Ecologically speaking, we are sawing the branch on which we sit. According to a WWF study, humanity is such a strain on the global ecosystem so that we would need the equivalent of 1.5 earths to meet our needs in a truly sustainable manner. The consequences, for the habitats of animals and plants, are dramatic.
If humanity lives on as today, we will need two planets by 2030 to meet our needs for food, water and energy. By 2050 we will need three. These are the findings of the “Living Planet Report 2012”, a two-year study on the health of the world, which the WWF has submitted.
According to its per capita calculations, an American consumes an average of four planets worth of resources, a German 2.5 and an Indonesian only about 0.7. In other words, the wealthiest countries consume on average three times as much as countries with average levels of prosperity and five times as much as countries with low levels of prosperity.
The ten countries with the largest ecological footprint per capita are Qatar, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Denmark, the United States, Belgium, Australia, Canada, the Netherlands and Ireland. Germany is ranked 30th. (more after video break)
What do you think of when you think of San Francisco? The “city by the bay” that is full of ex-hippies, steep hills, and… the best Jesuit education in the country?
Well, the University of San Francisco would like to have you think so. Earlier this month they unveiled their first ever visibility campaign, strewing slogans around the city that “emphasize USF’s commitment to academic excellence, a culture of service, and a passion for social justice, as well as its deep ties to the city of San Francisco.”
Translation: Inside jokes. Taglines like the one below that references Haight Ashbury, Mark Zuckerberg, and the difficulty of getting a seat on Muni or finding parking in North Beach.
Reading Rainbow was an American children’s television series on national public television that encouraged reading among children. Hosted by well-known Roots and Star Trek: The Next Generation actor LeVar Burton, it aired on PBS from June 6, 1983 until November 10, 2006.
In this video (from last spring) a cause-driven hip-hop collective in New Orleans known as 2-Cent remixed and rapped over the original Reading Rainbow theme to call a new generation of kids to the joys of reading:
The video is backed by these unsettling statistics from their community:
- Only one-third of all students entering high school are proficient in reading – only about 15 percent of African American students, and 17 percent of Hispanic students. (NAEP Reading_2009)
- Two thirds of eighth graders do not read at grade level (proficient). (NAEP Reading_2009)
- There is a significant economic reading gap for students: only 16 percent of Urban low-income, at-risk students are proficient in reading, compared to 42 percent middle income students.
2-Cent’s LISTEN! literacy event happened last May, but as often happens on the internet, the video has recently found new life as a viral. And as a youth-friendly PSA promoting reading, it’s quite fun and inspiring.
Is this an ad? And if so, is it effective? I don’t care. For me it’s a big wow. I love this trip.
It is about what reading a book can do with your mind.
I want something similar as a campaign video for ourselves…
Great work from agency String Theory and the sound designers from Antfood. They made it for Goodbooks International, an online bookseller from New Zealand. Goodbooks passes all of its profits through to Oxfam.
Antfood:
What you will see is an entirely fictional and completely unendorsed representation. [Though we humbly suggest Hunter S. Thompson might have liked it.] We are devoted fans paying homage. No disrespect is intended.
A nice idea from agency Carmichael Lynch and the Denver Museum of Nature & Science.
The Denver Museum of Nature & Science is one of America’s leading history and science museums. To support their latest exhibit, Lizards & Snakes, Carmichael Lynch created the Tweetaconda, a snake that grows with the help of your tweets. The goal is to make the Tweetaconda the world’s longest snake (a record currently held by a snake found in Celebes, Indonesia). The web site is designed to reach a length of more than 32.75 feet.
The goal of the site is to drive traffic to the exhibit and increase the Museum’s digital footprint by engaging its 25,000+social media followers. “We want the community to keep learning beyond the walls of the Museum,” said Amanda Bennett, director of marketing for the Museum.
Everyone double checks things sometimes. I always check three times if I’ve locked the door when I leave home… But People with OCD feel the need to check things repeatedly or perform routines and rituals over and over. OCD is the fourth most common mental disorder, and is diagnosed nearly as often as asthma and diabetes mellitus.
This video is a case study for a small but very smart campaign about OCD made by McCann Digital Israel. The challenge was to get people more educated about OCD and its symptoms.
(more after the video)
A well cared campaign from Colorado USA named Beforeplay.org, a public education campaign aimed at reducing unintended pregnancy among young adults.
This statewide effort is targeted to the 18- to 29-year-old age group and seeks to initiate more conversation about sexual health and family planning through an interactive website, social media, events, and statewide advertising.
The privately-funded campaign was developed by Vermilion Design + Interactive for the Colorado Initiative to Reduce Unintended Pregnancy and is supported by the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment.
About 40% of Colorado pregnancies are unintended, and the rate is even higher among young adults in their twenties, a segment that is often overlooked. Lack of knowledge about effective contraception, being uninsured, finding affordable health care, or being ambivalent about having children can all lead to unintended pregnancy.
Real stories introduction ‘Who do you talk to about sexual health?’:
Americans for Grammar wants to clean up the English language. As they told Ads of The World,
“The objective of this project was to create a movement for all Americans to stand up and take control of (and call out) a growing problem: Poor grammar. We see it everyday: In Facebook posts, in emails, memos…and graffiti tags on the street. The print ads drive to a blog where people can post their own found mis-tags, as well as donate money to an urban language and grammar school. We used grammatically incorrect graffiti as our example in print ads because they are the most visible example out in public. The print ads drive to a blog, Americans for Grammar.org, that is a growing collective of misspelled and grammatically incorrect tags around the country that encourages Americans that find misspellings and post pictures themselves.”
