ALR designletter [6.1]
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Welcome to the first issue of the 2006 edition of the ALR Designletter. As always we welcome your comments, suggestions, criticism and/or praise. Thanks for reading.
Noah Scalin, president
ALR design
socially conscious graphic design
http://www.ALRdesign.com
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[01] ALR News
You asked for it, you got it: ALR has a blog. Another Limited Rebellion the blog is officially online at http://www.alrdesign.com/blog. The ALR blog is not a replacement for the newsletter, but rather a daily companion featuring short items of interest (most of which due to time and space constraints won’t appear in the newsletter). The blog is edited by our own Noah Scalin as well as our friends: graphic designers Brad Choma and John Emerson, architect Christopher Humes, industrial designer Coryndon Luxmoore, and artist Mica Scalin. Be sure to check it out and let us know what you think.
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This past November Noah Scalin was an invited speaker at the What’s The Big Idea Conference 2005. Initiated by C3 (http://www.c3va.org) in Richmond, VA, the conference was designed to help “business creatives” and “creative businesses” learn about innovation and how ideas evolve into solutions.
[02] IDEAS + ACTION
What’s Victoria’s real secret? How about her habit of chomping through forests by sending out an estimated 1 million catalogs each day with little or no recycled paper content? ForestEthics’ lingerie and chainsaw campaign aimed at shaming Vicki into signing on to more ecologically sound industrial standards, is your chance to help make the secret into public knowledge. Get involved at http://victoriasdirtysecret.net/.
[03] WAR + PEACE
Put the faces to the numbers. Cryptome has compiled headshots of nearly half the American soldiers killed in combat so far in Iraq. It’s not all of them, but this respectful and sobering gallery provides plenty of perspective nonetheless. Visit http://cryptome.net/dead/dead-gallery.htm to see for yourself. Also worth reviewing is their calendar, which provides a visible timetable of the US casualties http://cryptome.org/mil-dead-iqw.htm.
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Bonds for peace. The Nonviolent Peace Force is selling tax-deductible peace bonds to fund its global conflict intervention teams most recently posted in Israel and Sri Lanka. The peace army uses techniques such as monitoring demonstrations and helping NGOs network with one another to wage peace. If your ready to invest in peace or would like to know more visit http://nvpf.org/np/english/pb/peacebonds.asp.html. (And for the creatively minded, there’s still time before the February 5th deadline, to submit your design for the new batch of bond certificates. See contest details at http://nvpf.org/np/english/welcome.asp.html.)
[04] DESIGN
New Orleans-based designers who lost everything from portfolios to clients in last year’s hurricane have more than FEMA to turn to. The AIGA and design firm The Chopping Block have put together Displaced Designer a web site where fellow designers can offer to lend a hand with extra equipment, web-hosting or just moral support. See how you can help (or be helped) at http://displaceddesigner.com/.
[05] ART
Unseen America is now on display. The project is an outgrowth of the cultural arm of Service Employees International Union chapter 1199, mostly health care workers, in New York. It tells the stories of the members’ lives through photographs they have taken and captioned themselves. See how the modern American worker lives, in the virtual gallery at http://www.bread-and-roses.com/galleryindex.html.
[06] STUDENTS
Free the ideas! The Free Culture student movement is bringing together fans of fair use and copyright reform on school campuses. Their site offers a how-to guide for starting your own campus chapter and other strategies for getting involved, each one designed to suit the amount of time you can commit. Check it out at http://freeculture.org/involved.php.
[07] ENVIRONMENT
LA to DC: 0.83 tons. Seattle to Uzbekistan: 2.28 tons. Now you can find out what tonnage of carbon dioxide a plane produces (anywhere British Airways flies) with the Climate Care calculator. It’s not often that a corporation gives you environmental activism ammunition against it, but the British Airways sponsored site is a product of Climate Care, which donates funds to organizations trying to offset the effects of green house gases. See what your holiday travel effects will be this year at http://www.climatecare.org/britishairways/index.cfm. (Thanks Sarah for passing this along).
