Staying Relevant

From the SF Chronicle article How to create a market for vaccines by Tom Kalil & Bruce Mehlman:

"Every year, more than 6 million people die from AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria alone. Today, there are no effective vaccines for these and many other diseases of the poor. That's because low-income countries have average health budgets of $17 to $36 per person, and can only afford to spend pennies per dose on vaccines. As a result, pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies have little incentive to develop these life-saving vaccines. In fact, only 10 percent of the world's health research and development is devoted to diseases that afflict 90 percent of the world's population."

Yes, I ripped this from BoingBoing, but I have a slightly more skeptical take on the article by Tom Kalil & Bruce Mehlman. First of all, let me say that both Kalil and Mehlman are brilliant people and their proposal is an innovative one that goes right to the policy level and may have a chance of actually working.

However, I do have a few questions:

1) Who is going to make the massive initial investment?
2) Can this long-term investment be politically palatable to politicians who are interested in short-term results?
3) If the project is funded, how do you deliver vaccines to people in need? For example, free US food aid is being sold at a premium on the Palestinian streets, or perhaps widespread corruption ala Oil for Food.
4) What is the incentive for countries to not treat this program as a crutch or handout?

This market-centered idea is a good one, especially with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's incredible amount of funding to create these markets (HINT, HINT!). Kalil & Mehlman's plan has a real chance of saving millions of lives, but there still needs the creative community's involvement. Creative types need to help in building public and political support, developing people-centered methods of delivery for vaccines, increasing education and awareness about health among poor communities, and empowering people to change their living situations through communication & design.

Tom Kalil, Bruce Mehlman, Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, Bruce Mau, Designers Without Borders - have your people call their people...please.

Posted by glen! at 06:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (82) | TrackBacks (0)

I just visited the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA) website today and noticed this blurb on the front page. I was so excited to see that this national body was actually working on the issue of disaster planning, rather than just disaster response through the arts.

"AIGA Disaster Relief Task Force
The AIGA Disaster Relief Task for is working to support Displaced Designer, extending the reach and effectiveness of this initiative so that no designer is left behind in the wake of a disaster. The task force is working to develop a framework that chapters can use to prepare for disasters in the future." [emphasis added]

I followed the link for more on the article and was slightly dissapointed when it took me to the AIGA Displaced Designer information page, which has been up since the Hurricane. Now, maybe I read a little too much into the blurb, and I don't mean to dismiss the Displaced Designer project (which is awesome), but I was expecting and hoping that the AIGA would realize its own ability for collaboration beyond that to raise money. Money is important, but if its put into use with bad ideas and bad planning (read, FEMA) then all the sacrifice, generosity, and good will put forth is lost. Organizations like the AIGA have an unbelievable network of creative people and business people, and yet their social initiatives only encourage designers to contribute posters to be shown on the AIGA website. How does this provide meaningful change?

There is an inequality of wealth and action here. It's time to start collaborating.

Posted by glen! at 11:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (398) | TrackBacks (0)

Continuing from posts found here and here

"For years, I’ve wondered how most of the world ignored the Holocaust even though they knew terrible crimes were being committed against the innocent. How could people be so callous and unresponsive? I have contempt for such people. And then I realized with a chill that our time has been marked by events of incomprehensible brutality and evil, and I have done almost nothing. ... I am embarrassed by the possibility that another generation will point at us and say, 'How could they have been so callous and unresponsive?'”

Milton Glaser

The more we learn and model how cultures respond to emotion during disaster, the more we can effectively help those in need. Why emotion and culture? Simple: Are people rational when disaster strikes? No, of course not. Yet for some reason, the planning for disaster response expects the opposite. The Katrina disaster put this error in planning in sharp relief – the emergency planners did not account for much of the behavior that happened before, during, and after the event.

They did not understand the culture – A culture in which some people had cars and places to go while others had only their houses, if anything; a culture where communities rely heavily on word-of-mouth, where rumors travel quickly. They also did not understand the phenomenal impact of emotion on this culture. The media understood it, and exploited it to boost ratings (I found it so odd that news crews – vans, helicopters, cameras, lighting, etc. – could get in and out of NOLA with ease, but emergency personnel could not) The emergency planners also did not account for the effect of emotion on their personnel either. Fear and hysteria became so out of control that police officers left their posts, first-responders simply did not go in to some areas of the city, and security personnel were told to shoot-to-kill and were hyped-up for some kind of Mad Max shootout. I remember watching soldiers delivering food with their guns up, ready to fire, and Lieutenant General Russel Honoré, who DID understand the culture but was brought in to the situation late, was yelling at them to “put those damn guns down!”

This is why the disaster after the disaster happened. The people involved in planning expected that certain things, like everyone evacuating and/or taking shelter, would simply happen. Then, when these expected things did not happen, people on both sides – citizens in need of help, and those in positions to help them – were gripped with emotion (fear & hysteria) which was spread by the culture and the media.

In the most basic terms…this was a communication problem. And how do we solve the problem? By being able to understand cultures and emotions. So, what kind of person knows about communication and its relationship with culture and emotion? That’s right, designers…I’m looking directly at you.

Posted by glen! at 02:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

I'm finding more intersections every day! Emergent Aesthetics + operat!ve disaster response. This one rocks my socks...

"Agent-based conception of disaster events: modelling human actors as rule-driven, simultaneous interactions within networks, as both affecting environments and expressing rules differently as environments change."

Emergence Notes (via Easily Distracted)
_
* I will update this post with my reactions and thoughts in a bit...I'm still on a conceptual convergence high.

Continue reading "Woah!" »

Posted by glen! at 09:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (445) | TrackBacks (0)

operat!ve is a way of doing things that transforms creative capital into meaningful action.

( IDENTIFY (( COLLABORATE )) IMPLEMENT )

operat!ve strategy
operat!ve process
operat!ve brands

Although similar to Design for the World and Massive Change, the operat!ve strategy is focused on engaging the American creative community into acheivable changes and outcomes. operat!ve is intent on expanding the creative process beyond the 11x17 poster, which has sadly become the most prevalent creative response to disasters and social issues.

The operat!ve strategy provides a base for creative action to take place within American, capitalist society.

Creativity is a market force.

Posted by glen! at 03:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (46) | TrackBacks (0)