Debbie Millman on branding and the climate emergency
Debbie Millman is the Chair of the world’s first Masters in Branding at School of Visual Arts in New York City, the host of Design Matters, one of the first and longest running podcasts, and the Editorial Director of PrintMag.com. Her seventh book, Why Design Matters: Conversations with the World’s Most Creative People, will be published this fall.
Here, she explores the role of brands and branding in the context of the climate emergency, and revisits Ken Garland’s design manifesto in the search for a way forward.
Humans are, more than ever before in our history, prisoners of design and branding. Our world is so saturated with branded products, branded people and branded experiences it can be difficult to separate our beliefs and behaviours from the very things that we make and design. Consequently, branding has become one of the most important and fiercely debated markers in culture today.
For those of us that work in the fields of design and branding, we are simultaneously citizens, consumers and professionals. How can we reconcile the notion that we create brands and consume them, often with opposing priorities and goals? Can we engage in both without doing an injustice to ourselves, to our clients, to consumers and to the world?
Earth Speakr, AKQA Copenhagen
These days it’s hard to say, and it depends on where you look for answers. I went for a walk in a local supermarket and saw shallots in plastic mesh and bananas packaged in styrofoam. I watched videos of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. I read about how our world is now producing more than 3.5 million tons of garbage a day – and how that figure is growing. I felt outrage and fear. And I was embarrassed for both my own contributions to these horrific scenarios and those of my profession.
How did we get here? I went back to reread the design manifesto First Things First to try and find a pathway. Originally written in 1964 by British designer Ken Garland and 21 of his design colleagues, the manifesto boldly encouraged students, designers and teachers to reconsider their opportunities outside “the noise and high-pitched scream of consumer selling” in favour of applying their talent to promote education, culture and a greater awareness of the world. This was not intended to advocate the abolition of contemporary design; it was a call to re-evaluate the profession’s priorities. Rather than apply design skills to selling “cat food, stomach powders, detergent, hair restorer, striped toothpaste, aftershave lotion, before-shave lotion, slimming diets, fattening diets, deodorants, fizzy water, cigarettes, roll-ons, pull-ons and slip-ons,” the authors hoped that society would tire of “gimmick merchants, status salesmen and hidden persuaders,” and designers would respond by using their “skills for worthwhile purposes.”
“These products should be designed by honest and passionate designers along with standards that hold both the designers and marketers accountable for what they create.”
In 2000, not content with the level of improvement since 1964, and “the explosive growth of global commercial culture”, Ken Garland renewed and rewrote the manifesto along with 33 design colleagues, some of whom had signed the first manifesto and others not yet born when the original manifesto was published. They did this with the “expectation that no more decades will pass before it is taken to heart.” They reiterated that designers should not only apply their talent to sell “dog biscuits, designer coffee, diamonds, instant film, french fries, detergents, hair gel, cigarettes, credit cards, sneakers, light beer, and heavy-duty recreational vehicles,” designers were encouraged to “inject passion, truth and reality into their design work.”
The need for both manifestos was clear, but to me, an inherent dichotomy was buried in both. You see, there will always be a need to design dog biscuits and hair gel and sneakers. I don’t believe these items should be relegated to the “gimmick merchants and hidden persuaders.” These products should be designed by honest and passionate designers along with standards that hold both the designers and marketers accountable for what they create. These products should include transparent benchmarks to ensure they are not doing harm both to the planet and to the consumers who consume them. I believe it’s easy to call for changes in the way we work. It’s a lot harder to actually manifest the changes we call for.
Fortunately, design organisations are finally recognising this. The addition of the D&AD Impact Pencil is a good start. Products like the 2030 Calculator and Olafur Eliasson’s Earth Speakr are just two examples of products helping to measure and inspire the change that both manifestos first called for, and they have been justly rewarded by D&AD judges.
The 2030 Calculator, FARM Stockholm
Design has the power to inspire humanity to think and grow, to teach us what we don’t know and to inform and remind us of what is important. What we need to be consciously, continually creating are alternatives to the current way we create those designs and the methodologies in which we bring brands to the market.
“The condition of branding has always reflected the condition of our culture and that culture now includes a climate crisis”
Every design we create now is cinematic because it gets swept up into a swift sequence of designs that precede and follow it. The condition of branding has always reflected the condition of our culture and that culture now includes a climate crisis, systemic housing and food insecurity and the widest disparity in income equality in history. No individual design or brand can be excluded from the assessment of this condition. Fruit containers and ballot forms and bottled beverages and shallot packaging and propaganda posters all need to be approached with the same rigour and transparency. If not, we segregate our power to communicate and translate what is happening in the world around us and nothing will change. No matter how fearful or dismayed or outraged we might be given the conditions we have imprisoned ourselves in, it does offer opportunities. We – the designers and the marketers and the makers and the markers – need only invent them.