Book Review: Out of Poverty – What Works When Traditional Approaches Fail

“Ninety percent of the world’s designers spend all their time working on solutions for the richest 10% of the world’s customers. A revolution in design is needed to reverse this ratio and reach the other 90%.”

Paul Polak’s book, OUT OF POVERTY – What Works When Traditional Approaches Fail, chronicling his twenty-five years in alleviating poverty, presents two reoccurring themes:

• Keep it simple (i.e., affordable)
• Know your audience

How apropos for those of us in the communications field – whenever we have a client’s problem to solve, the best approach is to break it down to its simplest form and to gain an understanding of the audience.

It is enlightening to learn that the same method can be applied to solving social problems, in this case, poverty. Mr. Polak stresses the importance of thoroughly knowing the people you want to help. Don’t assume anything, especially, do not think of poor people as a burden, but look at them as an economic opportunity. Poor people aren’t poor because they are uneducated, subjugated or sick. Quite the contrary, says Mr. Polak, they are poor because they aren’t making enough money. Continue reading »

Does Good Design lead to Good Decision-Making? An interview with Aaron Marcus

An interview with Aaron Marcus

How does significant information come to the surface of our attention, present itself in an orderly fashion, and enable us to make good decisions that affect our own lives and that may affect the lives of many others?

Effective personal, community, professional, national, and global decision-making is always there as a challenge.

Anyone’s current decision-challenge might concern whether I should reach for that next snack, in relation to my current cholesterol levels, blood pressure, and family medical history. Or, it might concern whether I should reach for that next email message among the 50 that have just arrived in the last half hour. It might concern which of 500 channels of media I should watch during the next 30 minutes of my life. It might concern whether I should deploy missiles targeted to certain positions where I have determined national threats to be located. Or, it might concern what strategic facts and personality traits of delegates around a conference table might enable me to make the right proposal to negotiate a peaceful resolution to a complex political conflict. Continue reading »

Book Review: The Decline of Men, How the American Male is Tuning Out, Giving Up and Flipping Off His Future

Men wanted!

A startling trend, affecting half the American population, is happening and happening fast. According to Guy Garcia, in his book “The Decline of Men, How the American Male is Tuning Out, Giving Up and Flipping Off His Future,” the dominant American male, as we know and love him, may soon be extinct.

In this thoroughly researched book, Garcia offers up surprising, eye-opening statistics to support his take on this cultural upheaval in America. His premise is as women are strengthening their place in the world and increasing their earning power, younger men are confused by the new rules of masculinity and are not only falling behind, but opting out all together.

As media and pop culture portray and foster this image of the young male as a video-game playing buffoon, it seems men are falling prey to this stereotype and no longer wanting or able to take care of themselves, let alone a wife and family. Continue reading »

Finding Your Rwanda Part II

What about the human condition needs improvement?

Claiming a personal and a collective uniqueness can be achieved in the participative action of designing our environment.In its essence, this declaration of uniqueness through the design and transformation of place, speaks to the power of branding and is illustrated in the Rugerero Genocide Survivors Village in Rwanda (see my previous blog post, Finding Your Rwanda, designing and debating our role in social responsibility). The cooperative design and building of a genocide memorial and the painting of murals on the mud brick homes of the village changed the spiritual and physical essence of this wounded place.

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¡Talking Cholula!

Scratch, Tear, Build, Rebuild, and get Dirty: Patricia Cué’s escapade with students into Mexico

“Instant Messaging” was the name of the show that exhibited their capstone project: they own cell phones and use social-networking sites, dubbed themselves the “IM Generation” and me “IM Picante”.

Technology- and brand-savvy, this was a group of twenty design students that traded T-shirts for grapefruits and ate crickets at the market in Cholula, Mexico, during a ten-week-long, full immersion cross-cultural experience.

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Can Design Shape the Political Landscape?

Measuring the Power of the Visual.

Chaz Maviyane-Davies, 2008

This poster by Chaz Maviyane-Davies was the first to run in the 30 Reasons internet campaign. Mr. Maviyane-Davies is originally from Zimbabwe, and for more than two decades has taken on the issues of consumerism, health, nutrition, social responsibility, the environment and human rights.

Join us in evaluating the role of the graphic designers in shaping the political dialogue or in promoting political agenda around the world.

