Headstretcher

The ten keys to responsible communication

2012-01-17T14:21:00.000Z

At Creative Concern we've been busy setting up a European network of like-minded agencies called 'Do Not Smile'; we've got good friends and colleagues now in Paris, Bonn and Brussels and we're actively scoping out more creative agencies with a penchant for sustainability so that we can swell our ranks even further.

As well as sharing ideas and insights, the network means we can collaboratively pitch for international accounts knowing that we have the reach needed to work alongside the bigger multinational agencies.

Anyway - to the point of this posting. I wanted to share one of the many useful nuggets of learning that I've gleaned from our continental friends: the notion of responsible communications. Established by a book of the same name and by a set of guidelines adopted by the French Advertisers Association, responsible communications is all about honesty, transparency and an end to 'greenwashing' particularly on the part of larger, more polluting corporations.

There are ten keys to the concept, scribble them down and apply them next time you're planning a campaign:

Make sure that the represented behaviour is responsible and ethical.
Use an appropriate register and do not exaggerate.
Be honest.
Use arguments that are placed in contact and reflect reality.
Use vocabulary that is clear, precise and easy to understand.
Provide sufficient, transparent and easy-to-access information.
Make sure that what you say is based on reliable, verifiable data.
Use creative/design elements that have a direct, logical connection with the reality being discussed.
Follow the riles of rising logos, acronyms, symbols, trademarks and labels.
Involve service providers such as agencies, copywriters and photographers.

So there you have it... ten steps to more ethical, responsible communications.

The eleventh step? Well you could always join our network.

(With thanks to Gildas and the comrades at Sidiese.)

fab // graphene

2011-10-03T11:10:00.000+01:00

Am more than a little obsessed about the opportunities offered by graphene and Manchester's very own Nobel prize laureates. Now it looks like they may be the anchor of a global R&D hub which I suspect will also be dead important for Manchester's low carbon stuff. Anyway here's the story:

£50m boost for University of Manchester's Nobel prize-winning work on 'wonder material' graphene | Manchester Evening News - menmedia.co.uk

#OCCUPYWALLSTREET

2011-09-17T09:23:00.002+01:00

Greater Manchester signs off 48% carbon target

2011-08-01T10:45:00.001+01:00

Imagine that - kicking off a blog posting with a headline that references percentages, targets and an admin process for signing off a strategy; stay awake at the back there!

It's pretty fundamental this one; Britain's second city (Greater Manchester to you and I) has signed off a climate change strategy that sets a pretty ambitious target of 48% carbon reductions by 2020 against a baseline level of 1990.

It doesn't stop there. The strategy covers all the bases, including mitigation, adaptation, green jobs and the need for a cultural shift (low carbon hegemony anyone?). The other cheeky bit lurking under the tarpaulin is an emerging measure for the thrillingly entitled 'Scope 3' emissions. To anyone who doesn't doze off at night with a copy of 'advanced carbon footprinting' clutched to their bosom, these are the emissions that we usually try and ignore: the stuff we buy, the flights we take, the food we eat.

Here's the first glimpse of our 'consumption-based' carbon footprint

The strategy as presented to the Greater Manchester Combined Authority can be downloaded from here. It's still in a stripped down, word-processed, no-frills format, but is well worth having a gander at. The headlines, in essence, are:

- A rapid transition to a low carbon economy

- Collective carbon emissions reduced by 48%

- Be prepared for and actively adapting to a rapidly changing climate

- ‘Carbon literacy’ will have become embedded into the culture of organisations, lifestyles and behaviours

There's some progress already, with a number of low carbon buildings, a domestic retrofit programme, emerging heat network plans, a green deal project and the introduction of an electric car charging scheme already well underway, but it's only the start.

The other issue for me is that it is a solid step towards getting all ten Greater Manchester authorities onto the same track on climate change. I chair the steering group for Manchester's own plan - 'A Certain Future' - and I know that we could achieve so much more if we all worked together, better, to cut carbon and adapt for the changes that lie ahead.

Headlands to headspace

2011-08-01T10:13:00.002+01:00

Earlier this year we (Creative Concern) were lucky enough to work with the Morecambe Bay Partnership and our good friend and collaborator James Rebanks on the Partnership's Heritage Lottery Fund bid 'Headlands to Headspace'. Today it's been officially announced that they've won the bid and have been allocated £2 million through the Landscape Partnership programme.

The aim of the scheme is to help local people come together and maximise the opportunity offered by the inspiring views, landscape features, heritage and wildlife of the Bay. This will include projects to celebrate the Bay's unique cultural heritage and stunning landscapes, restore and reconnect wildlife habitats, protect the tidal islands, develop the railway stations as hubs to access key sites and support support education projects and oral history looking at the traditions of fishing in the Bay.

It's this last bit - the area's social history - that unearthed a real gem for me, an old bit of documentary footage of shrimpers roaring across the Bay in the 1930s, their carts (and horses) at some points almost completely engulfed by the sea; amazing.

Morecambe Bay is rich in heritage of this sort, but it's got a slightly left field side to it too. There's something about the patterns of the sand, the windswept trees, the slightly unexpected art projects and the toppled, incongruous gun emplacements that makes the whole package totally distinctive. The best bet is to get up there and check it out for yourself, starting with a cocktail in the Midland Hotel would be a good idea.

Humphrey Head by Jon Sparks

Finally, the Headlands to Headspace project wouldn't have come off unless it had been steered by the awesome force of nature that is the Partnership's co-ordinator, Susannah Bleakley, or if it hadn't been given a glorious shove by the likes of the Mersey Basin Campaign, Regional Parks Exchange and the Northwest Regional Development Agency.

It's projects like this that should remind us that when it comes to big, connected and beautiful landscapes, regions work; someone might like to mention this to Mr Pickles.

Vertical farming in Manchester

2011-07-17T17:58:00.000+01:00

I've just emerged from chairing the sold-out Vertical Farm event at Manchester International Festival. We officially unveiled the 'Alpha Farm' project which will seek to transform a disused office block in Wythenshawe into a fully-functioning vertical farm.

Supremely exciting and there are loads more details on our Alpha Farm blog.

The star turn today though, was the amazing and inspiring Dr. Dickson Despommier, the godfather of Vertical Farming and the author of a seminal tome on the very subject. He was brilliant - and braved a very windy and rainy Manchester to be with us from NYC.

