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Last night I went with some friends to see the first showing of the Age of Stupid movie at the Ritzy cinema in Brixton, followed by a talk from Franny Armstrong, the director. It’s a hard-hitting film, part documentary, part dramatic dystopian prediction, released just in time to focus our attention on the upcoming Copenhagen conference when some life-changing decisions will be made for all of us. Read more »
I attended the “Better World by Design” conference in Providence, Rhode Island USA from Friday 7 to Sunday 9 November. The conference was held at the campuses of Brown University and Rhode Island School of Design and it was jointly organised by a committee of students from both institutions. I would say the conference was a phenomenal success, with a line-up of influential and knowledgeable speakers together with useful networking events and a couple of fun parties.
The aim was to bring together a community of designers and other professionals to interact and engage with students through a joint discussion of the potential for design in its broadest sense to advance the cause of sustainability across the world. We were encouraged to think big and keep an open mind. After 3 days, I came away with a lot of great new contacts and a stack of new ideas.
Better x Design
Better x Design is a blog, a networking group and a conference. I’ll be writing a series of articles on our blog in the next few days, reflecting on what I learned at the conference. It would be great to see more of this sort of event, from time to time, in the UK. Greengaged at the Design Council runs along similar lines but Better x Design raised the bar for big-thinking sustainability gatherings with a world view.
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John Grant published the Green Marketing Manifesto in 2007 and it influenced Pli’s marketing and business development strategy immediately. You can watch the author talking about ‘Love and Greed’ at the DO Lectures here. It’s fully weird…
The DO Lectures
Thanks to Howies for the link to the DO Lectures. There are lots of interesting talks here.
Annie Leonard, the genius behind the short movie ‘The Story of Stuff’, was in Istanbul on May 31st for a screening of the movie. I was among the few lucky Istanbulites-—nothing related to being invited, simply due to people’s lack of awareness!—-who were able to watch the movie with her, after which a Q&A session took place.
I already had a question in mind as I approached the movie theatre, since I had watched the movie several times—thanks to its brilliant webpage. What preoccupied me was something which I had come to realize after looking at what socially and environmentally aware thinkers has said back in the 50s and 60s. I think that today we cannot help but refer greatly to their studies, go against what they’ve gone against, and circulate around the same terms: Corporatism, consumerism, planned & perceived obsolescence, etc.
My question to her was, “Have we failed in coping with these menaces, and if we have, what has gone wrong?”
A recent article in The New York Times compares today’s environmental challenge with times of war and scarcity. Having addressed the issue with an identical comparison in a previous post, it’s amazing to see how two points made in conclusion to the same analogy can be so different. For those people who don’t have time to read the whole Times article, below is an excerpt to sum up the point it’s trying to make:
