Blog Action Day 2009 - Design Can Change

Blog Action Day is an annual event held every October 15 that unites the world’s bloggers in posting about the same issue on the same day with the aim of sparking discussion around an issue of global importance. Blog Action Day 2009 will be one of the largest-ever social change events on the web. At the moment I am writing this post 8192 blogs from 145 countries and 11,799,400 readers have been registered and participate!

First and last, the purpose of Blog Action Day is to create a discussion. Bloggers are asked to take a single day out of their schedule and focus it on an important issue. By doing so on the same day, the blogging community effectively changes the conversation on the web and focuses audiences around the globe on that issue. Out of this discussion naturally flow ideas, advice, plans, and action. In 2007 on the theme of the Environment, bloggers were running environmental experiments, detailing innovative ideas on creating sustainable practices, and focusing their audience's attention on organizations and companies promoting green agendas. In 2008 Poverty was the theme, and similarly focused the blogging community's energies around discussing the wide breadth of the issue from many perspectives and identifying innovative and unexpected solutions. This year the aim is to do the same for Climate Change, an issue that threatens us all.

I dedicate this post then to Design Can Change. An effort to bring together the world's graphic design community to address the issues surrounding climate change. While it is a complex and sometimes contested topic, nevertheless it cannot be ignored. Designers in particular must examine how our practices impact the environment. Acknowledging the problem is the first step. As designers (and this is true for all areas of design) we have great abilities and can group together to make a collective difference. It is important to consider all the parties we can work with and how we can all lend a hand.

Some of you may ask why should designers be concerned with climate change? Leave this to the politicians and social groups. But we beg to differ: designers are so close to the issue that are better placed to be able to make the difference. Designers often characterize ourselves as problem solvers. If so, then how about applying this to climate change? As the public has come to accept the importance of good design and demand it in almost every facet of their lives, our efforts as designers are pivotal in shaping the world around us.

Design Can Change works with the notion that we can collectively encourage substantial change. By utilizing our ability to effectively communicate and build interest, we can generate awareness and further the cause to end global warming. Designers are the hub connecting companies to customers. Additionally we steer lots of work to various sections of the construction industry, printing industry, and various suppliers of every possible resource. So what can we do? Implement sustainability in our work - from the way our practices work to our final products to making our collaborators and partners aware of it and suggest to implement it themselves. By choosing to work with people who are environmentally aware in their work too.

Sustainability is becoming the most important addition to the creative brief. As much as we might not like to admit it, many designers aren't prepared for this. We've been busy working on our skills, learning about brands, adapting to new technology, and keeping our studios alive during some lean times. Also note that sustainable practices in design do not have to be costly. In fact, smart designers leverage efficient ways of working that often reduce costs to organizations. Today most major brands have added sustainability to their business agendas because they recognize it is a competitive advantage and a key to continued success. From a position of self-interest alone, you really have to start thinking green.

So if the above have started to convince you a bit, go to DesignCanChange page, and take the pledge. From then on, lots of tips for changing your studio, raising awareness and making a difference will follow.

Images and text courtesy of DesignCanChange and Getty Images.

My first radio show at Poplie!

Just started a weekly radio show on Poplie internet radio. It is on every Sunday at noon and for two hours I will be playing my favourite tunes, mostly new stuff but old ones as well! I will also try to mention things relevant to design (like today, I said that the Ebony Bones track is the soundtrack to the video of YSL's Manifesto for this season). Here is my playlist for today's show (click on it to see it larger):

Irving Penn: a legend passes away at 92

Top models in 1947

Irving Penn. One of the most prolific and recognized photographers of the 20th century, with an elegant, minimal and defined style, died today at age 92. His art, much sought after by museums and photography lovers the world over will live on. Born on June 16th, 1917, in Plainfield, N. J., to Harry, a watchmaker and Sonia, a nurse. Studying at the Pennsylvania Museum School of Industrial Art, (now the University of the Arts), from 1934 to 1938, Penn studied drawing, painting and graphic and industrial design. he had as a teacher the designer Alexey Brodovitch, a Russian émigré from Paris, familiar with avant-guard European art and design. Mr. Brodovitch worked in New York City for Harper’s Bazaar at the time and travelled to Philadelphia on Saturdays to meet with his students and to evaluate their work. Penn’s graphic talent impressed Mr. Brodovitch, and he chose him to be his unpaid assistant at Bazaar during the summers of 1937 and 1938.

Irving Penn in the 1960's

Lisa Fonssagrives-Penn

Although trained as a painter and designer, he dedicated himself and his talent to photography. Penn started at Harper's Bazaar under Alexey Brodovich after he finished his studies. But in 1943 he began with Vogue what would become the longest running collaboration of a magazine with a photographer, under Alexander Lieberman. Starting out as his assistant, he was supervising the design of the magazine's covers. And when he found out no staff photographer would shoot what he suggested, he did it himself, under Lieberman's suggestions. His first shooting was a colour still-life photograph of a glove, belt and pocketbook, which became the cover of 1943's October issue. His photographs would grace more than 150 Vogue covers over the next 50 years.

