The design of injustice

However, lest we're feeling the least bit smug, taking a leaf out of the sketchpad of this morning's keynote speaker, Ivan Chermayeff, will be a humbling experience – 50 years in the acclaimed New York outfit Chermayeff & Geismar which offer a classic graphic design legacy upon which watertight corporate identities have been built. Such American empires as Mobil, NBC, PBS, PanAm, National Geographic, Xerox, The Smithsonian Institute, The Guggenheim, The Lincoln Centre, The American Film Institute and NY University to name just a few, showing graphic design as the manifestation of the very things its citizens hold dear.

And what with 2010 looming, the evidence in favor of design being a key component of successful civic initiatives should be becoming increasingly clear – the Design Indaba has become a thankfest to the New York designers, who annually demonstrate their take on the power of design as the thinking person's democratic tool.

Designing new models

Bosnian designer Mirko Ilic, who works in New York, showed amazing examples from around the world, which illustrate the power of graphic design to expose injustice. From a pen made out of a bullet shells from Sarajevo to lapel pins featuring the America flag draped over a coffin, graphic design is the new public voice.

This kind of social and environmental righteousness is also finding its way into the branding ethos of corporate giants such as Phillips – its Columbian creative director, Oscar Pena, showing advertising, marketing and design initiatives moving towards the ideals of adding value to both customer and environment.

Blowing existing models for design outfits out of the water are the new guard – Airside from London www.airside.co.uk, from Tokyo Hideki Indaba http://hidekiinaba.com, KarlssonWilker from New York and Marije Vogelzang www.proefamsterdam.nl from Holland – all obliterating any traditional borders between materials, performance art, media, experiential interfaces, production techniques and iconography to create fresh genres of engagement that encourage target audiences to keep thinking and feeling in the required new, socially responsible ways.

It might be fair to say that a global design ethos in 2008 is based on three business objectives:

• To have fun.
  
• To make money.
  
• And to act sustainably.

Doing all of these will ensure successful commercial ventures in forthcoming decades – it's that simple.

Design Indaba continues at the Cape Town International Convention Centre today, Thursday 28 February.

For more:

• [Design Indaba] The disease of marketing-driven design [blog post]
  
• [Design Indaba: Food, glorious food [blog post]
  
• [Design Indaba]: See Louise run. See Louise type [blog post]
  
• Design Indaba galleries