Here's his presentation which will give you a little glimpse into what you missed if you couldn't make it:

Mcr_Despommier

And we've made a little film about the whole Alpha Farm thing:

The future of everything...

2011-04-18T17:14:00.001+01:00

Have promised our good chums at FutureEverything that I'd post up what they've got planned this year onto the blog. Alongside our vertical farm plans with Manchester International Festival, and the opening of the Brockholes 'unreserved reserve', this is the 'other' high point of the year.

FutureEverything, 11 – 14th May 2011

Arriving in Manchester in May for its sixteenth year, FutureEverything transforms 4 Piccadilly Place into its Conference venue and Art Hub. Meanwhile Umbro Design Studio in the Northern Quarter becomes the ‘living lab’, mixing up live music DJs, workshops and music events across the city, from concert halls to backstreet gems.

Conference

The FutureEverything conference leads our Ideas strand, where visionary speakers explore the interface between technology, society and culture. The FutureEverything Conference continues to bring you the latest debate and visionary ideas around New Mobilities, Open Data and Emotional Computing, brought to you by forward thinkers such as Meg Pickard, Bill Thompson, Kars Alfrink and Sue Thomas. With over 30 events across the city, Showcase is the place to discover the sounds and stars of tomorrow, with emerging talent from across the city and beyond.

Music

The music strand profiles musical pioneers and ground-breaking talent. Acts confirmed to play the festival include Steve Reich, Rob da Bank, Beach House, Warpaint, 65daysofstatic, Gang Gang Dance, Black Heart Procession, Das Racist, The Radio Dept., Star Slinger, Dark Dark Dark plus many more.

Arts

 The art programme features world premieres and urban interventions, including new work by Me and The Machine.

Main exhibition

The Data Dimension, features artists exploring the flourishing field of data visualisation. Manchester citizens are invited to participate in the OurCity mass participate experiment by Adam Nieman. And the most inspirational digital innovations are celebrated in the FutureEverything Award 2011. 

For more information click here.

Yuri Gagarin in Manchester

2011-04-12T08:04:00.001+01:00

It’s fifty years since a plucky and rather diminutive Yuri Gagarin shot into space, cooped up in a contraption with the computing power of your average remote control, and what I really love is the fact that during his victory tour, he made a major splash in Manchester, only his second stop outside the Soviet Bloc, following the flight into space.

The stop-off had a lot to do with the fact that Yuri was a former foundry worker, and so the Amalgamated Union of Foundry Workers in Manchester decided to invite the now world-famous cosmonaut to come and visit Manchester in July 1951.

As he emerged from his RAF plane at Ringway Airport, it was raining (I know, I know) and he apparently asked for the car’s top to be rolled down, saying: “If all those people are getting wet to welcome me, surely the least I can do is get wet too!”

He was pretty much mobbed on his arrival by a crowd that included the then ‘Mayor of Stretford’. He then drove through Moss Side to the Union’s HQ, where his car was reported showered with ‘red roses, poppies and carnations’ and, this is my favourite bit, was presented with a specially designed medal that to my eye could have been the early work of Comrade Saville, if he’d been around at the time. It included the slogan ‘Together Moulding a Better World'.

He also stopped at Metros works in Trafford Park and was lunched by the great and the good at Manchester Town Hall, where he met Sir Bernard Lovell, who said: “He will become one of the historic figures in civilisation because he is the first man to live in a new environment. There are lots of things I would like to ask him, but probably he would not answer them.”

There are two pieces of press copy surrounding the visit that I like. First of all the Manchester Evening News which wrote how ‘Major Gagarin is above the tedious enmities of politics. His was a human achievement; a victory for man's spirit and courage’, but there was an even lovelier line in Pravda, which makes me a little weepy: 'Manchester's toiling masses accorded Major Gagarin a reception unsurpassed in its cordiality. Never over the past many tens of years has Manchester met anybody with such an embrace’.

Manchester's Vertical Farm

2011-03-17T15:40:00.001Z

Goodness me it's been hard keeping this one quiet. We've been very, very lucky at Creative Concern HQ to be working with the Manchester International Festival on a proposed vertical farm, right here in Manchester, housed within a transformed office block.

We've worked on the feasibility with sustainable food expert Debbie Ellen, Capital Relations and, naturally, our brilliant friends at Urbed.

More details eventually... but for now, here's Urbed's visual schematic as a 'taster' and I suggest you all book your tickets for the awesome Dickson Despommier!

iManc*

2011-03-03T10:00:00.003Z

NOTE: email digitalmap@marketingmanchester.com if you think you should be on our next map of Online Manchester!
__

There’s an urban myth about Manchester and computers that I am utterly beguiled by.

It goes like this.

Alan Turing, University of Manchester academic, father of modern computing and closet homosexual took his own life in 1954.

The myth has it that the cyanide he used was in an apple, which was then left, with a bite taken out of it, on the stand next to his death bed.

Fast forward to the late 70s and Steves Jobs and Wozniac are busy in a garage, building what will become the Apple computer. They need a logo for the company. After an early flirtation with an Isaac Newton cartoon they go for an apple, with a bite taken out of it.

And there you have it. Apple’s homage to Turing as they half-knowingly created a leading global brand of the future, complete with a hardline back to the original modern city of Manchester.

None of which is true of course, but as memetic messages go, it’s one that spreads the second you tell it. It’s irresistible, I hereby dare you not to mention it to someone.

I like to think it is true, in fact I insist it is, as I love to see my favoured brands united in some way. Manchester plus Apple is a kind of dream combo for me; if I could see brand collisions of Monocle Magazine and Paul’s Tofu, or maybe Bourgeois Boheme and Rapha, I’d be a very, very happy man.

But back to memetics.

How ‘stuff spreads’ is on my mind as I ponder the next phase of our work on Manchester’s digital map. Last year we researched, and then depicted on an interactive map, a cross-section of the websites and blogs that collectively make up our city’s online presence – our pixelated tendrils if you will.

We did the research, created the map, and now we’re asking an elite cadre of bloggers and tweet-happy social media types to comment on the notion of ‘online presence’ and more specifically, tell us and Marketing Manchester, our client, where the project should go next.

It seemed the right way to go about it really. It means we want you, dear reader, to tell us what YOU think.

In the process we’d like to uncover some more things we didn’t know about Manchester online, generate some insights into how cities should approach their digital ‘brand’ experience, and maybe we’ll even see some more urban myths, spreading out through the ether, next up from me, the one about how Manchester invented dance music.

