Final project

Brief

An estimated 70 million sharks are slaughtered each year to satisfy the nation’s taste for shark fin soup. This soup is a popular item of Chinese cuisine usually served at special occasions such as weddings and banquets, or as a luxury item in Chinese culture. As their income levels have increased, Chinese communities around the world are showing a greater demand for shark fin. This increase in demand, combined with the importance of this top predator in the ocean that damaging the ocean’s food chain.

TV chef Gordon Ramsay, after trying a spoonful, he said: “What does it taste of? It’s really bizarre, because it actually tastes of nothing. The bland fin doesn’t deliver. They eat it because it is a symbol of status. It is f***ing mad.”

Target audience

Shark's fin soup consumer, especially, chinese communities around the world.

Schedule



References








Research

In spite of their sharp teeth and vicious reputations, sharks now have more to fear from us than we do from them. Man is killing over 70 million sharks every year and driving them to the brink of extinction. And it's mainly to supply the key ingredient for one dish - shark fin soup. It's an expensive dish produced all Asia and sold in Chinese restaurants around the world, even in the UK.

Sharks are rarely caught for their meat - only their lucrative fins, which sell for up to £200 per kilo. In order to maximise profits, fishermen remove fins from a shark at sea and then throw its body back into the water. This way the bulky, unprofitable body does not take up valuable cargo space on board. Often still alive, the mutilated shark is unable to swim and slowly sinks to the bottom of the sea where it bleeds to death, drowns, or is eaten by other predators. Shark finning is widespread and is unmanaged, unmonitored and illegal in many seas. Fins are usually dried or frozen to be transported to the Asian markets - dominated by Hong Kong, followed by Taiwan and Singapore.



Shark fin soup

Shark fin soup has been eaten in China for centuries and was traditionally a special celebratory dish that was eaten rarely. In Communist times it was frowned upon for being decadent. The shark fins are slow cooked until the fin separates into needles of cartilage that look like clear noodles. This gelatinous delicacy ironically carries no actual taste of shark but tastes of the broth it is cooked in.
In modern China and across Asia the rising numbers of wealthy middle classes consider this elite dish a status symbol. With all its traditional associations with wealth and health, shark fin soup is now a must-have at weddings, business dinners and banquets. In the last 15 years numbers of sharks killed for their fins has escalated to up to 70 million per year and a number of shark populations have fallen by over 90%. Forty per cent of shark species are threatened with extinction and twenty species are critically endangered.



Eco-disaster

Sharks are particularly vulnerable to over-fishing because they mature slowly and have few young and so can’t recover their numbers fast enough. They are also critically important for healthy oceans.
Sharks are apex predators sitting at the top of the marine food chain and they play a crucial role in maintaining the delicate balance of the eco-system. Without them other species can start to dominate causing problems all along the chain. In waters where shark have almost been eliminated there have been reports of reductions in shellfish and water quality as well as an increase in algae. The demand for shark fins in Asia is spreading finning and the resultant eco-disaster across the world.

Better laws and more enforcement needed

There is no international ban on shark finning, but patchy laws and varying enforcement. Environmental campaigners have been working hard to raise awareness of the environmental impact of eating shark fin and have encouraged the tightening of finning laws.
A third of European sharks are threatened with extinction and the EU banned shark finning in 2003. The regulation has long been criticised though for being full of loopholes. In December 2010 the EU Parliament gave its support to strengthening the ban, a crucial step in the process of changing the law to only allow shark fins to be landed when they are attached to the shark. See Global Ocean's petition to find out more and add your support to the campaign.
The illicit trading is a dark affair and difficult to tackle. After being seen to be prying into a shark fin operation when filming in Costa Rica, Gordon Ramsay was threatened and doused in petrol. The Costa Rican police later advised Ramsay and his crew to leave the country.



End of the line

"With three to four times more shark fins passing through the Hong Kong shark fin market than can be accounted for by FAO fisheries statistics it is clear that despite many countries adopting finning bans - finning activities are still rife," said Ali Hood, Director of Conservation for the Shark Trust. "To prevent abuse of any finning ban the simplest option is to land sharks with their fins naturally attached."


