The Beijing Olympics are in full swing, and as the fever of national pride and the glory of breaking records sweeps through the world, Jonathan Barnbrook is asking designers to raise awareness about Tibet. Barnbrook, a well-known British graphic designer and typographer, has created a site called Remember Tibet with designer Pedro Inoue. The site encourages people to remember Tibet’s struggle for independence while the entire world has their eyes on the undemocratic government of China. The Olympics have brought to light many of China’s pollution problems as well as their not-so-stellar human rights record. But, instead of improving their human rights conditions as a result of being awarded the Olympics, China has actually made basic freedoms less available in its goal to create ‘stability’ and ‘harmony’ before the games.

The site was created in an effort to support the independence of Tibet through peaceful, non-violent resistance. Artists and designers are asked to contribute visual projects that raise awareness, but the site isn’t simply for people who want to express their discontent with the issue. Barnbrook says, “I don’t really want people to get hung up on the idea that this can change anything in isolation, it can’t. These works are just one tool of many which people will use to keep Tibet as a central issue in mainstream politics, as that is the only way things will change.” The creative arts have always played a role in forcing issues into the mainstream political agenda, and designers play an especially important role because we know how to put the pieces together in an effective way. It’s our job to bring visuals into the world that catch people’s eye. Why not use our skills to turn the focus towards Tibet. Thanks to the Olympics, half our job is done- the whole world is already looking that way.

www.remembertibet.org
www.barnbrook.net

There’s a mystery I’m trying to solve. It started with a swarm of people in a room, all abuzz about sustainability and its many guises. I overheard somebody talking about a particularly profound example of conspicuous conservation that seemed almost unbelievable to me, and I made a mental note to research it when I was next united with my laptop. My google skills are usually creepily good, but I was unable to track down anything definitive about this particular claim, so I remain in a state of skeptical curiosity, and am therefore reaching out into the no-doubt-vast network of sustainability-savvy folks who read this blog, in hopes that somebody somewhere will be able to provide an answer.

The mystery at hand: Are there people in Japan who put fake solar panels on their houses, just for the ecochicness of it all? Or is this just an urban legend, perhaps created by a clever Chindogu and a telephone gamey misunderstanding?

On the face of it, it just seems wrong that such a thing would exist. Yes, solar panels are so expensive that they’ve come to be seen as a luxury item in Japan, and yes, we know that people want to appear so green these days that 9 out of 10 people in the UK admit to telling little green lies to appear greener than they really are, but I simply cannot fathom the depravity of somebody who would actually go to the trouble of purchasing and installing fake solar panels. It would be like driving around in a fake Prius.

So you can see why I’m determined to find out whether these panels are real or not. If so, it would mean that conspicuous conservation has veered into new and disturbing territory. Our own research at egg has delved into the gap between green beliefs and green actions, but this data point, if true, would introduce a new category: the eco-fraud. It’s one thing for companies to greenwash, but quite another for individuals to go so far out of their way to blatantly misrepresent their energy sources. (Yes, I suppose one could make the tortured argument that fake panels will ultimately promote sales of real ones, but I’m not going there right now.)

So here’s what I found so far: a googlesearch for “fake solar panels” japan yields a paltry 28 hits. But no definitive answers. A handful of blog posts reference a now-defunct link to a TV show that apparently mentioned the fake panels. One guy thinks they’d make a great biz idea, but seems to think he came up with it. I uncovered no primary sources, no news articles, no images. So I expanded my search a bit, and learned that Japan makes 50% of the real solar panels in the world, that they’ve got big plans for solar (30% of homes by 2030), and that 80% of solar panel sales in Japan are made door-to-door. This last article was most revealing — it discussed how the panels are indeed considered a luxury item, but it had a captioned photograph of a standard-looking roof, saying Japanese prefer unobtrusive solar panals like these roof tiles. So at this point, I’m thoroughly confused.

I know that there are plenty of deeper mysteries out there, but I’m still rather curious about this one. So have at it: ask around, trawl the wayback machine, hop a carbon-offset flight to Tokyo. If you’re the first person who solves this little mystery, I’ll send you a special gift.

This handy chart from Futerra, a nifty communications shop in England. It identifies how to spot, prevent and avoid greenwash for consumers, companies and agencies. Futerra’s new Greenwash Guide analyses the current state of greenwash and what’s being done about it. You can also find guidelines for companies and agencies on how to prevent greenwash, and a ‘spotters guide’ for consumers to help avoid it.

