout the course of their project.

Idea 2

Create a social media platform (or an extension of an already existing one) (or potentially a website) that shares and promotes design work that has done some social, political, ecological or any other kind of 'good' in the world. It would give a chance for people to have their work publically displayed and for others to potentially be inspired by what good others have already done. This platform could also post potential briefs that would inspire designers to create change and bring about conversation relevant to the topics at hand. Websites that already offer these kinds of briefs include The RSA and Creative Conscience, who host social orientated projects based on issues prominent in our world today.

Idea 3

Reformat the way a typical manifesto would appear. By this, I mean to create the content that a regular manifesto would usually contain but to display it in a different format. Often I feel the word manifesto has a lot of stigma around it; as does it's format. They can sometimes feel too daunting and patronising to read and to abide. I feel like First Things First 2000 was a nice idea to spark conversation about the social responsibility of a designer but possibly appeared too idealistic and not necessarily applicable in everyday life.

As a result, I thought about changing the format of a manifesto to turn it into something more easily digestible and applicable to an already existing or upcoming designer's practice. 

The format of which could possibly be an app or a website, but somewhere for designers to possibly come together to discuss and potentially keep an up-to-date version of said 'manifesto' through debate and recognition of new responsibilities. 

Idea 4

This idea of reformatting a manifesto I think could be transferred into a small, handy guidebook/ notebook. This could be less of a structured manifesto as such and more of a set of rough questions/considerations that could serve as a basis to begin any brief with. A set of questions that would incite critical, conscious thoughts about every aspect of the project to ensure full consideration for the audience, the environment and society as a whole and their needs. This notebook could then be added to individually by the user, with their own potential questions or considerations. A small book of 'goodness'.

Key sources

Key sources that i plan to use for my research include but are not limited to:

- First things first 2000 manifesto
- Citizen Designer
- David Berman's Do good
- Good: an introduction to ethics in graphic design.
- Design issues - DK Holland
- Looking closer books

Time management

When doing something so thorough such as an essay it helps me to aim to manage my time effectively down to the weeks so that I keep on track and don't fall behind as writing is definitely not my strongest point.

My summer plan was to begin reading into the topic of social responsibility and from there on continue to research into the topic, documenting as I go. Being organised is something crucial for me this year given the large amounts of breifs we have to work on at any one given time.

Different to past years, this year I plan to organise my weeks into small parts of the module that I need to keep up to date with and complete. This will be done through calanders that I can manually annotate and keep note of.

Dissertation Proposal & Summer Reading

What is Good? 

To what extent does Social Responsibility impact on the role and function of Graphic Design?

Towards the end of second year I started to take more of an interest in work that had some sort of real world value. By this I mean trying to tackle issues that are currently on going in society that I could either bring light to or improve in some way. This is why I started my research based off the question above, to start looking into social responsibility and the designer.

Over summer I read a lot more into the subject, taking information from a lot of different sources including David Berman's 'Do Good', Steven Heller's 'Citizen Designer' and Victor Papanek's 'Design for the Real World', both of which were eye opening simply because of their strong ideals for what is essentially a more considered approach to design as a whole. I think that Berman's approach to design is very much a big inspiration for myself, he suggests that rather than just doing good design, we should just do good within everything we do. This is key because 'good design' could be interpreted in many different ways depending on the individual themselves. So rather than questioning if 'good design' is aesthetically pleasing, ergonomic or ethically considered design, we can instead put more of a focus on doing good all around, for the better of others, the society and our world as a whole.

Something that I need to do before I really begin to write my dissertation is define the term 'good', as this is something that is still a very ambiguous subject. To me 'good' is an overarching term for a small range of other words that hold their own meaning such as worthwhile, valuable or ethical. Most importantly I think that for something to be 'good' it's to be considered; consideration for others around you, the society you live etc. Because as a designer you should be taking responsibility for your own actions which is key for considering the effects and impact our designs could potentially have on others. Whether that means consideration for those less able or those who are in need in some way, it all should come into consideration through the design process.

End of module evaluation

Overall I feel as though my essay was strong and in depth into the world of consumerism with a practical response that could have been stronger in some areas. I think that the practical could have been developed more into a bigger concept than what it was. I enjoyed going more in depth into consumerism and the psychology behind it and that this helped me to get a better understanding personally of why we consume and on such a regular basis. I think my essay writing skills have developed a lot since last year with a much more improved structure from CoP 1 and better understanding of references. Reading a lot more books and research studies helped to better create a solid base of knowledge about branding, advertising and consumerism on the whole before going into my essay. I feel that I had a range of ideas for my practical that could have been expanded on a little more, but I think my practical response was appropriate to my essay.

Final Outcomes

I chose these messages as I feel they're something that people could respond well to whilst also in some way boosting moods and evoking happiness. Having these out in the streets typically where advertisements would be could prove more useful rather than being bombarded with products. Although these are portrait they could be adapted to fit landscape or other forms of advertising throughout the streets.

Although these are just one set of posters, essentially one project in the grand scheme of the public space idea, the concept is to change these around to something new and interesting every couple of weeks. The content would be dictated by the public who will make suggestions individually or as a group of people who maybe want to get a message across or just to display artist's work to the public.

Public space - For the public

After creating a couple of rough visual ideas for my concept, it dawned on me that it could potentially become repetitive long term to have this running theme of uplifting/positive messages, it feels more like a short term art installation maybe. Considering that the idea behind this piece is to someway improve individual and societal well being and happiness, this can be done in a lot more ways that one and the space that would usually be occupied by adverts is the perfect, well regulated amount of space to do so. Advertisements are ubiquitous which means take them away and there is an awful lot of blank space to display much more important things, ideas, concepts than that of just promoting a consuming way of life.

