davidthedesigner

student power?

If you're a regular here, then you'll know that in the past I've regretted the fact that so few design students blogged. And I hope I've done my bit to encourage them.

Well, I think that 2009 will be the turning point. And soon they'll all be wanting to follow Alan Clarke's lovely Olympics posters onto the Creative Review blog. But, of course, you've already seen them, haven't you? But here's another student with another lovely project that you might not have seen already:

Devin MacDonald has just graduated from the University of Michigan School of Art & Design, and for his final major project he contacted the city of Ann Arbor with an idea: to have a guide that showed students living in Ann Arbor how to live more sustainably. Devin explains "there is a lot of information out there about this topic but it is scattered all over. I set out to have a handbook that would encompass it all. The city of Ann Arbor liked the idea so much that they decided to fund the printing and distributing of 10,000 copies for the fall of 2009". You can download the Ann Arbor Green Guide just here.

It's worth it for the back cover alone:

(via For Print Only)

is this a great piece of design?

We get lots of junk flyers posted through our letterbox: mostly from pizza parlours and estate agents. I'm sure you do too.

We tend to put them on a step on the stairs until the pile's grown big enough to gather them up and sling them in the recycling bin. What a waste of resources, eh? All that ink and paper, not to mention the creative sweat and tears that goes into producing things that never get read.

Now this had been sitting on the stairs for a couple of days and I thought it was someone's shopping list, or the notes taken during a telephone conversation. So I ignored it, thinking it was someone else's list of something or other.

But I'm looking after a neighbour's house at the moment and when I was picking up her post I noticed exactly the same note sitting on her doormat. So I took a look. And then I came back home and read the whole thing.

So does this make it a great piece of design? The fact that it's been noticed when everything else gets ignored? Maybe it needs to be entered into one of those 'design effectiveness' competitions. Why it's even made it's way into the blogosphere now. And heck, I'll even go so far as to give them a web link.

They'll never persuade me to buy broccoli, though.

urban earth

This is a time-lapse movie of a walk of 26km to the centre of the city of Salisbury, and I urge you to watch it. It was made last weekend by Daniel Raven Ellison and represents the distance that one would need to travel in order to cover the city of Salisbury's ecological footprint (as opposed to its urban footprint which is a mere 2km). So if you've ever wondered what impact you yourself were having on the planet, this gives you some idea. A big one.

More details on the urban adventure blog.

this made me smile #47

From all the way down under.

the green gauge

I know a man (not terribly well, I must admit) who is the embodiment of the term petrol head. And, boy, does he like his cars. Not just any cars, mind you. I haven't seen him for a while, but every time I do he has a different one. Cars like this:

As you might imagine, he has a bob or two. So why not? Good luck to him.

The thing is, though, he emailed me a couple of weeks ago to proudly announce that by 2010 his company is going to be carbon negative. Not even carbon neutral, mind, but negative.

So I'm wondering whether this time he's splashed out on a bandwagon. Shall we all jump on?

an arboreal aberration

I happened to be in Birmingham over the weekend (this one, not that one). I couldn't help noticing that the council seems to have employed somebody to count all of the trees and then to tag each one with its own number. Is that in case they escape?

gimme five

I didn't learn to drive until I was into my forties - and, do you know what? I love it. Absolutely love it. Put me in a car and I'll drive anywhere. (And in case you're thinking that's rather ungreen of me, I would ask you to offset 30+ years of non-driving against my carbon footprint.) And because I started learning late, I decided to carry on the process and went through the advance driving course - thus going from a non-driver to an advanced driver over an 18-month period.

Now, part of the advanced driving test (yes, it's much tougher - and longer - than the regular test) involves remembering all the road signs that you pass. So at some point during the 90-minute test the examiner will ask you what was the last road sign you passed. In my case, that question came a mile further on down the road (and, yes, I got it right - it was a 'low bridge ahead' warning). But I wonder how much longer that particular part of the test is going to remain viable. Because every time I make a journey these days there seems to be another crop of signs which have appeared overnight. So you can hardly go 10 yards, yet alone a mile, without some sort of sign telling you can or can't do this or that.

A while ago I commented upon those digital displays that seem to spend 95% of the time displaying the 'NO REPORTED INCIDENTS' message. But it's not just the big things that our councils like to throw money at. Oh no. Let me show you a little car park - carefully landscaped, with some lovely bushes and card-entry barriers. And it holds perhaps 30 cars - maybe 40 if, as sometimes happens, people disregard the bays. And it's reserved exclusively for council employees and visitors, and you can only gain access with a card issued by the council.