So the question we ask ourselves is how much of what we are seeing out there is bad marketing, how much is lazy marketing, and how much is deceptive marketing? Most likely, there is a fair share of marketers who have jumped on the green bandwagon and who are spinning green pitches unduly and even unjustifiably, but what about those who have something to say and rely on an agency that just doesn’t get it? They rely on the hackneyed images, colors, and ideas that are the low hanging fruit of green communications strategies and executions. For example, I recall a Toyota ad where they used #3 here with the daisy flourishing from the tailpipe for Prius. And yet, Prius has a great story to tell–technologically speaking with direct benefits to the consumer. Sometimes, it isn’t even laziness, but simply a lack of understanding of the challenges in how to reach the consumer regarding these issues. I recall seeing GE’s first Ecomagination print ads that used Audubon prints in a very clever way, but in the end, the execution served the agency’s portfolio better than it did the initiative, and so they changed to a smarter, more informationally driven look and feel that explained the environmentally friendly technologies GE has been working on.

The challenge facing communications professionals will be to tell the stories that carry information and help educate the consumer on what makes something green and why it matters to them. But it most likely will not be colored green. And it will not involve a tree.

The quintessential, perfectly shaped, ribbed leaf. Almost any tree. Polar bears, glaciers, treefrogs, and bamboo. Illustrations of leafy vines, branches, stalks and roots. The classic dandelion image with seedlings a-blowin’. Of course, the omnipresent windmill as icon, regardless of the fact that the sponsoring brand has nothing to do with wind. And we cannot leave out the classic that started the category and continues to live strong to this day: a pair of tender hands cupping a baby earth globe.

And these days, globes of all shapes and sizes are selling like hotcakes at Getty Images and other stock photo sites. When I got my Green Festival brochure in the mail recently, I wondered what the meaning might be behind the woman on the cover who is playfully batting the globe around as if it were a volleyball—perhaps that the powerful human race is not taking this stuff seriously enough, and that our future might be in the balance? Hmmm. But then why is she smiling?

These are the images of green. We have all seen them now, and they are multiplying like the green tendrils of the invasive English ivy that have taken over my backyard. The big question for those of us in the business of communications around brands that are talking about sustainbility, is what works and what doesn’t? And what is best for the cause? It’s big business obviously, or Getty wouldn’t be selling their secret sauce for 400 quid.

Of course, for colors, just about every shade of Pantone green has been used to sell green. When egg started in 2003, we even created a Conscious Consumer swatchbook with seven shades of green—from darkest Off The Power Grid Green, to lightest Red State Green—to playfully denote the various segments of the green consumer landscape based on a US Green Consumer survey that we conducted. Somehow, at the time, it seemed warranted in this manner and for our specific purpose.

Obviously, the more we see the same images and colors used over and over again to communicate issues around sustainability, the less meaning and differentiation there is across the board. And who really wants a brand that looks like all the others? Within the Green Festival program itself, there are fewer than 5% of all ads that chose NOT to use the color green in their layout. Good for them. Bad for the movement, and bad for the communicators out there. We can do better than this.

As the green “movement” moves ahead, for it to become a success, we need to move away from these clichéd communications solutions. Such expected images and colors have become suspect in the selling of green. Consumers are having a hard enough time on their own without us marketing types muddying the waters. While they are desiring green solutions, they have a hard time understanding it, finding it, and embracing it. Because of the rampant nature of this cavalier and listless approach used to communicate green, consumers have come to question all things green, and we are now in the cynical, distrustful phase of the game. Greenwashing has become the standard.

But people are actually smarter than we think. They want to know what this all means and they are willing to listen, so long as we try a little harder. And brands that understand this stand to gain green ground.

The story of green is so much richer, and more colorful than “green”. Green is about innovation, technology, intelligence, and exciting solutions which conjure up all kinds of great images. As has always been the case in our business, the unexpected is far more interesting than the expected. And as John Grant thankfully proclaims in his good new book, the Green Marketing Manifesto, “Green marketing is about making breakthrough green stuff seem normal—and not making normal stuff seem green.”

We can do better. We need to do better.

Cultural trends tend to follow a certain pattern. A meme or a look or a movement will percolate through the culture, at first gradually, then infectiously fast, and then it will saturate the public consciousness so thoroughly that it will no longer satisfy those on the bleeding edge, who will initiate a radical shift and begin the cycle anew. And the interesting thing about trends, as opposed to fads, is that they reflect larger underlying cultural forces and tend to affect multiple domains. Thus, we witness transition times like the 1980s, when the US began to emerge from recession, and earth tones, bellbottoms, and back-to-the-landers gave way to neon, massive shoulderpads, McMansions, and big hair.