*As well as the title of this blog entry, this is also the slogan emblazoned on the best selling T-Shirt at Manchester Airport. You can buy one here.

Postscript: Makes you proud to be a BritGeek. In September of last year, following a frenzied campaign on the Internet, the then Prime Minister Gordon Brown issued a public apology on behalf of the British government for the way in which Turing was treated after the war.

Global effort needed to feed the world

2011-02-25T05:48:00.000Z

What's missing from this statement from Nina Federoff, professor of biology at Penn State?

“We need to expand our ability to farm on land not considered farmable because it is eroded or desertified, using water not considered suitable for farming because it is wastewater or saltwater.”

Er... the fact that we should be using our existing land differently, and not squandering resources on meat and dairy? Argh! Anyway the rest of the article is worth a read.

Global effort needed to feed the world

Robo Rainbow

2011-02-15T05:44:00.002Z

This is lovely... a man, a bike and some very clever spray cans.

robo-rainbow from mudlevel on Vimeo.

We are each of us tourists in the original modern city

2011-02-13T21:53:00.001Z

GM tourism review

View more presentations from Creative Concern.

A couple of years ago, I helped Visit Manchester - Greater Manchester's Tourist Board - write and publish a tourism strategy for the city region which I hope set out some of the critical challenges and opportunities that existed for what those in the know call the 'visitor economy' across our wonderful ten boroughs.

We're now busy, again with Visit Manchester, reviewing that strategy and doing a bit of an update report on how the sector has been doing.

The headlines? Well, the sector is holding its own with visitor numbers up a little over the last couple of years, but I think it would be fair to say that some of our core challenges, such as a diversification of the nighttime economy, still stand. Email me if you have thoughts, or post a comment.

And as an aside, I thought I'd include a quick comment on why I think this is so earth-shatteringly important.

First of all, I am passionate about a vibrant visitor economy being a fundamental part of creating a sustainable city. If we are inspired and are acquiring new knowledge and new experiences, then we are, for my money, more likely to make the connections and take the actions necessary to create a better future for our children.

Second thing - no surprise here - is climate change related. If we make our tourism product utterly irresistible and of the highest quality, then more of us will opt for 'staycations' and will avoid barfing out vast amounts of carbon going on mini-breaks and piss-ups in far flung locales.

Third - Manchester. Getting the experience of our city right is critical if we want to be a player. We want talented graduates to stay here? We need to be vibrant. We want people to invest here? We need to be vibrant. We want the jaded and over-indebted souls in the South East and London to do the smart thing and move up to the Original Modern City? We need to be vibrant, and different, and good.

So that's why I care about this stuff... but back to the review... comments if you have them are gratefully received.

The Museum in 2030

2011-01-19T10:31:00.007Z

We've been working with our friend and collaborator Alex Saint on a series of 'insights' for the North West Federation of Museums and Galleries - the NW Fed to its friends. The idea behind the pieces we've pulled together is to stimulate some radical thinking and give hundreds of institutions across the region the tools, ideas and approaches that will help them thrive in these challenging times. There's also an emerging LinkedIn discussion which is worth checking out.

Here's one of the pieces I wrote, in this case, it's a view to the museum of the future:

Rethinking the Museum

The successful museum in 2030 will be a place that unites; that engages; that takes the continued wonder of the original object and fuses it with shared stories and distributed histories. The transformation will have been powered by new partnerships, business innovation and a keen, clear eye on the shifting shape of society.
At the same time some of the museums we know and love today will be distant memories, their collections dispersed and their buildings transformed into centres of new activity: work/live units for micro-creatives; crash pads for funky seniors; urban food hubs; or incubation facilities for nanotech start-ups.

The notion that ‘not all will survive’ is as liberating as it is threatening. Think back just ten years and you will be able to think of organisations or institutions that are no longer a feature on our cultural landscape, or of new ones that have flourished. Change happens, and the shift in the next 20 years will be one where the innovators, the resourceful and the valued have thrived and survived. Those resistant to change will not have fared so well.

Making culture pay

At the most basic level, there will be a fiscal revolution in the two decades to come. There will be new ways to make culture ‘pay’. Smart cards for travel networks in our urban centres will also be used to extract voluntary (but relatively ubiquitous) entrance fees for arts and cultural venues such as museums; they will also log our preferences and help us, through enhanced social media, to discover new experiences in an age where experience carries a higher value to our citizens than consumer goods.

It won’t stop there though. Successful museums will have learnt how to save money and make money, to enable them to continue to deliver unique and invaluable public services. This will have been achieved, not least, through a zero carbon, zero waste revolution. Monetisation of the museum will be key. They will be true social enterprises, that offer paid for services, have a healthy network of volunteers or ‘members’ and have become more adept than ever at exploiting the philanthropy of those with ‘significant net personal worth’. They will be commissioned for services from a network of public and private ‘client’ groups; and they will be past masters at leveraging the value of their brand.

The bricks and mortar of museums will have changed in 2030, but our architectural landscape will not have shifted so dramatically; it always worth remembering that 80% of today’s buildings will – barring cataclysms - be still standing in fifty years’ time; what’s in those buildings is another matter.

There will, in 2030, be more of a barter and exchange going on in terms of collections – think of the PlusTate programme, which through a sharing of resources currently supports the development of the visual arts right across Britain, but taken to a whole new level. These exchanges will have a ‘showbiz’ value for visitors and will be as much about the shared brand equity of the big name museums, with ‘on show now from the V&A’ becoming a common line to see on promotional material.

This starts to break down the notion of museum as collection and shifts to the notion of museum as experiential brand. Across the next 20 years many would expect digitisation and virtual reality (remember that?) to challenge ever harder the primacy of the physical experience of collections but that will not come to pass; 3D printing will not create a ‘museum of museums’ in every town. What will happen is that collections are rationalised and in many cases thinned out; some may be given away to the community in return for social memories or histories that bring life to the ubiquitous mangle, butter churn or ZX81.

These stories will be captured, shared and in this way museums will not simply continue to be features of current and future social media networks (...‘Let’s have a Facebook page’ will no longer be the limit of their ‘Web 2.0 strategy’) but will actually become a new social media network, themselves, making connections, gathering their cultural tribe and offering a powerful mechanism for self expression.

