Well hooray! Provokateur’s very own Acme Climate Action has been shortlisted for the Environmental Award at the British Book Design and Production Awards. Having been selected to be in the D&AD Annual and chosen as a finalist at the 2008 Green Awards, this is certainly the icing on the cake. The results are announced in October, so fingers crossed.

Another recent article written by Provokateur’s chief agitator, Joshua Blackburn, on the role of ethics in design.

To see more, check out our book, Change The World.

Design Can Save The World

Designers and communicators have long debated the ethics of their craft. In 1964, the seminal First Things First manifesto appealed for designers to pursue ‘more useful and lasting forms of communication’. 34 years later, Adbusters updated the manifesto and called for the ‘exploration and production of a new kind of meaning’ in what they saw as a battle for the ‘mental environment’ against the uncontested rise of consumerism. Even more recently, champions of ‘sustainable design’ have unveiled manifestos for a greener industry and disciples of Designism have made declarations for a more caring one.

But is anybody listening? First Things First still comes last; Adbusters is still angry; Designism isn’t; and most visual communicators are continuing down Milton Glaser’s ‘Road to Hell’ (not that Mr Glaser is on a road to Hell, he merely wrote about one). ‘Socially conscious design’ (what a drab concept that sounds) seems so often to be either self righteous smuggery or an amusing diversion.

Getting right to the heart of this is a cheeky poster by illustrator Frank Chimero. In big bold caps it declares: “Design Won’t Save The World”, with the postscript, “Go volunteer at a soup kitchen you pretentious fuck.” Delicious.

Is this the repressed id of graphic design today, more interested in the rewards of immaculate kerning than social change? Or is there an uncomfortable truth here that, really, graphic design shouldn’t get ideas above its station?

The notion of design having a social role to play is far from new – and hardly a conceit. Artists and designers have long served as messengers, missionaries, revolutionaries, agitators, and propagandists. Centuries before the holy Brand Guidelines, visual communication was being sharpened as a tool of religion, war and politics.

First Things First might bemoan the commercialisation of graphic design, but 44 years earlier it was taken to its greatest and darkest heights in Nazi Germany in a terrible exemplar of the true power of design.

The point might be uncomfortable, but it’s an important one. Visual communication has always been a tool of social and political change – its role in selling consumerism only came later. It’s significant that the father of modern advertising, Edward Bernays, was first a master of propaganda at the US War Department in 1917; only when the war ended did corporations begin to covet the power he had harnessed.

The irony is that today, political and social concerns are seen as either extraneous or inappropriate to the craft of visual communication. We’ve become so absorbed in selling trainers and toothpaste that we imagine it’s improper to do anything else. The idea that ‘design won’t save the world’ has become a pervading ethos within an industry that apparently celebrates its own indifference.

The co-option of visual communication by business has convinced its practitioners that it was ever thus. Schools of design train students to handle their tools like jobbing carpenters and off they go, eager logo monkeys hungry for business. This is the reality of visual communication, or the reality we’ve come to accept. There might be a government awareness campaign or a pro bono charity job, but our real business is selling.

Those writing their manifestos for a new theory of design talk about ‘responsibility’ and ‘citizenship’ and certainly that’s an ethos Provokateur shares. But those notions miss an important point. The creative industry has downgraded from an understanding of ideas to an enchantment with things. We’ve taken the most powerful tool for social change and committed it to the most mundane of tasks.

It hasn’t been fashionable to use the word ‘propaganda’ for a good seventy years – instead, we refashioned it ‘social marketing’ and ‘public affairs’ (apparently a sweeter pill to swallow). But it is time for those who craft visual communications to look again at what they do.

Let us be propagandists in the true sense of the word; not, as we imagine, a disseminator of lies but a propagator of ideas, and let those ideas be driven by more than product. Let us be propagandists that understand how visual communication has always connected with politics and society, and that being a lever for change is greater by far than being a tool of business.

Instead of imagining politics and ethics have no place in design, we must realise they’ve always been there, we just forgot about it. Design can save the world – if we want it to.