Pin-pointing UK businesses that profit on dead sharks



Mapping

Book Design

Critical Debates in Design - task 8 : Sustainable design

What are your opinions on sustainable design?
Sustainable design is a great kind of design meant to yield products that are made only of renewable resources. It is a vision for a better life as it provides many benefits whether in terms of economic, social, or environmental. Sustainable design typically has lower costs for energy, water, maintenance/repair, or other operating expenses. It also affects on health, comfort, satisfaction, and quality of life which can be measured in terms of individual life expectancy and state of wellness. This includes such issues as environmental quality, aesthetics, educational and recreational opportunities, accessibility and quality of public services, and even psychological characteristics such as community satisfaction and pride. Furthermore, products made though sustainable design are intended not to seriously impact the environment either when they are being created or when they are being used. These products are also often designed to allow the users to feel more connected or to relate more closely to the natural environment. Therefore, it can be seen that sustainable design totally helps save the societies and the world.

Critical Debates in Design - task 7 : Thou shalt not advertise…

What do you consider to be the role of advertising?
Advertising is often considered as the senior element of marketing communications. When thinking about advertising, the term “media” from a broad perspective is needed to consider. It does not only include traditional mass media sources such as television, radio, newspapers, and magazines but also includes outdoor advertising (billboards and transit vehicles), direct mail, and the Internet.
What role advertising should play will be affected by the overall intentions of the advertising plan although it is generally agreed that advertising is better at achieving some things rather than others. It is considered, for example, to be capable of reaching large audiences and being effective and cost efficient at achieving high level of awareness, creating brand differentiation, informing and reminding, and developing and maintaining brands. In addition, as the nature of marketplace is highly competitive, advertising is important in terms of being used to maintain competitive advantage of the brand. This can encourage consumers to include the brand as a possible purchase along with others that they usually buy, leading to many benefits for the brand and company whether in terms of brand share or mind share.

Discuss the ethics of advertising.
Ethical issues in advertising to be considered are;
-Deceptive/misleading advertising, including puffery that amount to soft core deception: Positioning a product using misleading or exaggerated claims not only can be ethically unsound but creates customer confusion, negative publicity and can result in legal or regulatory censure.
-Advertising that manipulates behaviour (i.e. advertising as hidden persuader that creates false needs leading to unnecessary/harmful demand)
-Advertising to children
However, it is extreme difficult in defining what is, and what is not ethical especially when the notion of social acceptability changes over time and varies from one culture or country to another.
Moreover, as advertising becomes more and more fragmented, as a way of fighting through the clutter, creative people will push the boundaries, taking risks, more and more to get an advertising noticed. To them it is creativity that counts and they make the rules and will not held back by convention.

What do you consider to be good advertising and bad?
In my opinion, the impact of advertising, which can occur in just a short time and convince consumers to buy the product, is the most effective criteria to consider whether the advertising is good or bad. Advertising should be designed to have a lasting psychological effect on audiences so they will remember the product or brand. It gives the consumers something of value, whether that is entertainment or information, and creates a positive association with the product or service advertised. This can also help advertising produce the greatest results for a given expenditure.

Research “first things first” a manifesto by Ken Garland 1964 and the renewal of the manifesto in 2000.
First Things First a manifesto 1964
The original First Things First manifesto was published by 22 signatories in: Design, the Architects‘ Journal, the SIA Journal, Ark, Modern Publicity, The Guardian, April 1964. It was renewed in 2000