Penn's first Vogue cover, Oct. 1st 1943

Lisa Fonssagrives-Penn

Although fashion is constantly changing, it's image a blur from season to season, Penn's style was constant, timeless, his photographs instantly recognizable from the 1940s up until the early 21st century. It is most rewarding to see how fashion changes throughout the decades through his photographs, clothes, designers, models, come and go, but Penn and his inimitable style is always there, transfixing the eye of the observer with it's brilliant use of geometry and lighting.

Linda Evangelista

Photo for a Vogue cover, April 1st 1950

His photographs were never spontaneous. Not for him the jumping, dancing models of Arthur Elgort, the exuberant leaping ladies of Richard Avedon, the decadent women of Guy Bourdin, the overtly sexy femmes of Helmut Newton. Instead his subjects, elegant and timeless, restrained but sensuous, poised with a geometric precision, look frozen for posterity as if you look at the Parthenon marbles.

Dancers

Audrey Marnay with Amidala's costume from Star Wars

Nicole Kidman

For Issey Miyake, a long and fruitful collaboration

He did not do only fashion photography of course. His subjects ranged from cultural figures like Truman Capote and Pablo Picasso to Peruvian peasants, Guinea tribesmen and incredible still lives: his wilted flowers, published in the December issue of Vogue for years, look incredibly like paintings. The compositions with food elements he photographed to illustrate the food column or the beauty abstract photographs in Vogue are works of art in their own.

Richard Avedon

Truman Capote

Christy Turlington

YSL

He had a long and happy marriage with his eternal muse, the model and sculptor Lisa Fonssagrives. They had a son together, Tom. With her, they defined the image of an era between the 1940's and 1950's. Slim, sophisticated and seemingly lofty, Lisa was a perfect match for him and his photos of her display an incredible aesthetic standard.




Always anxious to improve his photographs, he experimented constantly with their printing. He printed his own photographs and revived the platinum-palladium technique (instead of silver), which, although more time-consuming and costly, delivered great depth and luminosity, giving lovely velvety tones to the image and increasing its longevity. He will be sorely missed.

Kate Blanchett

To end this post, some photos of my muse, Christy Turlington, shot by Irving Penn through the years (all in Vogue magazine).

World Day of Architecture today!

The International Union of Architects has chosen the first Monday of each year to be celebrated as the World Architecture Day. So here is the UIA president's message, which concerns a very current topic.

WORLD DAY OF ARCHITECTURE 2009

Architects' energy versus the global crises

How can we do more, better, with less?

We are together today to celebrate the 2009 World Day of Architecture and its theme: Architects’ energy versus the global crises.

The world is experiencing unprecedented and simultaneous environmental, climatic, financial and social crises that force us to urgently reconsider a number of parameters and find innovative solutions. In these difficult times, architects must step forward and show their aptitude to lead the struggle, to use these crises as a springboard for developing new technical, environmental, social, economic and aesthetic solutions. Developing pertinent responses to entirely new situations is the daily task of the professional architect.

Today, we must ask ourselves:

What are the new opportunities, orientations and aspirations resulting from the current crises?

What are the alternative and creative processes that architects and architecture students can offer?

How can we effectively contribute to reducing carbon emissions and the use of non-renewable energies.

How can we do more, better, with less? We must assume all the possibilities that are now open.

New options are always available for those willing to look for them. It is time to establish new partnerships in new areas.

I call on all architects to take every opportunity, even the smallest ones, to show what they can make out of nothing, using their intellect, design skills and lateral thinking to create sustainable solutions from this global crisis.

This year’s World Day of Architecture represents a new engagement toward a sustainable future. The next appointment is in Copenhagen for the United Nations Climate Change Conference, and everyone in the UIA is working to elaborate a world architects’ declaration for this event. The UIA’s commitment will continue, focusing on the Tokyo 2011 UIA World Congress of Architecture, where architects will invite all the creative planning forces to help design our planet for 2050.

From here in Abidjan, Cote d’Ivoire, Africa, where the UIA Bureau has assembled, I wish you all a constructive celebration of architecture and the architectural profession.

Louise Cox, AM
UIA President
5 October 2009.

And to celebrate the day, here are some photos of buildings by Mies Van Der Rohe, one of my very favourite architects ever.

Vienna Design Week: 1-11.10.2009

One of my all-time favourite cities is hosting its third Design Week! The aim of VIENNA DESIGN WEEK is to show and enable people to experience the many-faceted creative work in the fields of product, furniture and industrial design, but also aspects of experimental design. After two successful festivals in 2007 and 2008, this October an exquisite and colourful programme of events will be awaiting the visitors. Design is an important field in the production of culture: it shapes our material culture, our everyday life and our consumer world, it influences lifestyle and fashion and most fundamentally our aesthetic sense and judgement. This wide-ranging impact is a reason to celebrate design and also to examine it critically; VIENNA DESIGN WEEK has made both of these its mission.