Right now, we’re going through another cultural shift, heralded in by the faltering climate, the faltering economy, and the profound reassessment of values that began in 2001 after the towers fell and the dotcom bubble burst. And as 2001-2007 saw the revival of green, from a fringe concern to a mainstream trend, 2008 appears to be witnessing the beginnings of an interesting shift around the color wheel — to blue. Which makes all of us at egg very happy, because ‘green’ was never a broad enough term to describe what we’re about, but we found ourselves using it anyhow, often when talking to people who have no idea what sustainability means (which is most people).

Whence blue? Two words: climate change. If green was about hugging trees and not paving paradise, blue is about the fact that the entire planetary balance is shifting, fast. When climate change finally begins to scare mainstream people in a Y2K problem or duck and cover kind of way, we can expect to see a lot more blue everywhere we look. We’re only witnessing the first glimmerings of the blue shift right now, but I predict that it will eventually come to subsume green in describing the cultural shift that’s been happening since the early naughties. Green was a step in the right direction, but it always had too much baggage. Blue is neutral, it’s soothing, it’s the color of clean water and air (ever-scarcer resources), and it also happens to be the color that people worldwide choose most frequently when asked to name a color. I think it’s got good staying power, as far as these things go. And don’t worry — the sensibilities underlying green won’t go away. They’ll just expand

Ready to jump on the blue bandwagon? Pantone has beaten you to it — they’ve declared Blue Iris the color of 2008, because it “satisfies the need for reassurance in a complex world, while adding a hint of mystery and excitement.” A complex world indeed. A google search reveals 9680 hits for “blue is the new green,” and I expect that this number will be growing exponentially. Gradually but gradually, all the common leitmotifs of “green” ads — leaves, seedlings, and of course, the ubiquitous color itself, will give way to a newer bluer look. And this blue period isn’t just about imagery; we’re already seeing it percolate into names and concepts: Mercedes has dubbed its newest eco-technology Bluetec, France has been using the Pavillon Blue as an eco-label to indicate eco-towns and ports, our client Gerdling/Edlen has named their latest eco-building Cyan, there’s a UK sustainability consulting firm named Level Blue, and the list goes on and on. Yeah, blue may have corporate associations, but a fresh new shade, especially complemented by some vibrant gold or orange hues, will be in no danger of looking workaday.

The thing that makes me happiest about this shift is that I won’t have to keep reading articles about what green is not. It seems that every article I read nowadays assures me that green is not about Birkenstocks or granola or Ralph Nader or frumpy hemp clothing or tree-huggers or patchouli or dubious hygeine practices. In short, people are still terrified of hippies and hardcore environmentalists, especially those people who are still stuck in the 80s conspicuous-consumption mentality. And yeah, the back-to-the-land movement is on its way back, and the hardcore hippie look will eventually undergo a full-on revival, as the current porn-plastic-botox-airbrushed-metrosexual aesthetic reaches a zenith and the utterly natural begins to look dramatically different and fresh. But at this moment, green still has plenty of limitations. And I welcome the influx of blue. It won’t happen overnight (hell, there are still plenty of people who covet McMansions), but it’ll happen.

As for me, I’ve already moved on.

After a very energizing weekend with the folks at LinkTV in San Francisco, we stopped by Compostmodern 08 on the way to the airport to get wound up even a little more. It was a great line up for this event’s 4th year, where “brilliant ideas, practical solutions, drama, inspiration, eye candy and some tough questions” all converge in consideration of a transition to a sustainable society.

Our green guy emcee and man of many green properties Joel Makower kicked off the gathering with a framing of the green business timeline, and then handed the mike over to the always entertaining Alex Steffen from World Changing, whose powerful, pointed Powerpoint usually gets the crowd thoroughly roused. The day was filled with leading designers presenting case studies on their work in design toward a less unsustainable world. There was Mark Galbraith of cool green clothing company NAU, Jeff Walker of VSA Partners, who made a solid enough pitch of (his) work with GE on Ecomagination, Valerie Casey of IDEO, Jane Savage from Nike who we shared a panel with at Discover Brilliant in Seattle last year, and Scott Stowell of Open Studios whose work on Good magazine is better than good. Adam Werbach of Walmart “Personal Sustainability Project” fame keynoted out the affair to end on an upbeat we-can-do-it-one-small-step-at-a-time note (which ironically was quite the opposite message coming from Alex at the outset, who made it clear what he felt about individuals’ small efforts to address the planet’s problems).

