Academy

Walking With Sluts

Slutwalk Toronto happened today, as scheduled. Some 1500 women, men, and people of all gender expressions, converged in front of the Ontario Provincial Legislature at Queen’s Park, and marched peacefully to police headquarters on College St. This was in response to an incident on January 24th, when a Toronto Police spokeperson caused widespread outrage by suggesting that “women should avoid dressing like sluts in order not to be victimized”.

A group of Toronto women took to social media to organize a show of strength against the blaming of rape victims by the system.

photo by Woresh Mean

A couple of days ago, I conducted an e-mail interview with Sonya JF Barnett, one of the lead organizers of the event.

Q: How did you feel when you first heard the words “women should avoid dressing like sluts in order not to be victimized” coming from the Toronto Police?

A: Absolutely appalled. Even though I’m engaged in a sexually liberated and creative community that uses the modern definition of the word ‘slut’, hearing it slung from a police officer was very disheartening. I knew exactly what context he had used it in {as an epithet} and I realized that education in the use of the word was important for our protective services.

Q: How did the concept of Slutwalk come about? Were you influenced by any other movements?

A: SlutWalk was conceptualized as a reaction to the harshness of the word. If it was going to be slung out, we were going to sling it back, with our own spin. We weren’t influenced necessarily by specific movements, but by simple motivation to do something. Our team is a spirited bunch that are confident in standing up for what we believe in.

(Interview continued after the break)

About Fearless & Common Revolution: Alex Bogusky

It looks as if we are on a sure way to self-destruction. All the signs are pointing to it: climate change, environmental issues,  world hunger, water pollution, air pollution, insufficient drinking water for billions of people ... The list goes on and seems to grow longer every day.

At times even the most optimistic despair in light of all this. The major driving force of all these problems seems to be an almost ideological way of consumption, some already call ‚consumerism’.
We consume without thinking. We consume without a conscience.

Everybody is part of this, everybody consumes: food, clothing, devices and machines, energy … We use up a lot but don’t think much about it. We do not give a thought about what we consume, how we consume, if we do damage to ourselves, others, or the environment.
Are we really that unscrupulous or have we just become complacent, thinking we cannot change anything?

Alex Bogusky believes in the influence of the buyer, he sees revolutionary power with us, the shoppers. According to him, it is time to expect more from companies and brands.

He initiated the projects “FearLess” and “Common” to create a new agreement between consumers and corporations.

I spoke with Alex Bogusky about his projects, about the Fearless and the Common Consumer Revolution.

Emily Pilloton: Teaching design for change

Osocio visitors who are familiar with social design know Emily Pilloton. She is founder of Project H, the project to help develop effective design solutions for people who need it most.
In 2009 Emily also wrote Design Revolution, a book about 100-plus objects and systems designed to make people’s lives better.

Earlier this year she spoke at TEDGlobal about her move to rural Bertie County, in North Carolina USA. She’s teaching a design-build class that engages high schoolers’ minds and bodies while bringing smart design and new opportunities to the poorest county in the state.
She strongly believe in these 6 assumptions and practice them all in Bertie Country:

• Design through action
• Design with, not for
• Design systems, not stuff
• Document, share and measure
• Start locally, and scale globally
• Build

More about the project in this article from Emily Pilloton at design mind.

Related post: Hippo Roller by Project H Design

Free download: She Decides

Women make more than 80 percent of all health-related decisions for their families (this is a U.S. Stat). That goes for choosing a brand of children’s cold medicine to selecting a health insurance plan. Yet many health-related organizations miss the mark when it comes identifying them as a critical audience – or understanding what motivates them.

A new Fenton guide, She Decides: How to Reach the Most Important Audience for Your Health Campaign, is designed to help health leaders and communicators who are shaping policy or encouraging healthy behaviors harness the power of this core demographic.

The guide explores four tried-and-true marketing principles that effectively target women through Four C’s. The principles — Care, Connect, Cultivate and Control — drawn from Fenton’s analysis of market research, successful campaigns from both the corporate and nonprofits sectors, as well as the latest in brain science.

She Decides is available for download at: http://bit.ly/shedecides

Round Table: How a local campaign went global - Embrace Life

The most successful social campaign from this winter is definitely the Embrace Life campaign from the Sussex Safer Roads Partnership (SSRP). An road safety campaign without shocking images is pointing us to a new approach in communication.
The video already got more than 1.4 million views on YouTube. A fan made a group page on Facebook. And here on Osocio the pageviews are still coming in.
I got many questions about the campaign so I decided to do a co-creation interview with the help from our fans on Facebook and Linkedin.
Thanks Nedra, Tatjana, Reuben and Bas.

The man behind the campaign is Neil Hopkins, the Communications Manager from SSRP. Neil was very helpful with answering our questions. Read it after the break.

Round Table: Better World Advertising

“I started Better World Advertising (BWA) because I saw the power that social marketing could have in helping individuals, and society as whole, in solving issues that cause a lot of pain and suffering.  I still believe that getting information to people and delivering messages that motivate them to make better decisions has unlimited potential for good.”

As said by Les Pappas, President & Creative Director of San Fransisco and New York based social advertising and marketing agency Better World Advertising. Regular visitors of Osocio know the work of BWA very well. Time to talk with BWA. In this new chapter of the Round Table we spoke with Les Pappas and Emily Foran, Art Director at BWA. Again a collaboration with James David from The Groundswell Collective. This interview is crossposted at his great blog.

Book Review: Do Good Design

For the last six years I’ve taught a class on socially conscious design at Virginia Commonwealth University called Design Rebels. I created the class after teaching general design classes and seeing that no one was talking about the issues that drove me to start my on socially conscious design firm in 2001. Namely that design is an extremely powerful tool for affecting change in the world and designers need to be making conscious choices about how and for whom they do this work.

Through readings, discussions, presentations, and self-directed community projects, Design Rebels introduces the students to the range of gray areas they will encounter in their professional lives. But when I started the class the only book that really dealt with the related issues was Naomi Kline’s No Logo and it was not directed specifically towards designers. Lacking a proper textbook I created a course pack culled from dozens of books and articles that represented the range of issues that I wanted to class to discuss. And every year I have added and removed articles attempting to refine it into a functional handbook for the students, while keeping an eye out for something to fill the void.

Round Table: The Change

Branding is a thing typically left to corporations with the money to invest in coordinated marketing plans, but Jerry Stifelman and Sami Grover don’t believe it has to be that way.  The Change is the name of their firm, and they bring brand-building services to nonprofits and “good-for-the-world” businesses.

Visitors to the company website are immediately confronted with the motto: “The truth is your best tool.”  Making use of an organization’s conviction, personality, and sense of mission are key to brand-building in their view, which they conceive of as apolitical. 

James David from The Groundswell Collective asked me to collaborate doing a interview with Jerry and Sami from The Change. That gives Osocio the opportunity to start a new serie: Round table. We will do interviews on a irregular basis with all kind of do gooders. Straight from the war zone of the design industry.
Do you want to read more? See Groundswell Talks, the interview serie at the Groundswell blog.