WEEK 9: Globalisation

VIDEO
Naomi Klein - This Changes Everything
 

Naomi Klein discusses the recent history of the environmental movement, with particular reference to climate change, the timescale of required action, and how politics and economics in the 1980s effectively put the movement back 10-20 years. 
 
Alarm bells began to ring during the 1960s with the publication of Rachel Carson’s 'Silent Spring' (Carson, 1962) and in the 1970s with Limits to Growth (Meadows et al. 1972) as well as following the oil crisis during 1973. A growing environmental movement began to gain traction during the mid to late 1970s, with designers attempting to consider issues of resource depletion for the first time on any major scale.

However, the widespread dismissal of ‘hippy culture’, and the successful spinning of governments towards economy boosting and ‘business as usual’ served to hamper this movement significantly in the 1980s. Rather than transitioning towards using less energy, the message that ‘everything is fine – keep consuming’ was prominent, particularly during the Ronald Reagan era and stock market boom of the early 80s (prior to Black Monday in late 1987). Technology was still advancing in many domains (e.g. the first CDs produced in 1982), and this supported the myth of infinite growth – the idea that everything would continue to advance forever without consequence.
REFERENCES

• Belk, R., Ger, G., & Askegaard, S. (2003). The Fire of Desire: A Multisited Inquiry into Consumer Passion. Journal of Consumer Research, 30(3), 326–351. 
• Holt, D. (2002).  Why Do Brands Cause Trouble? A Dialectical Theory of Consumer Culture and Branding. Journal of Consumer Research, Inc., 29(1), 70–90.
• Klein, N. (2000). No logo: taking aim at the brand bullies. New York: Picador.
• Oppenheimer, D., & Frank, M. (2008). A rose in any other font would not smell as sweet: effects of perceptual fluency on categorization. Cognition, 106, 1178–1194.
• Poynor, R. (2009). Design is about democracy. In H. Clark & D. Brody (Eds.), Design studies: a reader (pp. 176–179). Oxford: Berg.
• Roberts, L. (2006). Good: an introduction to ethics in graphic design. Lausanne: AVA Publishing SA.