So why is is necessary for the council to put up this large metal sign to tell it's employees and visitors that they can't drive any faster than 5 miles per hour in this particular car park? If it really is necessary to do that, why don't they just send all 30-40 card holders an email? Or tell them on the card that's needed to gain access?

Oh yes, I forgot. It's public money, so cost and common sense don't come into this equation, do they?

this made me smile #33

(via OK Blog)

i once gave george monbiot a lift, does that make me green?

Well, yes, that's true - I did once give a lift to George Monbiot. It's a few years ago now, but we were coming home from The Big Green Gathering. I was driving, but George was hitching a lift. So, a man who lives by his principles: he doesn't (or didn't) own a car. You have to admire him for that. Not that he introduced himself as George Monbiot - that only emerged during the conversation on the journey back. Still, I doubt that he realised that he was being given a lift by davidthedesigner.

But the reason I mention this is because, as I said here, I've been pondering green issues of late. Probably because of the blog discussion around the Applied Green conference that happened while I was away in Belgium, and mentioned in the blogosphere by Ben and Michael, who both spoke at the 'festival of minds' (well, that's what it says in the blurb). Mind you, I always think about green issues when I stay in Gent, not least because the attitudes and culture are just that little bit different than they are in the UK. And I'll come back to that later.

But I'd also been thinking about all things green because I happen to live in the little city that, while I was away, lost it's crown as the 'Location, Location, Location' best place to live in the UK. (Now, I have to step in here to dispel any misconceptions that this fact might conjure up in your mind: you know, middle class designer swanning around Britain's most desirable cathedral city. In my defence, I will tell you that I've lived in the same house for more than 25 years and that happens to be within a mile of where I was born. So that hardly makes me a typical resident - at least not in comparison to my immediate neighbours. And, no, I'm not landed gentry either.)

Now the local paper reported the loss of this little city's crown with the headline 'city needs to improve green image'. And there's the rub: it's not what we are, it's what we appear to be that's deemed to be important. We just need to polish up our image.

Which is where the designer is usually called in. To polish up somebody's image.

And that's precisely where we (those of us who are designers) need to be careful. That we don't simply get drawn in to the whole 'greening' thing just to polish up somebody's image. As Ben quite rightly points out, 'I'm a designer. Use me better'. But more forcefully put by George Monbiot in his article (which I urge you to read) 'Eco Junk' - 'green consumerism is becoming a pox on the planet'. The myth that we can all save the world by doing a bit more shopping.

And while I'm on the subject of shopping, here's where we can all (whether you're a designer or not) make a start:

Get rid of the plastic bag. They truly are a pox on the planet. And you know what? At least in this little city in which I live it seems impossible to get through a day without amassing at least half a dozen of these things. They're thrust upon you everywhere you go. If I go into to Tesco Express to buy The Guardian I'm asked 'would you like a bag?'. No, I don't want a bag. Don't you know that Guardian buyers never ask for plastic bags? And if I pop in to Sainsburys to buy a bottle of wine they want to wrap it up in two plastic carriers bags before putting it in to another carrier bag for me to carry home.

Mr Tesco, Mr Sainsbury (and while I'm about it, Mr Waitrose, Mr Morrison and Mr Asda): here's my message to you - WE CAN ALL LIVE WITHOUT YOUR PLASTIC CARRIER BAGS, THANK YOU VERY MUCH.

Which brings me back to Gent. Because if you shop in a Belgian supermarket you'd better take a shopping bag with you, because there won't be free plastic bags. And do you know what? It works. It's no hardship. It just requires a tiny shift in attitude. But that shift in attitude is far more effective if it's collective. If we all do it together.

I'm ready when you are.

green connections

One of my intentions on coming back from my sojourn in Belgium was to post some thoughts on going and/or being green. I'm sure I'll get there - I've got lots of thoughts running around in my brain, but they just need to be put into some sort of order before they're ready to be put up here.

In the meantime, I've been doing some research into a packaging problem for which we'd like a 'green' solution - and it's not proving easy, I can tell you. But one thing I have come across was a wonderful resource for all things green: a first-class collection of links, courtesy of The Green Stationery Company.