Do Good Design: How Design Can Change Our World: How Visual Communicators Can Save the World [Paperback]

You might expect a book with "good design" in its title to showcase elegant communications pieces for savvy clients. Not this book. On the cover, the word "design" is crossed out. "Do good" is the message.

But first, Canadian designer David Berman shows us bad design. Really bad -- and not in the aesthetic sense of the word. He bombards us with offensive, sexist print ads for cigarettes, cars, fast food, beer. According to Berman, the multinational conglomerates selling these products are an axis of evil far more dangerous than Al Qaeda, creating an addiction to mass consumption that is leading to the demise of the planet's environment. He also bombards us with words: exploitation, deceit, junk, greed. "Designers are at the core of the most efficient, most destructive pattern of deception in human history," he writes.

Is it fair to blame designers for these evils? Should graphic designers, who generally work in small firms, be lumped together with the global ad agencies that create Coca-Cola and Marlboro campaigns? And where does the responsibility really lie? Are designers responsible for plastering Coke billboards on every surface in third-world villages? Berman, who is the ethics chair for the Graphic Designers of Canada, asserts that we are all designers and we are all responsible; we've collectively created the mess and must clean it up. Does that include lobbying the local landlords who sell the space where the ads are posted, and the authorities and politicians who don't legislate against it?

David Berman is a man of conviction and passion. But to whom is he preaching? To design firm owners ("Next time you pull out a disposable pen at a client briefing...")? To clients ("If you can't find a promise to make about your product that you'd feel comfortable making to your children or best friend, redesign your product")? Or to students? Perhaps only young, naïve students are unaware of many of the facts related in the book: "Cigarettes are the most highly advertised product in the world." "Extreme women serve as billboards for fashion brands."

Nevertheless, I truly hope this book gets in the hands of students. As required reading in first-semester communication design programs, it could help them begin to look at the uses and possibilities of design. If only a few are inspired by the picture of a girl on page 27 with a tube going from her ear to her mouth, the book will have succeeded. The caption reads: "...technology designed for quadriplegics. A person without use of their arms or legs can surf the Internet by combining neck movements with puffing air through a tube." Perhaps a student who peruses the babes-in-bikinis ads and then sees this photo will think, "Maybe my ultimate career goal shouldn't be designing CD jackets. I'll take engineering and physiology classes and become an industrial designer who creates products that heal people, and the world."

Healing the world is a key theme. Some of the book's most compelling bits are the "Doing Good" sidebars that describe remarkable things designers around the world are accomplishing. "There is no reason why you can't make an extraordinary mark on our world," Berman advises. "Recognize the independence, power, and influence of your role as a professional." I hope his next book will show more positive examples and explore in greater depth the projects he mentions including the ballot designs the AIGA is sponsoring, the Canadian cigarette packages that graphically depict cancerous lungs, and the design programs that celebrate indigenous cultures.

The book itself is an exercise in non-wastefulness. Its mass-market-paperback, Adbusters vibe has more in common with Jerry Rubin's 1970, counterculture Do It! than any design book on my shelves. However, the message might be more effective if the paper and printing were of better quality and the visuals were larger and more legible.

Today, a book is not just a book. It's part of a user experience including a Web site, and in this case, a pledge. Taking off from where British designer Ken Garland left off with his "First Things First" manifesto, Berman asks us to take the "Do Good Pledge, which includes: I will spend at least 10% of my professional time helping repair the world." As I write this, his site shows that 80,184 hours of doing good have been pledged. What could be bad about that?

One of the books I received from Amazon Vine last month was Do Good Design: How Design Can Change Our World by David B. Berman. Actually, it was a book I heard about from a few other bloggers who I respect, so getting the opportunity to pick it up for review was perfect. Overall, I thought his premise was interesting and thought-provoking... Designers have an obligation to "do good" when it comes to crafting messages, and that our current mindset of mass consumption is not sustainable in the long run. He shows plenty of examples to back up his views, and you can't help but consider how much "mass deception" we've succumbed to. But to buy into his message completely, you have to think that most everyone out there is bent on seducing you in ways you haven't imagined. And I personally don't think that everything is a conspiracy theory...