E Pluribus Unum

Or, Why I Voted for Barack Obama: Identity Politics for the 21st Century

I am a middle-aged white man, and I voted for Barack Obama. I did not vote for him because he was African-American, young and charismatic. I voted for him because he addressed the most difficult issues of our troubled time in a reasoned manner based on concrete analyses that offered the possibility of pragmatic solutions. I voted for him because he transcended the histrionics of fear-based ideologies on the left and the right and spoke to all sides with the respect and concern that the citizens of a representative democracy deserve. I voted for him because he placed intellect above emotion without sacrificing his humanity. I voted for him because he harnessed the power of words in order to defeat the demagogic populism that pandered to our most easily frightened fellow citizens.

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Decoding Design

Early on in my design education, I was taken with the work of Herb Lubalin. To this day, the design he proposed for a masthead for the publication, Mother & Child, still resonates. It’s clever, simple and elegant.*

After reading Maggie Macnab’s book, Decoding Design: Understanding and Using Symbols in Visual Communication, I have a more profound understanding of why this design works so well. Besides the universality of it (who doesn’t see the baby within a mother’s womb), it is the concept of wholeness, represented by the circle that makes it appealing. Wholeness is both everything and nothing; right and wrong; light and dark – it is life; so it is with mother and child.

With the advent of technology, we communicators live in a competitive arena, we struggle for our messages to be heard above the din of the marketplace. It is our role as designers to fight the instinct to follow the crowd and instead, create unique, meaningful work that communicates effectively and, in more and more cases, cross-culturally. As Ms. Macnab states in her introduction “it is crucial to be aware of the quality to quantity ratio…there are far more compelling ways to create a message besides saturation”.

Her answer to our complex and challenging world is to step back and recognize the simple patterns that have been part of humankind since the beginning of time. She delves into anthropology, mathematics, physics and spirituality to weave together a very informative and engaging thesis on the importance of symbolism in creating impactful design.

She has organized this intricate material into 11 easy-to-read chapters, the first one examines our relationship to patterns in nature and architecture; each subsequent chapter looks at a number, from one to ten, and interprets that number’s symbolic meaning. In addition, she provides a wealth of examples and case studies to support her theories, some more obvious than others.

Although as designers we generally work on instinct and intuition, this book would be worthy of a place on your bookshelf. You may not use it as a starting point when tackling a new design project, however, the wealth of information contained in its pages may just provide you with the language and validation you need to communicate and support your ideas.

About the book’s author Maggie Macnab is a designer, writer and educator. Her design work has been recognized in Communication Arts, Step by Step, Print and Graphis and her articles have been published by Communication Arts and the AIGA. She is past president of the Communication Artists of New Mexico, teaches at the University of New Mexico and speaks at national conferences, universities and school.

For more information on Maggie Macnab and her book, please visit ww.decodingdesign.com

*Herb Lubalin's proposed design

Review by Deborah Plunkett

Finding Your Rwanda

Designing and debating our role in social responsibility.

I accepted AIGA XCD’s offer to open a blog on social engagement with the idea of provoking discussion on how we Designers can reach into into our “Tool Box” and make a difference in our world today. Many designers–Shiego Fukuda, Grapus, Herb Lubalin and Tibor Kalman, to name but a few–have committed their talent to sensitizing their audience to the problems that plague humanity, provoking thought and inspiring action.

My path has been somewhat different, perhaps a reflection of the evolution of social activism as we’ve come to know it and what I believe is an example of our increasing ability to design our own roles in social engagement.

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Does Art Transcend Cultural Boundaries?

A True World Language

When Europeans initiated their first fully-documented oceanic voyages, they unleashed centuries of cruelty, suffering, destruction as well as wealth, opportunity and unprecedented cultural cross-fertilization. The first Portuguese, Spanish, English and Dutch explorers unwittingly transformed European culture by importing textiles, porcelains, sculptures, prints, painting and manuscripts that at first befuddled and ultimately conquered their owners. The adventures of 1492 and 1498 began as predatory raids and ended with the transformation of the raiders’ descendants and the beginnings of an arguably global, multicultural civilization.

Countless books have been written about the economic, political and social consequences of the Age of Exploration. The subjugation and at times destruction of First Nations peoples is a growing field of scholarship with increasingly sophisticated documentation. Unfortunately, the study of cross-cultural communications has yet to go beyond art history, musicology and literary studies. To be sure, those are important fields, but they do not always address the deeper human aspects.

Continue reading »