The National. The Take-Away Shows.

Get Your World Cup Radial Bracket Poster

Hyperakt Studio: Exceptional design isn’t just about making things look pretty. It’s about making them more meaningful, useful and engaging. It’s about improving communication and capturing hearts and minds.

A lovely design firm from NYC who loves to do work for do gooders. Very good stuff. 

NAACP

Institute for War & Peace Reporting

From the Library of Congress, a wonderful poster collection of the Works Progress Administration. Impeccable typography. Extremely skilled imagery. All in the name of progress and moving America forward. I can just hear the glenn beck army of spastics now. Oh the rallying cries: “I’ll blind my kid if I want to.” “Stay away from the bottom of my swimming pool.” “Keep your damn hands off my syphilis.” Ah what fun. 

It’s quite a selection of work from an important part of American history. When government was seen as a tool for equality and democratic processes. As we approach Independence Day these posters offer a nice visual ride through a time of bold visioning. 

The official measure for health and well-being.

How do we measure success? Happiness? Prosperity? That old metric we call GDP and point to as if it were created by God himself is beginning to be recognized as completely inadequate. Economic growth certainly should not be equated with happiness. Especially when environmental limits put a cap on how much “growth” we can get out of our market systems existing on a finite planet. The Well-Being Index attempts to add more to the equation. Presented at Meeting of the Minds 2010 by Gallup, it has been developed to provide the official measure for health and well-being. It’s the voice of Americans and the most ambitious effort ever undertaken to measure what people believe constitutes a good life. 

It includes Life Evaluation, Emotional Health, Healthy Behavior, Physical Health, Work Environment and Basic Access. Very interesting findings. As for 2010, we’re looking pretty good, all things considered.

There’s just something about how Naomi Klein sees a situation. Her point of view is a powerful take on our world. Author of NO LOGO and the Shock Doctrine, her most recent article covers the oil spill in the gulf. Not one to hold back, she certainly captures the mood and adds appropriate context to the situation. Knowing she’s out there, beyond the filter of the mainstream, is certainly comforting. Her honesty helps us to catch ourselves and pulls us out of complacency, often shaking the foundations of our worldview or what we deem to be acceptable in our reality. 

The article is powerful. Infuriating. A little sad and hopeless. And yet an important alarm sounding. Calling on us to correct course. Following are some choice paragraphs (Full article via the Guardian): 

If Katrina pulled back the curtain on the reality of racism in America, the BP disaster pulls back the curtain on something far more hidden: how little control even the most ingenious among us have over the awesome, intricately interconnected natural forces with which we so casually meddle. BP cannot plug the hole in the Earth that it made. Obama cannot order fish species to survive, or brown pelicans not to go extinct (no matter whose ass he kicks).

This Gulf coast crisis is about many things – corruption, deregulation, the addiction to fossil fuels. But underneath it all, it’s about this: our culture’s excruciatingly dangerous claim to have such complete understanding and command over nature that we can radically manipulate and re-engineer it with minimal risk to the natural systems that sustain us.

None of this sloppiness would have been possible, however, had BP not been making its predictions to a political class eager to believe that nature had indeed been mastered. Some, like Republican Lisa Murkowski, were more eager than others. The Alaskan senator was so awe-struck by the industry’s four-dimensional seismic imaging that she proclaimed deep-sea drilling to have reached the very height of controlled artificiality. “It’s better than Disneyland in terms of how you can take technologies and go after a resource that is thousands of years old and do so in an environmentally sound way,” she told the Senate energy committee just seven months ago.

With gas prices soaring to unprecedented heights, that’s when the conservative leader Newt Gingrich unveiled the slogan “Drill Here, Drill Now, Pay Less” – with an emphasis on the now. The wildly popular campaign was a cry against caution, against study, against measured action. In Gingrich’s telling, drilling at home wherever the oil and gas might be – locked in Rocky Mountain shale, in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and deep offshore – was a surefire way to lower the price at the pump, create jobs, and kick Arab ass all at once.

Human limitation has been the one constant of this catastrophe. After two months, we still have no idea how much oil is flowing, nor when it will stop.

And this is surely the strangest twist in the Gulf coast saga: it seems to be waking us up to the reality that the Earth never was a machine. After 400 years of being declared dead, and in the middle of so much death, the Earth is coming alive.

Virtually all indigenous cultures have myths about gods and spirits living in the natural world – in rocks, mountains, glaciers, forests – as did European culture before the scientific revolution. Katja Neves, an anthropologist at Concordia University, points out that the practice serves a practical purpose. Calling the Earth “sacred” is another way of expressing humility in the face of forces we do not fully comprehend. 

The Rest Saving The West

The Competition: We live in a complex world, one full of inequities and wonderful things. Our fellows in the First World have been concerned for awhile with us having the major share of the badness, so we thought, why don’t we pay back? After all, their life isn’t problem-free either. And that’s where this competition starts. We’re calling artists, designers, tinkerers, makers, and thinkers with an idea to participate. Two con­ditions only: you were born in and live right now in a Developing Country and you are 13 years of age or older.

Areas of Focus:
• Reducing obesity.
• Addressing aging population and low birth rate.
• Reducing consumption rate of mass produced goods.
• Integrating the immigrant population.

A collective call to action.

Washington, DC on June 28th, 2010

TEDxOilSpill will explore new ideas for our energy future, and how we can mitigate the current crisis in the Gulf. TEDxOilSpill will tackle the tough questions raised by the recent and ongoing environmental catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico. Topics will include mitigation of the spill and the impending cleanup efforts; energy alternatives; policy and economics; as well as new technology that can help us build a self-reliant culture.

Certainly an impressive group of speakers from EarthEcho, Carbon War Room, Rocky Mountain Institute and much, much more.

More boom, a protesting poster and an island that is shaped like a seahorse.

SPUR's Agenda for Change

Included in the Meeting of the Minds 2010 conference was a presentation by Gabriel Metcalf from SPUR. Focusing on the innovations we need for more sustainable cities, the conference was a gathering of leading thinkers, architects, designers, political officials, policy experts, environmental advocates, urban planners, leading foundations, community activists, and on and on. There was a lot covered in two days that I’ll write more on this week. But one of the most engaging presentations was from Gabriel on the work of SPUR. Their Agenda for Change includes Community Planning, Disaster Planning, Economic Development, Good Government, Housing, Regional Planning, Sustainable Development and Transportation. It’s really worth exploring further.

Obsessive Consumption the Book

Our friend Kate, from the Office of Kate Bingaman-Burt, has a book out. It’s pretty great. Quoting now: “I love documenting the mundane and, in turn, putting a personal face on something that is mass-produced. I make work about personal consumerism, market economies, guilt, joy, excess, more guilt, gifts, celebration, repetition, and the community of these shared experiences.” She’s going on her Summer Zoom 2010. Really nice stuff. Enjoy.

yeasayer

the faint

russian circles

Very nice posters from doe-eyed. Filed under “wish I’d done that.”