This is where the idea of public space for the public comes in, given that these advertisements are out in public space, they aren't actually for use of the public instead just for corporations to promote their new product most of the time. But not all ads do this, some of the time there are government ads that inform the public on new incoming laws/changes to society also things such as health awareness schemes etc. which I think are necessary and is why these would would still form part of this public space idea.

This would be a chance for artists to display more of their work out in public, it would give anyone the chance to propose an idea to display something in public without needing lots of money to do so as you normally would. These in themselves could give people a voice to get thoughts out there, to evoke emotion through work to the public without having to specifically go to an exhibition.

The easiest comparison to make is in a way similar to graffiti, except a legal version of this. Although some graffiti doesn't always serve a purpose, a lot of it can actually send out positive messages such as within the examples below.

Advertising positive/thought provoking messages

After speaking to a couple of classmates about my visuals so far, a suggestion was to take the structure of a typical ad, e.g. McDonalds and use that to structure the content. This way, although I've already used the same colours and typeface from the McDonald's ads, having the same layout will give it more recognisability.

I kept the text yellow, simply because it's more recognisable than having white text within the ad.

A point that was made about the poster is that although the message makes sense, it might not always be taken into account, people may see it and possibly think 'yeah i already know this' and dismiss the advert. A solution to this could potentially have messages that evoke the feeling that's trying to be conveyed within the messages but to not directly say it, or at the very least put the message across objectively.

Aiming to evoke happiness

The second example I was aiming for more of an objective wording on the benefits of exercise as opposed to saying 'exercise is good for you, you should exercise' sort of thing. I instead stated it more as a fact hopefully in an appealing way to the audience.

Change of direction (again)

I began to develop this idea of a brand and it's blank advertisements only to realise within a discussion with some friends that I had a much stronger idea from the very beginning that I didn't choose to follow through with for whatever reason.

The idea to take the format of advertising (so the traditional advertising methods with bill boards, on buses and such) and to use it to communicate positive/thought provoking messages or useful information that people would benefit from. Topics such as exercise, meditation, the environment, something along those lines. Because I think the format of advertising is useful and considering they are everywhere, people will see a lot within a day.
I think that this tackles the problem I posed to begin with of advertising promoting products in an unethical way and instead can be used to communicate more useful messages than those just of consumption. All of this would hopefully promote happiness and lighten up people's days, rather than to decrease it by degrading people's self worth through photoshopped models/ celebrities on bill board posters etc.

My first thoughts on how I could visually represent this is by using already commonly seen colours and typefaces used from brands to grab the attention of passers by, but the content would instead be positive/useful messages.

A perfect example of this would be from Stefan Sagmeister's talk Happiness by Design where he shows an example of a friend's piece of work that does a similar take on this idea. A group of designers overruled the usual subway instructions. They replaced the typical informative posters with posters that evoke genuine happiness, posters with a funny side to them whilst retaining the same design as the previous posters. Typically the posters would have been boring but although the format of it stayed the same, the content changed to be something interesting and funny.

An example of how I could present this would maybe to use the attractiveness of ads that already work by this I mean take the bold, striking colours of existing ads and use them to my advantage such as McDonald's red and yellow for example. The same goes for typefaces, using Nike identifiable typeface to catch the attention of passer-bys that would typically think it's an advertisement and will instead take in the positive message it's stating.

Colours

McDonald's Key Colours

Pepsi's Brand of blue

Coke's Distinctive Red & White combination

Typefaces

Adidas' Brand Typeface

McDonald's Typeface (Best Guess)

Nike's Brand Typefaces (Old&New)

The messages within these advertisements would be positive ones or ones that provoked some sort of response within the person to think about. A couple of topics that came to my mind that I feel everyone could benefit from knowing the benefits about was meditation and exercise.

Rather than telling people what to do and stating the benefits, instead I think that wording it in such a way that sounds more like advice would be better received by the audience. By using purely typography I feel like a strong message can be communicated when combined with bold colours and common, recognisable typefaces as previously mentioned.

Following the usual combination of red and yellow of McDonald's plus their usual typeface used within ads, it will hopefully catch the eye of the audience whilst communicating an important message that would contradicts typical advertisements.

Study Task 09: Outcomes & Production/Distribution/Testing

Thoughts on my new idea

From the feedback session I got the suggestion to revert back to one of my older ideas of 'Blank Advertising' but with some changes, that being the fact that I would create a new brand to advertise for that would have no previous associations with it. All of this would be done to take away the influence both the brands themselves and their advertisements have on us as the consumer.



As examined within my essay, the Coke advertisement 'open a Coke, open happiness' is an example of an advertisement that uses clever catchy slogans that promote the idea that this product could improve your life in some way (Leonard 2010). I've noticed that there is a reoccurring theme throughout the fizzy drink advertisements, which is that they all suggest ideas of improving your life in some way or another. As the Pepsi ad below directly says 'Refresh your world', suggesting that the Pepsi drink could do exactly that. It's for this reason that I think producing a new brand of drink(s) but using this style of 'Blank Advertising' could be a good way to set an example, not just to other drink brands but also to other product brands.

The Coke ad below also plays on our needs of companionship by suggesting to share the drink with friends and family, creating an association of lovingness that would normally shared amongst family and friends now associated with Coke.

My aim is to create a no frills brand that promotes what the product is and nothing more, promoting it based upon what the drink is. The advertising to go with it will be blank, only showing the product as opposed to using slogans, endorsements etc. to sell it to consumers. Almost like in a way turning a new leaf in the world of advertising, a fresh start.

Sources:

Leonard, A. 2012. ‘The Story of Stuff. New York: Free Press. 149.