Trust, democracy and a 'third space'

As a renewed and vibrant network, museums will increasing be genuine centres of democratic dialogue, interrogating the issues of the moment. From conflict resolution, to reproductive rights or the fight against climate change, the interpretation of collections will increasingly encounter and embrace the zeitgeist and be far more relevant as a result.

Part of this new buzz around museums will be established on a notion of ‘trust’. More than anywhere else they will be places and spaces in the future that people want to connect with because they are trusted and known as passionate, informed, but fair communicators of histories and ideas that matter; they are also the zone within which we increasingly choose to contemplate, relax, or make the bigger decisions in life. In 2030 we will be even more harried than today by bleeping texts, ringtones and the tsunami of email. Richard Wurman called it ‘Information Anxiety’ and he was on the mark. Museums will offer us, in the future, a respite from the everyday; they will be the space we need.

And they will be well established by then in this new mode of operation. What the next twenty years will provide is the added perspective, post ‘age of anxiety’, that reveals the powerful effect of major investments around the turn of the millennium. There will be no such dramatic investments in our run through to 2030, in fact the next twenty years will be all about making those historical investments work, and work hard.

This work will be undertaken together. There will still be a North West Federation of Museums, indeed there will still be a North West of England, in twenty years time. What feels in 2010 like a complete reshaping of our political and cultural landscape post-recession will seem less pronounced in 2030, although museums as a sector will have helped many people, not least through their strong sense of social purpose, to ‘get through the worst of it’.

Museums will be a sector in 2030. There will be a collective. From new business models to artefact exchanges or the creation of a new ‘social media’ of museums, all the key trends for the sector will rely heavily on the sector working collaboratively and in partnership. Core museums will learn from nationals, and vice versa; local museums will boast a new charitable trust status, independent from their local authorities, benefitting from mutuality and enterprise. The new ‘pop-up’ museums of the 2020s will, in particular, be an unexpected and challenging addition, not least because they make the effort to stay open, just that little bit later.

The Great Transition

The networks and sharing that hold the sector together will become more pronounced in the future. There will be a regional ‘currency’ of museums that helps them share with each other collections, staff and expertise; there will be a skills bank that all can access to raise their collective game; and there will be a shared infrastructure that is physical, digital and human.

The great transition ahead will challenge us all. Vision and leadership will be prerequisites. The people who will steer the sector into this future will have to be networked, resourceful and ready to embrace change. They will have recognised and risen to the need to be true civic leaders, with a mandate to provide the places and experiences which we will all access in some way.

And that uplift in ‘taking part’ will be critical. Currently fewer than half of all adults visit a gallery or museum each year – in 2030, if we have succeeded in transforming our sector, there will be much higher levels of engagement.

Today there are 290 museums and galleries across England’s North West. In 2030 there will be fewer than this and they will be stronger, more resilient and more productive than today, if collaboration and innovation is pursued, as a collective goal.

A final view into the future, then, should spell out more clearly what some of those shared goals might be. What’s clear is that the sector will have a critical role in unlocking minds, educating and engaging the public. Within our time horizon of 2030 there will be a ‘double hit’ for example when you consider the region’s social capital (or skilled people, to you and I). The demand for low-skilled jobs will drop dramatically as our economy continues to shift up the value chain towards industries based around intellectual property and key sectors such as low carbon goods and services. At the same time we have a worrying skills ‘bubble’ in the pipeline, with half of our current workforce not making it past A-levels at present. Museums can and should be in the frontline of creating a new culture of learning that ensures we are not left behind in the skills race. The challenge today, with an eye on 2030, will be for museums to identify the topics and areas that are important, economically, which they can explore and bring to life for students young and old; here they should connect with local partners who are driving economic strategy and forecasting.

Museums will also have a shared goal of keeping our minds ticking over. The fastest growing audiences in the next twenty years will be the over 60s, as our society grows significantly older and greyer. This is a critical mission, particularly where museums can overcome isolation, connect with social histories that will stimulate memories, and respond pro-actively to the notion of new skills and new employment for people in their ‘third age’.

Museums can (help to) save the world

There is a third, almost didactic role for museums, working collectively, and that is to be part of efforts to create a genuinely sustainable future. As centres of experience rather than consumerism, museums immediately offer an alternative to the ‘consume at all costs’ culture that has successfully damaged or destroyed 60% of our planet’s ecosystems. Beyond this role, they can also access the ‘headspace’ within which we need a dramatic shift in thinking and values; technical ‘fixes’ for climate change for example are already reaching the limits of their application as we realise that it is behavioural change and our shared culture that will be pivotal in handing a habitable planet over to future generations. By 2050 we need to have reduced our carbon emissions by a phenomenal 80% or more, and this requires a complete change in the way we view the world.

It’s a change that museums can help to deliver. Sustainability messages sold as drab calls to constrain consumption, use less and lower your expectations have been failing spectacularly for a generation or more; museums can bring delight, intrigue and play to this mission, in many ways they are perfectly placed for it.

This final notion of creating delight is an apt place to end an exploration of 2030. Today many are focused on survival, both within the museum sector and beyond, but across a longer time frame there is an opportunity to create universal delight that make places more characterful, that makes minds more inquisitive and makes communities stronger. One recent study revealed that the use of social networks like Twitter possibly releases the brain hormone ‘oxytocin’, also known as the ‘cuddle’ chemical that makes people feel trust, security, less anxiety and possibly even turned on. It’s all about connecting with people, and interacting, in a delightful way. If museums are a social network of the future then they need to set their sights too on the cuddle chemical as their central indicator of success; or as they call it in Tameside, generating more ‘moments of magic’ through museums.

This is the future. It is ours to create.

__

NB. Thanks to NW Fed for a great project - and also to Renaissance North West, MLA and National Museums Liverpool for making it happen. Also am heavily indebted to the awesome work done by the Center for the Future of Museums in the USA and has some valuable input from Stephen Feber.

Charting our course for a certain future

2011-01-05T14:27:00.004Z

New year, new plans to save the world... but first a look back, finally, at the big bash that took up a good deal of my time at the tail end of 2010 - the first stakeholder conference for ‘Manchester: A Certain Future’, which took place at the revitalised Museum of Science and Industry (MOSI) on 30 November 2010.

(M:ACF in case you're wondering, is Manchester's Climate Change Action Plan, which I had a hand in helping to write in 2009.)