We, the undersigned, are graphic designers, photographers and students who have been brought up in a world in which the techniques and apparatus of advertising have persistently been presented to us as the most lucrative, effective and desirable means of using our talents. We have been bombarded with publications devoted to this belief, applauding the work of those who have flogged their skill and imagination to sell such things as: cat food, stomach powders, detergent, hair restorer, striped toothpaste, aftershave lotion, beforeshave lotion, slimming diets, fattening diets, deodorants, fizzy water, cigarettes, roll-ons, pull-ons and slip-ons.
By far the greatest effort of those working in the advertising industry are wasted on these trivial purposes, which contribute little or nothing to our national prosperity.
In common with an increasing number of the general public, we have reached a saturation point at which the high pitched scream of consumer selling is no more than sheer noise. We think that there are other things more worth using our skill and experience on. There are signs for streets and buildings, books and periodicals, catalogues, instructional manuals, industrial photography, educational aids, films, television features, scientific and industrial publications and all the other media through which we promote our trade, our education, our culture and our greater awareness of the world.
We do not advocate the abolition of high pressure consumer advertising: this is not feasible. Nor do we want to take any of the fun out of life. But we are proposing a reversal of priorities in favour of the more useful and more lasting forms of communication. We hope that our society will tire of gimmick merchants, status salesmen and hidden persuaders, and that the prior call on our skills will be for worthwhile purposes. With this in mind we propose to share our experience and opinions, and to make them available to colleagues, students and others who may be interested.
signed:
Edward Wright, Geoffrey White, William Slack, Caroline Rawlence, Ian McLaren, Sam Lambert, Ivor Kamlish, Gerald Jones, Bernard Higton, Brian Grimbly, John Garner, Ken Garland, Anthony Froshaug, Robin Fior, Germano Facetti, Ivan Dodd, Harriet Crowder, Anthony Clift, Gerry Cinamon, Robert Chapman, Ray Carpenter, Ken Briggs

First Things First Manifesto 2000
The First things first 2000 manifesto was an updated version of the earlier First things first 1964 Manifesto published in 2000 by some of the leading lights of the graphic design, artistic and visual arts community. It was republished by Emigre, Eye and other important graphic design magazines and has stirred controversy (again) in Graphic design.

We, the undersigned, are graphic designers, art directors and visual communicators who have been raised in a world in which the techniques and apparatus of advertising have persistently been presented to us as the most lucrative, effective and desirable use of our talents. Many design teachers and mentors promote this belief; the market rewards it; a tide of books and publications reinforces it.
Encouraged in this direction, designers then apply their skill and imagination to sell dog biscuits, designer coffee, diamonds, detergents, hair gel, cigarettes, credit cards, sneakers, butt toners, light beer and heavy-duty recreational vehicles. Commercial work has always paid the bills, but many graphic designers have now let it become, in large measure, what graphic designers do. This, in turn, is how the world perceives design. The profession‘s time and energy is used up manufacturing demand for things that are inessential at best.
Many of us have grown increasingly uncomfortable with this view of design. Designers who devote their efforts primarily to advertising, marketing and brand development are supporting, and implicitly endorsing, a mental environment so saturated with commercial messages that it is changing the very way citizen-consumers speak, think, feel, respond and interact. To some extent we are all helping draft a reductive and immeasurably harmful code of public discourse.
There are pursuits more worthy of our problem-solving skills. Unprecedented environmental, social and cultural crises demand our attention. Many cultural interventions, social marketing campaigns, books, magazines, exhibitions, educational tools, television programs, films, charitable causes and other information design projects urgently require our expertise and help.
We propose a reversal of priorities in favor of more useful, lasting and democratic forms of communication - a mindshift away from product marketing and toward the exploration and production of a new kind of meaning. The scope of debate is shrinking; it must expand. Consumerism is running uncontested; it must be challenged by other perspectives expressed, in part, through the visual languages and resources of design.
In 1964, 22 visual communicators signed the original call for our skills to be put to worthwhile use. With the ex- plosive growth of global commercial culture, their message has only grown more urgent. Today, we renew their manifesto in expectation that no more decades will pass before it is taken to heart.
Jonathan Barnbrook, Nick Bell, Andrew Blauvelt, Hans Bockting, Irma Boom, Sheila Levrant de Bretteville, Max Bruinsma, Si‰n Cook, Linda van Deursen, Chris Dixon, William Drenttel, Gert Dumbar, Simon Esterson, Vince Frost, Ken Garland, Milton Glaser, Jessica Helfand, Steven Heller, Andrew Howard, Tibor Kalman, Jeffery Keedy, Zuzana Licko, Ellen Lupton, Katherine McCoy, Armand Mevis, J. Abbott Miller, Rick Poynor, Lucienne Roberts, Erik Spiekermann, Jan van Toorn, Teal Triggs, Rudy VanderLans, Bob Wilkinson
(Reference: Gestaltung and Zürich, 2005. Available from )