Here’s to AIGA in the Bay Area for a very good event. Keep up the good work Phil, Gaby, Marc, and Jeff. And bring it to Seattle, please.

The web is abuzz with talk of Amazon’s new e-book reader, the Kindle, which will launch tomorrow at a swanky gala at the W Hotel in NYC, timed to coincide with the finest media coverage that money can buy. Some say it’s a dreadful bit of industrial design destined for the dustbins of failed electronic devices, others say it will define the future of reading. Personally, I’m obsessed with its ecological impact.

Here’s what I’m trying to figure out: is the Kindle a vast improvement over the current dead-trees approach to publishing? At first glance, it seems like it definitely is. There are around 3 billion books sold worldwide each year, which adds up to an awful lot of trees being cut down, shipped off for processing, ground into pulp, made into paper, shipped off to printing houses, printed with toxic inks, glued with toxic glues, shipped to distributors, shipped to vendors, and finally shipped to recipients.

With the Kindle, you can summon a book directly through the aether. Just click a button, and the magic of the internet and cellular telephony will deliver it to you in seconds. Carbon footprint: zero. But it’s not really zero, of course. First, all the materials for the device have to be individually fabricated and/or sourced. This includes metals (likely toxic), plastics (ditto), and perhaps glass and ceramic (perhaps less toxic). Then the devices need to be assembled, shipped to distributors, and then shipped to recipients, who will then discover that, unlike dead-tree books, these Kindles take power to operate. Carbon footprint? Unknown. And then there’s the matter of planned obsolescence and the dirty little problem of consumer electronic waste. Starting to long for dead trees?

Of course, this all begs some deeper questions: can we fabricate a book out of entirely recycled and non-toxic materials? Sure. And could we do the same thing with the Kindle? Certainly. And we could even power it with renewable energy — one could do worse than trekking into the wilderness with a solar backpack and a slim little Kindle filled with hundreds of books. Assuming all recycled non-toxic materials for both, I’m thinking that the Kindle might just come out way ahead in the ecological race. And with humankind’s current technophilia, I’m suspecting that even a non-eco Kindle (or its inevitable sexier kin) will eventually displace the analog book.

But deeper still, what happens when climate change reaches a tipping point (looking closer and closer these days), and Amazon becomes just another jungle? E-ink may be as easy on the eyes as paper, but in the end, it may be far more ephemeral.

This past weekend, we attended the 2007 Net Impact Conference at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, TN to discuss and discover what the next generation of MBA students will do to make our world more sustainable.

This year’s conference, the world’s largest ever gathering of socially responsible graduate business students and young professionals, attested to the dramatically increased interest among leading corporations in corporate social responsibility with more than 30 major organizations, an unprecedented number for this fast-growing event, pledging their support and sponsorship for the conference. We saw flagship logos from the likes of Dow, Dupont, Starbucks, McDonalds and Microsoft purposefully displayed throughout the conference, and Dow even sent their Chairman & CEO, Chad Holliday, down to keynote the conference. There was no mistaking that the era of CSR has arrived in full force, and it’s no surprise considering the following stats:

• 79% of MBA’s indicated they would seek employment that is socially responsible in the course of their careers, and 59% said they would do so immediately following business school.
• 89% said business professionals should take social and environmental impacts into account when making business decisions.
• 81% agreed with a statement that businesses should work toward the betterment of society, although only 18% believed most corporations are currently working toward that goal.

We found the opening remarks by Patagonia’s founder Yvon Chouinard quite refreshing in a creatively pessimistic way. Interviewed by Andy Savitz, author of The Triple Bottom Line, Yvon pulled no punches in his brutally realistic outlook of the status quo, indicating with abrupt hand gestures the dissonance between projected population growth on the one hand, and non-renewable natural resources and ecosystem stability on the other.

Along with an overabundance of fantastic panels, covering everything from The International Business Challenge: Balancing your company’s identity with local culture to Making Waves: How social entrepreneurs bring about change, egg’s own Marty McDonald was a featured speaker on the subject of Green Branding: Engaging the Consumer, along with Nick Aster of TreeHugger.com, Perry Goldschein of SRB Marketing, Inc. and Brian LaValle of EcoMedia.

Happy takeaways: the conference’s use of the old-school Hatch Show Print shop for all of their design and printing, and a few memorable foodie visits including the very well-known Loveless Cafe, and the considerably less well-known Smokin’ Ed’s Barbecue.