Back to MOSI, though. Delegates from a host of different organisations and sectors took part in a hands on, highly interactive day of workshops, debates and networking sessions designed to help all of those attending to share their plans for the future, identify what was working (or not) in the fight against climate change and to make fresh connections with possible future partners.

The shape of the day was deliberately experimental, from an art session where participants were given the opportunity to literally draw what a low carbon culture looked like, to ‘carbon dating’ where the focus on was on a series of quick fire meetings with new people to share ideas and thoughts for the future. There was also a masterclass on low carbon regeneration and a series of sessions where delegates shared the barriers they had overcome, or their plans for the future.

Future scenarios

As well as chairing the day, I had the chance to run two 60-person sessions with Joe Ravetz of the University of Manchester to focus peoples’ minds on that certain future, using the scenarios (good and bad) that have been created by the University’s Eco Cities research team. The two scenarios – an Upward Spiral and a Long Descent - were brought to life by fictional radio broadcasts from the future crafted by Phil Korbel of Radio Regen and then participants voted on how they thought Manchester stood in the face of such changes.

The good news? Few participants thought that our city is on a collision course with certain disaster, by stating that they thought the future set out in a Long Descent was a sure thing. In fact in both sessions, half or more of those taking part stated that they thought Manchester was a headed in the right direction, to some degree.

When we asked in what areas we were strong or weak in the face of climate change, those taking part felt that we had a good track record on technology and innovation an that we had strong political leadership driving us forward. Where were judged to be weaker, by those voting, was on a shared set of public values around climate change, and on working towards a more equal society.

What next?

Shared values and developing a low carbon culture were the clear priorities that emerged from the day, including a final concluding vote from delegates that gave our stakeholder steering group a clear mandate to push for this as a focus for 2011.

Attendees also told us how they thought we could improve the conference for 2011, including building in more advanced notice of the event, improving the diversity of the event (though a number of attendees remarked on how it wasn’t the ‘usual suspects) and to create a greater presence for the event in the conventional media, as well as the Twitter reports that were a feature of the day, thanks to Inside the M60.

Get me toasty

2011-01-04T15:48:00.001Z

Today we (Creative Concern, as opposed to the wider human race) helped to launch a campaign to get homes across Greater Manchester warm and toasty. The client is AGMA, the Energy Savings Trust and the 10 local authorities. The scheme provides grants for basic insulation measures in your home if you live in Greater Manchester and it's genuinely unbeatable:

Free no obligation energy survey by an accredited assessor
Home insulation improvements for as little as £50
Free cavity wall and loft insulation if you are over 60 OR on eligible benefits OR pregnant OR have a child under 6

Full details are on the website we've built for them - http://www.getmetoasty.com - and as I type, my colleagues are racing around with our giant 'Mr Toast' character, preparing the radio ads and getting ready for two weekends of fun and frolics in the Trafford Centre and Arndale. Marvellous stuff.

And my favourite part of the campaign so far? Hooking up with the awesome, LA-based creator of 'Mr Toast' who is our collaborator on this project.

Four visions of the future...

2010-12-23T13:36:00.001Z

Just came across this on the marvellous 'Global Dashboard' website:

Jim Dator, a futurist at the University of Hawaii, developed a classification system in the 1970s that he has used ever since to order discussion about possible futures. He argues that there are just four main visions underlying attempts to outline possible or preferable futures. Here’s an outline of his four “Generic Images of the Future”:

Continued growth: This is still the most common view, and certainly the “official” view of most political and academic discussion. Growth is desirable because it has made good things possible for some people already, and will bring more good things to more people in future. The idea that growth might falter is usually discussed only in terms of economic recession, and almost always assumed to be a “Bad Thing” – as a glance as any newspaper will confirm.

Collapse of economic structures: This is the family of futures which descend from Malthus via The Limits to Growth. It has a popular constituency, who believe that the carrying capacity of the planet has already been exceeded, and that growth cannot be sustained much longer. The last straw may be climate change, oil depletion or a variety of other things, but the consequences are similar.

Disciplined, sustainable society: This is the first addition to the simple Malthusian versus Cornucopian visions. It means trying to manage things to avoid the worst. The “third way” is outlined in many detailed plans for organizing a transition from the current social and economic system. The premise is that growth cannot go on forever, and avoiding collapse is overwhelmingly important. So these scenarios try to outline paths to a sustainable, steady state. What form the transition might take is controversial, partly because of the difficulty of designing a no-growth economy that works according to the currently dominant capitalist model and does not fall into depression.

Transformation: These kinds of visions are about transformation, not transition, because they embrace a radical, usually technologically driven, alteration of the conditions of human life, and possibly of humanity itself. Under this heading are filed the future pictures which see the next stage of evolution as involving the immensely powerful development of, for example, artificial intelligence, robotics, genetic engineering or nanotechnology. These are “post-human” futures that perhaps include moving to off-Earth environments – one pretty convincing way of escaping from a closed system.

A Song on the End of the World

2010-12-23T11:24:00.000Z

I found this incredibly moving. It's a visual poem from the people at Adbusters. The closing frames put me in mind of what 2011 may look like. A year of activism awaits, I think.

Ten most watched in 2010

2010-12-22T11:02:00.002Z

Am officially blown away by the fact the vigil we helped to PR at the John Lennon Peace Monument in Liverpool has appeared in China Daily as one of the ten most watched in 2010. Move over Wiki Leaks, Palin and Putin! The full story is here.

More on world-saving museums

2010-10-30T14:00:00.001+01:00

I was at the Maritime Museum in London yesterday giving a revved up version of my 'Can Museums Save the World' presentation which I blogged about a few weeks back; after suffering a train cancellation and moderate level ticket barrier carnage at Euston, I got there a wee bit late but in time to deliver my pitch. A fascinating group of senior people from National museums had been assembled, and all had a keen eye on what the future may hold for their institutions.

Much of my pitch is about sustainability, but blended with a bit of futurology. The basic question is: What will museums be like in 20, 30 or 40 years time if they are truly sustainable? Will they be embedded in their communities, treading lightly on the planet and financially thriving?

In terms of the futurology slice of my pitch pie, I've leant heavily on some superb work being done by the Center for the Future of Museums in the United States. They've produced a superb paper on what 2034 might look like for the museums sector, and for the California Association of Museums they've pulled together a full 'futures' resource guide complete with five 25 year scenarios, suggested worksheets and some guidelines on how to hold a futures-focused session in your own organisation or network.