[08] FOOD
Follow your food. Sounds like it should be a straightforward enough task, but when the Free Soil artists, using Italian oranges as a case-study, started asking simple questions about where their food had been before it arrived in the grocery store they found the answers weren’t as forthcoming as they had hoped. How long has this orange been off the tree? How did it get here? How much waste did it produce in the process? See what this international collective of artist-activists found and why those questions are so difficult to answer at http://www.free-soil.org/fruit/italy1.html. And be sure to check out the rest of their funky, fact-filled site for more information on food in the urban environment.
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Sustainability 90210. Urban agriculture takes to the suburbs and makes itself at home on the front lawn of a Los Angeles subdivision this spring with the second installment of the Edible Estates series. The goal is to reclaim front lawns from fertilizer and over-watering and instead put urban farming on display. Parsons Design professor Fritz Haeg heads up the project aimed at establishing nine model homes. See last year’s results (and maybe sign up your southwestern, homeowner friends) at http://www.edibleestates.org.
[09] MEDIA
The best piece of Election ’04 digital-ephemera may just be an eight-minute video made by three young hip-hop producers. They cross-pollinate the Rock the Vote message while bringing the Minnesota political elite a little funk. They even have footage of Walter Mondale working a turntable. No joke. Check it out along with the fifteen other social justice shorts that were part of the Fifth Annual Media That Matters Online Film Festival at http://mediathatmattersfest.org/mtm05/. And keep your eyes out for the 2006 winners, the submissions deadline was this month. (Thanks to John Emerson for showing us this one.)
[10] POLITICS
Red block, or blue block. Public disclosure is a good thing for democracy, but it’s even better when it comes with a global positioning system. Indiana University’s computer science program has taken campaign finance donations and mapped them out so they’re searchable by zip code. Find your neighborhood partisan breakdown at http://www.cs.indiana.edu/%7emarkane/i590/contributors.html.
[11] REFERENCE
Digging for Corporate dirt? You might want to start at Knowmore.org (http://knowmore.org/) a corporate database, which catalogs facts and profiles of the biggies like HP, Xerox and Nestle. The site even includes “praise” sections for areas where a corporation has improved or behaved conscientiously, like when Adidas pulled out of Burma in opposition to the government’s abuse of its citizens.
[12] SHOPPING
Some corporations are so big they can set their own rules. Sometimes that’s a good thing. The Human Rights Campaign Foundation has posted online report cards for companies, giving 100s to those that offer domestic partner benefits and have established anti-discrimination policies in their offices. See how your bank and grocery store stack up at http://www.hrc.org/buyersguide/buyersguide.htm
[13] LEXICON
Yomango-n.-Spanish origin, title of a radical social movement manifest in performative acts of shoplifting meant to highlight disjoints in the popular understandings of private vs. public property, stealing vs. buying, etc. A pun turning on the proprietary title, Mango, of a popular Latin American clothing store and grammatically modified to gloss to “I steal,” c.f. http://www.yomango.net/.
[14] NOSH
Strawberry Shortcake gets a reprieve. While a Dutch perfume company has managed to trademark the smell of fresh cut grass so that their tennis balls can carry the aroma, a French company was recently denied the right to trademark the smell of fresh strawberries. The court ruled against them because, according to the court’s smell expert, strawberries have five distinctly different odors depending on the variety of berry. Read the sordid details at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/4382308.stm
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The ALR Designletter is a semi-regular update on the activities at Another Limited Rebellion design, the world of socially conscious design, and beyond. You are on this list because you have worked with, contacted, or have a personal connection to ALR design. The names on this mailing list will never be sold or given away. If you no longer wish to be on this list, just respond with "REMOVE" in the subject section and there will be no hard feelings. Back issues can be found on our web site in the ISSUES section.
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