Critical Debates in Design - task 6 : Product packaging

Packaging design serves to protect, store and transport goods and is the means by which the marketing strategy for a consumer brand is visually communicated. However, packaging is an environmental problem because the materials that make it are often from limited resources (like oil which is used to make plastic, or trees that are turned into cardboard and sometimes not replaced with new trees), and once it’s used, packaging tends to end up on landfill sites rather than being recycled.

Packaging designers are the design professionals that understand how to connect form and structure, materials, color, imagery, typography and ancillary design elements with product information to create a marketable design for a consumer product.


Anyhow, it’s important for designer to look at the impact that company’s packaging products have on the planet by using less material, shipping with smaller packaging, being free of many toxic substances, and being as energy efficient and recyclable as possible. With every production process, the progress should be done toward minimizing our environmental impact (Green packaging).

Due to the essential of environmental concern, most company consider in reducing the impact their products have on the environment by measuring company's Carbon footprint, which is, a measure of the impact our activities have on the environment, and in particular climate change. It relates to the amount of greenhouse gases produced in our day-to-day lives through burning fossil fuels for electricity, heating and transportation etc.


Furthermore, one of the important informations provided on packaging is Traffic light labelling (on food and drink labels), which is a starting point to help consumers to see how healthy or unhealthy their food or drink is. The traffic light colours tell consumers whether the product has low, medium or high amounts of fat, saturated fat, sugars and salt.

Regarding packaging and labelling, under the Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations any descriptions of goods you trade must be accurate - it's a criminal offence if they're not.

This applies to both the writing and the illustrations on your packaging and labelling. Among other things, you must not be misleading about:
• quantity or size
• composition
• method of manufacture
• place and date of manufacture
• fitness for stated purpose
• endorsements by people or organisations
The law applies to you if you sell goods to the public or manufacture goods.

Origin marking
In most circumstances, there is no legal requirement in the UK or anywhere else in the European Union for goods to be marked with an indication of their origin-but you can do so if you wish. However, if you do, the origin markings must be accurate or you will be committing a criminal offence under the Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations.

Pricing
It is also an offence to give consumers a misleading price indication about goods and services, including immoveable property, rights and obligations.

Business for design II

Critical Debates in Design - task 5 : Ethics

Tibor Kalman
He was an influential American graphic designer of Hungarian origin, well-known for his work as editor-in-chief of Colors magazine.

Colors Magazine: Established in 1991 under the editorship of Tibor Kalman, with the premise that diversity is positive and all cultures have equal value, COLORS is part of the publishing activity of Fabrica, Benetton's communication research centre. COLORS' editorial offices are located in Fabrica's architectural complex, which was restored and enlarged by Japanese architect Tadao Ando. COLORS has a network of collaborators in the four corners of the Earth.



Stefan Sagmeister
He’s Stefan Sagmeister, a superhero to many in the design world (even though he prefers not to be seen this way). He can convince clients to take creative risks that leave the rest of us awestruck. He employs guts in his work and gets endless publicity for his most shocking and provocative designs. Young designers everywhere revere him.



But with great power comes great responsibility, and he is attempting to bring a sense of humanity back to design and remind us of our individual power as designers—all by asking us one simple question: Can design touch someone’s heart? To get things rolling, he has turned the question into a course he is teaching at design schools in New York City and Berlin, including the School of Visual Arts (SVA), the Cooper Union and the Universität der Küenste.

Stefan’s question has inspired me to take a closer look not only at Stefan as a thoughtful designer and teacher, but at what my own design work is accomplishing (or not accomplishing).