The sustainability part of my pitch however, is all the product of my own chunterings over the last couple of years. I genuinely see the world I know well (sustainability) and the world I am getting to know better (culture) as natural collaborators, if not wholly intertwined players in creating a better future. These two gorgeous worlds, bastions of progressive thinking, are of course arrayed against a third universe of infamy: the world that thinks economic growth and perpetual materialism are the only things that make life worth living.

Anyway so here are the key points:

Happiness and wealth fell out with each other more than half a century ago.
We need to ‘reboot’ economics and find a way to achieve prosperity without growth.
Non-materialist forms of social capital and experience are part of the solution.
Culture and the experience economy can win us back from materialism.
Reaching people, and fighting for headspace, is a core strength of the cultural sector.
Culture creates the places and spaces that people want to be in, fostering a more compelling and competitive identity.
Innovation must no longer be the preserve of consumerist ‘novelty’ and desire but has to become part of how we craft our collective future.

Therefore, it's clear to me, that culture can (help to) save the world. Not least because just like the sphere of creative communications (design, media, advertising, film etc) that Creative Concern operates in, culture is an antidote to the idea that it is all about selling shit to sleepwalkers. I use this quote from Raymond Williams' 1962 book, Communications:

Our commonest economic error is the assumption that production and trade are our only practical activities, and that they require no other human justification or scrutiny.

We need to say what many of us know in experience: that the life of man, and the business of society, cannot be confined to these ends; that the struggle to learn, to describe, to understand, to educate is a central and necessary part of our humanity.

I know to many, particularly in the current climate, the notion that economic growth is a futile and unsustainable pursuit probably comes across as a piece of sideshow prattling; but it is those that still pursue this ultimately self-defeating course of 'growth at all costs' that are, to use the vernacular, 'off their rockers'.

Another quote I like is from Edward Abbey:

"Growth for the sake of growth is the philosophy of the cancer cell."

Enough said.

Peace and love, Liverpool style

2010-10-14T13:43:00.004+01:00

The world's media at the launch of the European Peace Monument

It was a busy weekend for the Creative Concern PR team. On Saturday (9th) we handled the global PR launch of a European Peace Monument gifted to Liverpool by the Global Peace Initiative (and created by artist Lauren Voiers) on what would have been John Lennon’s 70th birthday. We were commissioned by Liverpool’s Beatles Story attraction and also worked with the City, and with Liverpool One.

The event centred around the 18ft monument which was unveiled by Julian and Cynthia Lennon in the city’s deeply lovely Chavasse Park (one of my favourite bits of new green infrastructure across the region). The launch was attended by dignitaries from all over Europe and captured by the world’s media.

Unveiled live worldwide on BBC News 24 and Sky News the broadcast was syndicated nationally by CBS in the USA for live transmission on the popular ‘The Early Show’ reaching a global audience of millions. NBC in the USA, Russia’s NTV channel, Japan’s KGL, China’s CNC, Germany ZDF and Italy’s RAI attended creating packages of interviews from the live event.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7MqYBSTR-Ps

In addition the story and images received blanket coverage around the world in print media from The Sunday Times and News of the World through to USA Today and the Wall Street Journal. The team here at Creative Concern also engaged directly with a global audience through social media.

I don't often do blatant trumpet blowing on this blog, but I'm dead chuffed by this one, and by the efforts of our super, fabulous and quietly dapper media team.

Also chuffed that it's all about... peace.

What is Creative Concern?

2010-10-12T17:47:00.002+01:00

I've recently been called upon to explain myself. Quite right too. Embedded below is a trolley dash through the chaos that is my head. It starts with a bit about why and how we do what we do at Creative Concern, before moving onto some of our bits of work 'out there' in the real world that we love so much.

As is ever the case, it's an evolving pitch so if there are any bits that could do with improvement, please send your thoughts in now on the back of stamped addressed envelope.

What is creative_concern?

View more presentations from Creative Concern.

Can museums save the world?

2010-10-05T23:14:00.000+01:00

I'm off to deliver a 'provocation' tomorrow morning at the annual Museums Association conference here in Manchester. My pitch – no huge surprise here - is whether museums can help chart our collective course into the future, deliver greater levels of environmental sustainability and deliver major societal change. Not asking too much there, then!

With the rest of the team at Creative Concern I've been lucky enough to work with loads of cultural organisations over the last few years, such as the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester Museum, the Museum of Science and Industry and Renaissance Northwest. They're all amazing institutions and people, and I'm genuinely in awe of their potential to reach out and touch people, to open minds and, possibly, help us create a better world. Even in the 'Age of Austerity' there can be no other mission with such singular importance.

In putting the pitch together for tomorrow, I found myself particularly absorbed by the work of the Center for the Future of Museums in the US. They've done some great 'futurology' work recently and I think that they're a fine model to follow; the 'Tomorrow in the Golden State' report is worth reading, if you have the time.

Can Museums Save the World?

View more presentations from Creative Concern.

The Forests of TAFKAR*

2010-09-11T11:52:00.006+01:00

I've been working on a plan, recently, to get some more trees in the ground. Nothing new there to anyone who has visited this blog before, but I thought it was time for an update.

I chair the Northwest Forestry Framework (soon to change it's name to something more in keeping with the political zeitgeist, but more on that another time) and have been working with a whole host of people, both in the Northwest but also in the national offices of the Forestry Commission, to put forward several areas in the Northwest as possible pilot areas for a major national push on woodland creation.

As an area of England with a level of woodland cover well below the national average, there is scope and opportunity for large scale tree planting and development right across Cumbria, Lancashire, Greater Manchester, Cheshire and Merseyside. When you look at the statistics, we are poorly served in these areas when it comes to woodlands.

The good news is that each of these areas has also developed clever and canny new models for woodland creation that deliver multiple benefits and move beyond traditional public sector investment models towards partnerships with business and the voluntary sector.

It's all very, 'Big Society'.

Now these areas are signing up to a ‘forestry manifesto' that I've been touting around the region since the start of the year. This manifesto seeks, over 40 years, to deliver a doubling in woodland cover, to have an immediate and significant impact on carbon stores, timber production, environmental resilience, green jobs, local image and happiness and wellbeing; this is a vision of an intensely productive, as well as beautiful, landscape.

