Civil society in Lebanon is blossoming. The number of registered NGOs has increased dramatically in recent years and as advocacy campaigns become more sophisticated, there is a growing appetite for learning new techniques for conveying ones messages. I was invited by the US State Department Speaker Specialist Program to work with the Social Media Exchange (SMEX) in Beirut to conduct a week of workshops for local and international NGO staff on visual thinking and information design for advocacy.

Building on my work and my 2008 booklet Visualizing Information for Advocacy: An Introduction to Information Design, I devised three day-long workshops which were announced as follows:

Continue reading "Information Design for Advocacy: Beirut Workshops" »

I don’t usually blog about events, but I like how the model here approaches something of an incubator:

“A three day hands-on workshop (5 - 8 December 2010, in Jordan), for activists and NGOs in the Arab region, working on women’s rights, to explore how visual techniques can strengthen campaigning. The workshop will give participants the skills to plan and strategise visual campaigns, think about how to use information effectively and gain hands-on skills to develop a campaign using information design, mapping and animation/imaging techniques....

We invite applications for those working on women’s rights issues, in particular violence against women, the impact and role of women in political and violent conflict and women’s participation and leadership in public life. We also welcome communications specialists, designers, artists, illustrators, or technologists working with mapping techniques or data who can support women’s rights activists. 35 to 40 applicants will be selected to attend the launch workshop in Jordan in December. Participants will have to bring with them a campaign idea which will be developed over the course of three days. Of these, 10 campaigns will be provided with small-scale follow up support and mentoring to implement the visualisation element of their campaign in early 2011.”

They also have a project blog highlighting examples of visualisations. Applications to attend the workshop are due October 14, 2010.

Beirut: Mapping Security is an ongoing research work and a newspaper publication edited by Mona Fawaz, Ahmad Gharbieh and Mona Harb, developed and assembled within the international network DIWAN.

“Armed conflict normalizes the presence of visible so-called security measures in the form of barricades, road blocks or army personnel in the everyday life of the city. This is perhaps one of the legacies of the Lebanese civil war (1975–1990), the Israeli occupation of parts of South Lebanon (since 1978), and the ongoing Arab Israeli conflict that have all marked Lebanon’s recent history. In Beirut security associated with these conflicts, whether in the form of protecting key political figures and/or preventing inter-communal violence, has been a latent aspect of the cityscape which heavily affects people’s everyday practices and movements. The recent development of a network of high-end shopping and entertainment facilities in Beirut has established a new layer of security, this time intended to protect the rich.

Our aim in this project was to initiate a public debate about the normalization of security as an element of urban governance and how this new narrative of threats and fear profoundly alters everyday practices.”

A few more images after the jump. (via)

Continue reading "Beirut: Mapping Security" »

I missed this when it first hit the web, but wow, that’s a striking presentation.

The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine published this graphic during the 2007 debate on the US Farm Bill.

I’ve added three new items to my growing list of design manifestos, all from 2010.

• January 2010: The Role of Design in the 21st Century, a manifesto and vision for the future of Danish design from the multidisciplinary Danish Design Association.
  
  
• August 2010: The Obstructionist Manifesto. Mark Goldman writes against harmful, heavy-handed, insider-driven city planning.
  
  
• September 2010: Anti-Design Festival Manifesto. Tomorrow the Anti Design Festival kicks off in the UK as a counter-event to the London Design Festival, both a protest against its “pretty commerciality” and attempt to “unlock creative fires and ideas, exploring spaces hitherto deemed out-of-bounds by a purely commercial criteria.”

Back to school gear seen in YRB. (via)

In July 2009, I noted a study concluding that Brazil’s telenovelas have inspired both a drop in birth rate and rise in divorce. Via the Communication Initiative Network, I found a a few other items on soap operas and public health:

• A German report looks at TV soap operas in Kyrgyzstan, the Dominican Republic, and Côte d’Ivoire as vehicles for HIV/AIDS education.
  
  
• A radio soap opera in Vietnam reached millions of farmers changing their attitudes and practices managing rice pests, fertilisers, and seeds.
  
  
• Authors of a 2006 paper on a radio soap opera in Bihar, India document how it spurred fundamental, sustainable shifts in people’s values and beliefs.
  
  
• A May 2008 Master’s thesis looks at the effect of two Ethiopian radio dramas on attitutde towards reproductive health and spousal abuse.
  
  
• Fans of a radio drama in Sudan learned about, or were reinforced in, the importance of abandoning female circumcision, giving girls more control of their reproductive health, having a small family, and staying away from drugs and alcohol.

And though I couldn’t find a study on its impact, straphangers in New York City may remember Julio and Marisol: Decision, an episodic comic strip soap opera dealing with AIDS that ran in English and Spanish in NYC subway cars from 1989 through 2001.

Wow, it’s been a while since my last post. If and when I do retire this space, I dream of converting it into more of a database of ideas than a reverse-chronological history of my random walks.

For instance, I like what’s happening at spatialagency.net, a database of architectural practices engaged with social and political concerns. The last few years have seen growing number of projects cataloging design and architecture for good, but I think this one has a nice historical breadth and expansive perspective of what constitutes a design practice. I’m not totally down with the “acting on behalf of-” line, but I like the emphasis on context:

Spatial Agency is an ongoing research project that aims to shift the of focus of architectural discourse from one that is centred around the design (= building) and making (= technology) of buildings to one where architecture is understood as a situated and embedded praxis conscious of and working with its social, economic and political context.

In the spirit of Cedric Price the project started with the belief that a building is not necessarily the best solution to an architectural problem. Architecture, and it is easy to forget this, is about a lot more than just objects in space. The project attempts to uncover a second history of architecture, one that looks at other ways that people have operated beyond the building, working on behalf of others as spatial agents. Buildings are of course not excluded, but the project expands its reach to cover all aspects of spatial production - from publications to pedagogy, activism to enabling.

Continue reading "Space Agents" »

The folks at cognitivemedia took 10 minutes of David Harvey’s marxist analysis of the financial crisis and created this entertaining information visualization. Harvey’s full lecture is worth watching, too.