Contents:
The Creative Brief - Disarming the Weapons of Mass Deception: Start Now; Beyond Green - A Convenient Lie; Pop Landscape; The Weapons - Visual Lies, Manufactured Needs; Where The Truth Lies - A Slippery Slope; Wine, Women, and Water; Losing Our Senses
The Design Solution - Convenient Truths: Why Our Time Is The Perfect Time; How To Lie, How To Tell The Truth; how We Do Good Is How We Do Good; Professional Climate Change
The Do Good Pledge: "What Can One Professional Do?"
Appendixes: First Things First Manifesto; Excerpt From The GDC's Code of Ethics; Excerpt from AIGA's Standards of Professional Practice; The Road To Norway And China; Notes; Index; Questions For Discussion; Acknowledgements; About The Author

If you're not in the habit of questioning what you see, Berman will open your eyes in the first section on disarming weapons of mass deception. Yes, you've got the typical ads that are heavy on sex, enticing male viewers to equate the product with fulfillment. But he also goes after products like Fiji Water that attempt to position themselves as an environmental alternative. But we're talking about, as he puts it, "shipping water from the South Seas in plastic bottles from China to the US and Europe in container ships". When you start looking at ads designed with those deceptions in place, you realize that the drain on resources to support that type of selling is not something that can be sustained on a global basis before the environment takes heavy damage. Coke takes a pretty heavy hit with the ubiquitous use of the familiar Coke logo spread all over the world, cementing their products in people's mind through sheer mass exposure. He also exposes myths like Bailey's Irish Cream, which tries to evoke the image of centuries of handcrafted excellence, while it's really only about 40 years old and is a result of a corporate campaign to get more young women to drink whisky.

He intersperses these examples with others that show responsible and truthful facts in advertising, such as cigarette warning labels that tend towards the graphic depiction of what tobacco can do to you in the long term. All this culminates in a commitment to the Do Good Pledge: the time to commit is now (immediacy), I will be true to my profession (ethics), I will be true to myself (principles), and I will spend at least 10 percent of my professional time helping repair the world (effort). In other words, instead of doing whatever it takes to get and keep the large clients, take a principled stand that you will not feed the mass consumption beast and you will instead try to make a difference in the world.

Personally, I got a lot out of the book even though I'm not a "designer" in terms of the audience he's addressing. We *do* need to change our mindset as consumers, and stop being manipulated by images designed solely to make us want to buy more stuff we don't need. On the other hand, there's a fair amount of grey area over what constitutes responsible selling vs. manipulative selling, and I don't know that I fall as far to the left of the scale as he does. But if nothing more, reading Do Good Design will make you look at the images and icons around you in a new light. And hopefully you'll act a bit differently as a result...

When I first started reading this I was a bit cynical. Yeah, much of graphic design deliberately skews its message to influence the viewer. As a designer myself I pretty much take this as part of the game. Whether selling a product or person the idea behind design is to influence behavior.

As I got into the book however, I realized that I am not as jaded as I thought. Yes influence is important but so are clarity, honesty and appropriateness. I recently looked at a cover of Psychology Today and am pretty put off by the blatant sexual overtones that the magazine regularly uses. Do Good Design covers that subject and raises the question of how tying a product to the implication of sex with an attractive partner plays out in the long term. Will buying that beer or soft drink get you the supermodel? Obviously not. Yet that's what the drink ads not so subtly imply.

Spiekermann suggests the long term fallout of such manipulative practices is negative for the advertiser. It sure hasn't hurt Budweiser, so I don't quite buy that argument. On the other hand, I recently turned down a job for a firm that wanted me to use sexually suggestive material for their website. I found the project offensive.

The point that the author makes is that appropriate images work better if they fit with the product they are designed to promote. The basic idea is truth in advertising applied not just to the textual or spoken content but to the images used as well.

Images are powerful and can touch us on a subconscious level. Did you know that Coke is the second most know word in the world behind okay? Coke ads blanket not just the industrial world but outlying villages in Africa and Asia. A coke costs about the same as a malaria pill. With the extreme poverty rampant in malaria infested areas is it right to promote sugar water sales where such a purchase may keep the customer from being able to buy medicine?

As I went through example after eye opening example of the power of product promotion through design I realized that Do Good Design makes me recall the old phrase consciousness raising. The book certainly raised my consciousness about my work and the power of design for both good and ill.

Obviously, design is just a tool and it's the underlying motives of the people who use it that is the real problem. As we see the results of corporate greed and how it has hammered the world economy. Do Good Design is a timely reminder about motivation and manipulation.