As chief instigator of the Tap campaign, Provokateur’s Joshua Blackburn has been asked by ooffoo.com to have an online debate with a spokesman / spin doctor / pr lackey at the British Soft Drinks Association. He just kicked it off with the following article:

>> Is Tap Water Preferable to Bottled Water

Despite being the founder of the Tap campaign, whose mission is to take on the bottled water industry and get people turning on their taps, I secretly admire those in the water business. Forget selling ice cubes to eskimoes, they’ve gone one better: through inspired marketing, they’ve persuaded millions of people to fear tap water and believe healthy hydration is only available from mountain springs and Hawaiian aquifers.

So before bombarding you with facts and figures, I want to set out three truisms which I ask you to bear in mind as you consider this debate.

Firstly, bottled water is a business within which genuine sustainability is inescapably at odds with the corporate objective of selling. In a truly sustainable world, bottled water would not exist, but no industry person could ever wish for this, because they sell disposability – irrespective of its offsets and recycled bottles. Whatever the greenwash, be under no illusion: protecting the planet and selling bottled water are mutually exclusive affairs. This is an industry that consumes immense resources, generates mountains of unrecycled rubbish and contributes generously to Co2 emissions. It is, quite simply, a climate disaster.

Secondly, the real marketing strategy of bottled water is not health and wellbeing but fear. One job of bodies like the British Soft Drinks Association is to undermine public confidence in tap water, so expect lots of this from their spinner and recognise it for what it is – negative propaganda designed to instil fear and sell product.

Thirdly, tap water is good – hell, it’s actually a miracle! Because I don’t have a vested interest, I can admit it’s not always perfect and in some places it can taste funny. But what an incredible privilege we in the West enjoy in having safe, clean, fresh municipal water so freely available. (Ironically, the bottled water industry knows this better than most, since one quarter of bottled water sold worldwide is actually filtered tap water!)

Bottled water is, in fact, the triumph of marketing over common sense. Despite being 250 times cheaper than bottled water, and although most tap water tastes very good (in Decanter Magazine’s blind tasting of 24 bottled water brands, Thames Water came joint 3rd!), we’ve become obsessed that purity can only be found in bottles. But the truth is we aren’t buying water but brands, and when you take the brand away, the overwhelming majority simply can’t tell the difference.

British consumers spend billions on bottled water each year and worldwide the industry uses around 27 million tonnes plastic. We ship our water from Fiji, France and New Zealand (and I’m afraid even the stuff from the British Isles racks up ample travel miles). Meanwhile, tap water generates no rubbish, costs us next to nothing and is tested rigorously and regularly (in 2006 the Drinking Water Inspectorate gave 99.96% of tap samples a clean bill of health). I mean really, where’s the debate?!

Across the country, tap water is of incredibly high quality – but I want it even better so that no one can say of their water that it ‘tastes funny’ or they’re worried it isn’t clean. For those who need reassurance, Tap would heartily encourage every home, office and restaurant to install top notch filtration units so we never have to buy a bottle again. Not only would it pay for itself in a year, but it’d end, once and for all, the colossal consumer scam that is bottled water. In a world beset by environmental and financial crises, we need more things that are sustainable, cheap and healthy – for once, it’s literally on tap.

At 17.03 today, Provokateur pressed the button on The Elders website, re-launching the world wide web presence for this remarkable organistion, founded by Nelson Mandela and Graça Machel.

Provokateur has worked for some pretty amazing clients, but our work for The Elders, an organisation that brings together Kofi Annan, Mary Robinson, Jimmy Carter, Muhammad Yunus and Gro Brundtland – to name but five of the ten Elders – has been a unique privilege.

The website will be their main tool for communicating with the world. To celebrate the launch, the first online event is a live webchat with Desmond Tutu on July 8th, which Provokateur will be assisting with.

So please, visit the site – www.theelders.org – and ask Archbishop Tutu your question by going to www.theelders.org/asktutu .