Show me the money

It all sounds very motherhood and apple pie, but who is going to pay? There are a number of existing or planned investment models across the Northwest which warrant further development and replication elsewhere. These include:

• Woodland planting as a key aspect of PFI (Public Finance Initiative) contracts and, specifically, waste management strategies;

• Working with large-scale developers to create an attractive setting for investment and adding value to land-based asset portfolios;

• Practical business partnerships providing improved local area ‘image', biomass resources or climate change adaptation;

• Woodland or green infrastructure bonds, where investors can support woodland creation by investing in a bond that provides non-fiscal benefits in lieu of interest payments as part of a CSR or sustainability strategy;

• Developing a suite of woodland creation opportunities alongside community interest levies/section 106 arrangements where developers support environmental works as a condition of their planning consents; and

• Integrated land use planning to maintain and improve water quality.

• Landscape-scale, economically-linked programmes to aid recovery and local economic resilience.

Some of the above options sound a little jargon laden, but they have the potential to help us get some trees in the ground, and that's what I care about. Each of these investment models is either already in play across one of our counties or city regions, or is ready to be developed by one or more partners.

Breaking down barriers

From the discussions we've been having so far, these partners are ready to start delivering woodland creation, on the ground, if certain barriers to progress can be removed. These barriers include:

• The ‘Hope value' attached to under-utilised land and the misplaced notion that new woodlands permanently remove large areas from possible future development;

• More flexible, short to medium term land use deals and frameworks that will allow the notion of ‘temporary' woodland to be pursued;

• Clear signals on the future of carbon pricing and accounting in relation to woodland creation;

• The lack of a mechanism for business to report on the carbon benefits of woodland creation programmes as part of their net greenhouse gas emissions; and

• The consideration of effective tax regimes to encourage investment in new planting in areas of need as a way for business to play a part in 'big society' programmes.

Making it happen

So the exciting thing is that if we bash down a few barriers, win over some hearts and minds, and pull our fingers out, the partners in the Northwest Forestry Forum are ready to begin work piloting a new wave of woodland creation using innovative funding and delivery models such as these.

More trees, in the ground, delivering a huge range of benefits.

And the track record for delivery across the region is solid and impressive, with the Community Forests (e.g. Mersey Forest and Red Rose Forest) having already planted 12 million trees and millions more having been planted through the Forestry Commission's Capital Modernisation Fund and Newlands programme.

Here are some more tangible examples of where can start planting.

Real life example - Mersey Belt

There is an immediate opportunity for an ‘Adapting the Landscape' pilot across what has been coined the ‘Atlantic Gateway', connecting the twin city regions of Greater Manchester and Merseyside with the Northern areas of Cheshire.

Such a pilot would be focused on woodland creation in and around key physical development sites and along transport corridors; on productive forestry including biomass; on leisure, recreation and the ‘visitor economy'.

Funding can be drawn from business through receipts from soils deposition, community interest levies, Section 106 agreements, through an easing of planning constraints if the creation of greenspace is assured and possible short-term amnesties against business tax.

Delivery partners would include large development businesses in the area, as well as the key Local Enterprise Partnerships and the voluntary sector in the form of community forests and Groundwork.

Real life example - Lancashire

In Lancashire there is already an innovative model for woodland creation in the form of the county's ‘Woodlands from Waste' programme linked to a soon to be commissioned, 25 year, £2 billion Waste PFI.

A partnership of Lancashire County Council, 13 Local Authorities and their commercial contractor, Global Renewables, alongside the Forestry Commission, will be planting and managing 100,000 new trees per year for the next 25 years - creating woodland on brown and greenfield sites across the area. The cost is being met through savings on landfill taxes and, in addition, is utilising a growing medium by-product of the waste treatment process.

Real life example - Cumbria and Lancashire

Water company United Utilities has pioneered a programme called the Sustainable Catchment Management Programme (SCaMP), working with farmers and land managers, local authorities, Government and other conservation organisations to influence how water catchment areas are managed and properly funded. The objective is a double win of improved water quality (under the European Water Framework Directive) as well as conservation of the natural environment. UU's partner in the programme has been the RSPB.

The project has leveraged in public funding to help deliver an increase in clough woodland, with 450 hectares of upland oak woodland to be planted, some 300,000 trees being planted and 200km of fencing to allow for moorland restoration and woodland planting. It has carried out the work in two of its four estate areas: Bowland in Lancashire, and the Southern estate including Longdendale, the Goyt and parts of the Peak District.

Meeting Defra's priorities

It may sound a bit arcane, but in the absence of any major eco bills or statements, there are still some clear signals as to what the new government's priorities are, not least in the departmental 'Structural Reform Plans' which have beenpublished. How does the above outlined activity ‘fit' with the three key priorities outlined in Defra's structural reform plan?

The woodland creation opportunities highlighted can directly contribute to and foreshorten the delivery of each priority and relevant actions and milestones. Specifically:

Support and develop British farming and encourage sustainable food production

Defra's objective is to enhance the competitiveness and resilience of the whole food chain, including farms and the fish industry, to ensure a secure, environmentally sustainable and healthy supply of food with improved standards of animal welfare.

Woodland creation can contribute to this objective in a number of ways. It will provide affordable measures of support for hill farmers via diversifying farm incomes e.g. through timber sales and reduced energy cost savings through woodfuel.

It will also help with animal husbandry, particularly in the uplands, primarily through the provision of shelter. Woodland creation will also lead to more sustainable, integrated land use where for example, higher value agricultural land holdings can be protected through woodland creation ‘upstream' stablising soils and alleviating flooding.

Biodiversity and landscape

Defra's objective is to enhance and protect the natural environment, including biodiversity and the marine environment, by reducing pollution and preventing habitat loss and degradation.

A pilot of new woodland creation in the Mersey Belt, Cumbria or Lancashire will contribute to this in a number of ways.

It will deliver more green spaces for local communities, new native habitats and wildlife corridors needed to help wildlife adapt to expected climate change impacts. It will help stabilise soils, improve water quality and reclaim damaged, brownfield land. In addition there will be increased tree planting by private sector and civic societies.

Support a strong and sustainable green economy, resilient to climate change

Defra's objective is to encourage businesses, people and communities to manage and use natural resources in a sustainable manner and to reduce waste; and work to ensure that the UK economy is resilient to climate change.

A woodland creation pilot will directly address this objective, as the approaches above show, it can directly provide a source of carbon storage and can be deployed in partnership with the private sector.