Okay, so their grammar isn’t schoolbook either, but that’s what the internet has done to literacy.
I was happy to see that the campaign and blog focus on misspellings in graffiti, rather than harping on more subjective (and culturally relative) points of grammar such as vernacular, slang, jargon, or even changing standards.
Another thing I like about this campaign is that it gives me the excuse to share this web comic by System 13:
Teachers are currently represented by uninspiring, childish visual imagery. Images like apples, chalkboards, and the ABCs neither revere the profession of teaching nor do justice to the intellectual and creative development teachers help guide in students of all ages.
We began with a simple premise, that education is the key to human progress, therefore teaching is among the most important professions for humanity. Our new visual vocabulary should capture the excitement and magic of activating the potential that is innate in every student. It should celebrate the process of developing ideas, reflect the collaborative nature of teaching and pay homage to existing visual tools used in teaching.
Our solution is all about connecting the dots. Visual maps, like teachers, help learners brainstorm ideas, reveal relationships, explain processes, tell stories and much more. The visual language of these connected dots can be found in toys, in letter tracing, in classroom brainstorms, on the whiteboards of innovators, in maps, in molecular structures and beyond.
Connecting the dots allows us to create a boundless visual language that celebrates teaching and learning in a way we can all be proud of.
The concept is very simplistic and abstract, but I have to admit it grows on me the more different ways I see it used. I am married to a teacher, and I am constantly disappointed by her profession’s cliché and self-serving ad campaigns. This, instead, is something with potential to change the conversation. And all based on the essential nature of the verb “Teach”.
I am mother and mother’s love is unconditional. Like any other mother, I think about the future of this world and in what kind of world my son grows up. If there is an elementary power to make this world a better place, then it is feasible with the power of a mother. This beautiful campaign for clean air with celebrity faces is an Intiative of the mothers. These mothers share a very good and necessary idea: to create a better world for our own children. I believe that if the mothers would take over the power of this world, we would not have today’s problems.
All mothers (and Fathers!) should get together and fight for childrens right to have clean air. Air pollution is not just dirty. It is toxic.
Actress and mother Julianne Moore released a this video calling on parents to join the fight against toxic air pollution. In the video, which endorses a nonpartisan grassroots group called the Moms Clean Air Force, Moore appears along with the heroine of her popular children’s books, Freckleface Strawberry.
Moms are becoming a powerful force in American politics. They are telling Washington that they will not allow their children’s health to be compromised by dirty fossil fuel power plants, the single largest source of pollution in the U.S. The Moms Clean Air Force is a growing community of tens of thousands of moms— from all across the political spectrum and all across the country—uniting to make their voices heard to protect their children’s health. “Clean air should be above politics,” Moore said. “The discussion about regulations to protect our air has gotten so polarized that we have forgotten an important thing: We all breathe the same air. And all our children suffer because of pollution. We don’t have to choose between a healthy economy and a healthy environment. We can have both. We can have what’s best for all our children.”
President Richard Nixon signed the Clean Air Act into law in 1970 with overwhelming support from Democrats and Republicans; however, the law is now under dangerous political attack. The new mercury and air toxics standards signed in December, after 21 years of planning, are already under political attack, with some politicians in Congress and lobbyists for the utility and coal industries calling to annul it or defund the Environmental Protection Agency.
Responding to this threat, Moms Clean Air Force is bringing parents together in support of a simple idea: That every child has the right to breathe clean air.
Moore became interested in MCAF after Dominique Browning, the group’s Co-Founder and Senior Director and former Editor-in-Chief of House & Garden, contacted her last summer. “I wrote to Julianne, knowing she is a protective mom, asking her if she would help us spread the word about the connection between toxic—and invisible—air pollution and children’s health, and she responded immediately,” Browning said. “Julianne joins a Force of thousands of mothers with real concerns about mercury poisoning, asthma, behavioral issues, and host of other problems associated with polluted air. Together we are determined to clear the air and protect the health of our children and loved ones.”
Moms Clean Air Force is a coalition of mothers including Blythe Danner, Laila Ali, and Jessica Capshaw, and partner groups such as Healthy Child, Healthy World, Asthma Moms, Latism (Latinos in Social Media), Me and my 1000 Girlfriends, Alliance of Nurses for a Healthy Environment (ANHE), Care2, BlogHer, Clever Girls Collective, and Me and My 1000 Girlfriends. source: Julianne Moore: Tell Washington to support clean air for our kids.
More about the Mission of “Moms Clean Air Force” you can read after the video ..
Human trafficking – it is the new slave trade, an action many of us thought be extinct after the US Civil War. But it is worse than ever, not least because many of the victims hand themselves over to get out of economic and political peril. They want to…
I recently had the privilege of being invited to speak and participate in the 2012 Design Ethos Conference/Do-ference at Savannah College of Art and Design. The creator of the conference, Scott Boylston, is a longtime friend in the relatively small socially conscious design community and I was delighted that…
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