In cooperation with many partners – from Vienna museums to production and retail companies to designers from all over the world – the whole of Vienna becomes a platform and show-case of design. VIENNA DESIGN WEEK doesn't have the character of a trade fair but instead offers a variety of venues and approaches specific to Vienna. The festival sets out to be "international but localised", with an abiding interest to cooperate with the flourishing design scenes of Central and Eastern Europe, and certainly beyond that. Bringing to Vienna an important international design show every October is another example of the long-due international exchange; VIENNA DESIGN WEEK is stimulating.

The festival aims to reveal creative and production processes and encourage experimental work on the spot. It also presents and promotes design that in the first instance withdraws from the scheme of utility value and functionality in order to create awareness and pose questions or also simply just to have fun. The exploration of materials, mood values and the interaction between people and objects lie at the centre of design practice and consequently are important points of reference within VIENNA DESIGN WEEK.

With exhibitions, venue-specific installations, theme specials, discussion events, a programme of films and, of course, enough opportunity to party and network, VIENNA DESIGN WEEK is not only an attraction for the international design scene but most explicitly also aims to interest and appeal to a wide public audience of Viennese and visitors to Vienna. This year VIENNA DESIGN WEEK energetically goes into the third round with the wish and the aim to take up a firm place on the international festival scene and at the same time become a fixed early-autumn cultural event in Vienna.

The programme is here.

The participating designers are here.

The week's calendar is here.


Photo/Concept: Wolfgang Zajc & Rudolf Zündel

And here is our London correspondent!

Why should designers blog? (article published in DESIGN Magazine issue 14)

Since blogging started becoming the next big thing, years ago, more and more designers from all aspects of the industry have started, phrase by phrase, paragraph by paragraph, post by post, becoming seduced by it. Sharing their thoughts, ideas, knowledge about their respective fields, they connect every day with people all over the world with whom otherwise there would be no contact whatsoever.

Should a designer blog then? How can it be possible for people that are so creative in their work, to step aside for a moment (or hours in many cases) and delve into a previously unknown world to them, the one of creative writing? Keeping a blog is no mean deal – if it is for serious, that is. It is not merely a personal diary, especially for a professional who will centre it on his métier. Is it worth all those hours spent in front of a screen, but instead of designing, say, the perfect chair, writing about designing one?

Holly Becker, the famous Decor8 blogger , who is a writer and interior design consultant, seems to think it does. “I think designers should blog because clients enjoy having access to them day and night - they are able to gain insight into your inspirations and ideas 24 hours a day, 7 days a week”, she says. ”It also helps them to learn more about your personality and to deepen their relationship with you. They can view links, shops and other things that you highlight so that they can learn more about the things that you find as a designer. Interior design should not be some mystery society in my opinion; I enjoy sharing what I find with all who visit my site. I believe everyone should have access to good design!” .

Increased exposure seems to be a major advantage of blogging for a designer. Making him stand out between his colleagues, a designer’s blog helps him reach out to an international audience, reach people from all kinds of professions and fields and make his ideas and work known to places that otherwise he could never reach, or have to spend a huge amount of money doing so. That of course leads to another bonus: name recognition. Decor8 had 16 readers when it opened, most of them Holly’s clients. Now she has over 25,000 daily readers and one of the most popular design blogs in the world.

The learning experience is another aspect of blogging. Writing about one’s designs and inspiration leads the designer to further solidify his/her personal style and tastes, find out what he/she likes or dislikes in a more precise way, and have the archive to shift through whenever one feels like it. It also helps the designer become more aware of his personal style.

The obvious reason to blog of course would be networking. Getting in touch with colleagues, possible collaborators and clients from all over the world is a tempting option for the designer/blogger. Richard Haines, illustrator for In Style magazine, J Crew and 5 star luxury hotels. is wondering why not most fashion designers don’t have their own blogs, especially the more famous ones. And having such an immediate and easy way of communicating between them, it makes realizing projects that much easier. It also provides an easy access to the designer for his clients, who can comment on their projects without spending time on time-consuming telephone calls from a city 500 km away. The instant feedback one gets on his work through the blog is as valuable a tool as any. Writing also improves the designer’s communication skills, in writing and otherwise, while at the same time providing a nice variety and distraction from a routine workload.

The blog also can be a pivotal component of an official website, which is the more traditional means of an online presence. It improves the site content for search engines, gets more indexed pages, provides fresh and updated content frequently and also feeds the internet with keywords and phrases that lead straight to the designer and his work when one looks for it on-line.
Writing about one’s respective field also demonstrates his knowledge about it, which of course is another way of promoting oneself. It also provides potential promotion opportunities, as the designers can post their upcoming projects or exhibitions or events and make them known to a wider audience. In combination with social networking sites, this can be a powerful advertising tool with minimum cost.

Is it worth then to steal some time from honing one’s talent, perfecting one’s work, to deal with the hassles and travails of blogging? The answer is yes and I am particularly surprised that more designers have not yet caught up with it: they would be pleasantly surprised with the results.

This article was written for and published in issue 14 of the South African DESIGN> Magazine.