We rather like Akin Bilgic’s SF Mirrors Project. The function is antithesis of advertising billboards and posters in which companies constantly remind us that we are hopelessly incomplete without their their goods/services. The uplifting messages on these mirrors are designed to “spread a bit of random happiness” to the good people of San Francisco as […]
Valerie Pettis has just been selected as a winner of Poster for Tomorrow’s international competition advocating the abolition of the Death Penalty. Her poster, entitled “Legal Murder Is Not Justice,” was chosen from among 2094 entries submitted by designers worldwide as one of the ten most outstanding (the highest category of the competition). Pettis’s stark, black and white design replaces the Greco-Roman columns of a hall of justice with coffins.
Poster for Tomorrow is an organization that promotes activism through socially relevant design and is currently touring both the top ten and top one hundred posters in thirty-five venues across the globe.
However, the posters have sparked controversy and of the roughly one hundred countries originally scheduled to participate many have now declined. Clandestine exhibitions were mounted in many of these places, including Syria, China, Malaysia and Iran where promoters were beaten and jailed. Except for a single gallery in Los Angeles, major organizations headquartered in the United States, fearing controversy, have also withdrawn.
Images of the one hundred posters, and a list of exhibitions, can be found at www.PosterforTomorrow.org.
Noah Scalin over at ALR Design is looking for submissions for The Design Activist’s Handbook a book that he is working on with writer Michelle Taute and is being published by HOW Books next year. Here’s what their looking for:
Artwork and interviews: Socially conscious design projects, both self-initiated and client projects, with good stories to go with them. We’d like to hear about failures and successes:
• Your first efforts at socially conscious design.
• Projects/situations where you struggled with ethics.
• How you manage to pursue socially conscious design and still pay the bills.
• What socially conscious design means to you.
• Situations/projects that helped you discover your power as a designer.
Referrals: Know someone else we should talk to? Or something you’d really like to see in the book? Please let us know! We’re especially interested in talking with in-house and agency designers who are working to affect change at their companies from the bottom up.
For more info submissions and referrals go here. All entries must be sent by July 16th of next week.
From The Province: “Activists have entangled two sculpted porpoises in a giant plastic six-pack ring to protest the use of throwaway plastic and its impact on West Coast marine and wildlife.
The downtown Vancouver demonstration has been organized by the Plastic Pollution Coalition (PPC) and Vancouver advertising agency Rethink. The PPC is trying to draw attention to the fact that plastic pollution covers millions of square kilometres of ocean in the North Pacific and in the North Atlantic. Scientists expect to find similar accumulation areas in the remaining oceanic gyres. There is no known way to clean up the plastic pollution in the oceans as the plastic particles are very small and circulate throughout the entire water column.
The giant plastic rings were originally set up to strangle a wildlife statue at Georgia and Thurlow, but a building manager at that site asked the organizers to move their protest elsewhere. The environmentalists have since set up their exhibit in front of the Scotiabank building at Pender and Burrard.”
“There has been a massive global expansion in green marketeering. BP, a.k.a.,“British Petroleum,” has spent tens of millions of dollars to develop and sell its green street cred” says Paul Taylor from the LA Examiner. I think it is safe to say that BP has an uphill battle to reclaim its environmental credibility.
For the latest news on the clean-up efforts head over to the Huffington Post
The National Geographic Museum will open a new exhibition this Wednesday, April 28 called Design for the Other 90%, a touring exhibition from the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum in NYC. The exhibition takes a look at designers who are developing solutions that address basic needs for the vast majority of the world’s population not traditionally served by professional designers. Of the world’s 6.5 billion people, 90% have few to none of the basic necessities required for progress and survival.
Maya Lin – Unchopping a Tree from What is Missing? Foundation on Vimeo.
Unchopping a Tree, part of Maya Lin’s last memorial entitled What is Missing?, debuted at COP15 during the Support REDD+ events sponsored by the Coalition for Rainforest Nations.
For more information on how you can help unchop a tree through carbon offset projects, please visit CarbonFund.org/unchopatree , NRDC.org/unchopatree and Conservation International at conservation.org.
“Photographs do more than document history—they make it.” At TED University, Jonathan Klein of Getty Images showcases some of the most iconic images shared to the public, and talks about what happens when a generation sees an image so powerful it can’t look away—or back.
Via:
The poster for tomorrow competition for 2010 is now open for entries. This year the theme is the abolition of the death penalty. Learn how to participate here.
Excerpt from press release:
In 2009, countries with the highest number of executions were Iran (with at least 388 executions), Iraq (at least 120), Saudi Arabia (at least 69), and the United States (52). In China information regarding the death penalty remains a secret, but estimates show that China executes more people than the rest of the world combined.*
But there is hope—the number of people being executed around the world appears to be declining. And in December the United Nations will vote on a universal moratorium on the death penalty. It’s a vital step towards abolishing the death penalty once and for all. No matter whether you live in a country that practices capital punishment or not, we have to raise awareness across the whole world that the death penalty is a violation of human rights that has no place in modern society.
Poster 4 Tomorrow, a non-profit initiative whose mission is to encourage people, both in and outside the design community, to make posters to spark constructive debate on issues that affect us all. Their theme (Death is not Justice) this year coincides with the World & European Day Against the Death Penalty on October 10th, 2010. On that day they intend to hold 100 exhibitions in 100 cities, curated by 100 local partner
organizations. Find out how you can contribute here.
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