Next steps

As you might imagine, I'm dead keen to play these arguments out to national players - especially Defra - but also to the emerging Local Economic Partnerships which have been causing such a stir in local politics over the last few weeks.

In addition, this proposal will be the centrepiece of our next meeting of the Forestry Forum on November 8 of this year; if you want to come along, just let me know. We need every bit of help we can get to achieve that goal we've set for ourselves - a doubling of woodland cover.

...

*TAFKAR = The Area Formerly Known as Region.

Paul Smith and the Manchester Velodrome

2010-09-08T14:15:00.000+01:00

This film is great. I hereby pledge to only cycle in Paul Smith suits*.

*Subject to budget.

Infographics. Brilliant infographics.

2010-09-02T12:24:00.001+01:00

I'm indebted to the fabulous people at UHC for sending out an email with this amazing (but chilling/sobering/depressing) infographic linked to it. The graphic has been produced by GDS Infographics, one of a series of genuinely brilliant pieces of work. Check them out.

The MAMILs have a job to do - ditch the Lycra!

2010-08-17T17:35:00.003+01:00

Love this. Courtesy of my friends at Love Your Bike and via the excellent online news site road.cc, I've encountered the marvellous concept of MAMILs (or middle-aged men in Lycra).

Basically the idea is that there's major growth in cycling amongst men of a certain age who, instead of turning to a Porsche or a Harley Davidson as they lurch headlong into their midlife crisis, are buying a high-end bike, peeling on some crotch-hugging Lycra leggings, and then getting out on the road.

The findings are part of a report released in June from Mintel. Amongst the 'highlights' in the report are the fact that the keenest cyclists are most likely to have at least two cars in their household, they're also broadsheet readers and are likely to have an average household income of over £50,000.

And they're mostly blokes. Middle-aged blokes.

So far, so almost fascinating. My own hugely comprehensive survey on the streets of Manchester is that there are a growing number of cycling 'typologies' of which we should be aware:

FFOPs - Floaty Frock on Pashley. This new subset of cyclist is a bloody breath of fresh air. Normal clothes, elegant bike and generally higher regard for the little things like red lights, not mowing down pedestrians and being generally courteous.

NOAF - Nutter on a Fixie. You know who I mean. They're not in Lycra. They're in black skinny jeans. Anarchists on two wheels for whom no piece of roadspace is too tight a squeeze. Love their bikes though. Yum.

BBOYS - BMX with Bumcrack. Why these students are 'commuting' along Oxford Road on those tiny little stunt bikes is beyond me. Apart from the constant flashes of bottom, equally amusing is their insistence in overtaking you whilst frantically peddling their teeny little wheels only to slow down horribly once you hit a straight patch of road. Bless.

Anyway, back to those MAMILs. I've got a problem here. First of all, like my wife I think that Lycra is a privilege and not a right; lots of these boys are NOT equipped to be wearing Lycra and should steer well clear. Furthermore there is a central issue about making all cyclists look like refugees from the Tour de France.

We have to normalise cycling. It's critical! I think those of us for whom cycling is our daily preferred mode of travel have a moral duty, which I would set out as follows:

1. Look normal. Do not wear Lycra and where possible avoid performance clothing. It looks ugly, and sends out a subliminal message to the rest of the world that cycling is an extreme sport. It is not, it is the best way to get from A2B and the weirder we make it look, the less likely people are to join us in the saddle. Grow up, and stop dressing up.

2. Be super-courteous. We should be the very opposite of Lycra banditos and instead be the lovely, lovely knights and knightesses of the road. Let the bus out! Make way for that driver! Stop and give someone directions! And of course, stop at red lights.

3. Embrace elegance. Here of course I'm following a well trodden path set forth by the excellent people at The Tweed Cycling Club and outlets like Rapha. We should make cycling aspirational, desirable and the mode du jour! Now if I could just afford that Timothy Everest jacket, I'd be away. Must also figure out the etiquette of pipe-smoking whilst cycling.

Mintel are right to highlight the MAMIL but rather than jibing at him, he should be challenged, to become an ambassador for cycling, on a mission to get more people peddling. And he could start by choosing to cycle to work, and do so in a way that makes the whole thing seem fashionable, safe and not requiring the donning of an outfit that makes you look like you're either about to jump down a luge run or storm the Death Star.

I'm thinking plus fours and a natty cap might do the trick.

Brand Hell

2010-08-16T08:36:00.000+01:00

Just stumbled, thanks to the Twitter feed of @antonvowl, upon a genuine glimpse of what hell might look like. The Daily Mail and Internet Explorer, fused together like two dark, sinister and dastardly siamese twins. IE8 customised for the Mail Online. Genuinely hurts my head, this one.

In fact, it's got me wondering if Satan is actually walking amongst us, running an FMCG brand and marketing company (not that hard to imagine) working up evil brand synergies to unleash upon us all.

Next up? How about Jeremy Clarkson's own brand line of foie gras pâtés? And isn't it about time they brought out a Blackberry with an in-built taser? More suggestions please, and I'll pass them onto the fallen one.

Factor Four for Greater Manchester

2010-08-08T15:16:00.000+01:00

Have got myself worked up over the last few days about the notion of a radical eco-efficiency programme for Greater Manchester's local authorities, all carried out in the interest of protecting public services... Basically a Factor Four programme for the city region. Given the possible scale of such an effort, it could save millions, but would have to be ruthless in the pace it set and uncompromising in terms of challenging bureaucracy.

Da Gryptions - The Bixi Anthem

2010-08-03T13:27:00.000+01:00

This is so brilliant I've had to watch it twice. They even rapped 'carbon footprint'! Amazing.

The Windmill Farmer

2010-07-20T08:42:00.000+01:00

Mersey Forest takes to the sky...

2010-07-04T15:33:00.001+01:00

Had to share this one - a really cute story. We staged a press launch and photocall last week at the Mab Lane Community Woodland for the Mersey Forest and Forestry Commission. My colleagues were there at the break of dawn, inflating (biodegradable) balloons with tags attached full of wildflower seeds.

It was the one and only rainy morning of the week, predictably, but even so more than 30 children from St Brigids, St Albert’s RC and Mab Lane Primary School released the biodegradable balloons filled with wild flower seeds into the air to help plant vibrant patches of wild flowers right across the region and beyond.

The exciting thing came when this appeared on the woodland's blog site:

"I’m a teacher at Highfield Hall Primary School in Chesterfield, Derbyshire. One of the Nursey children I was teaching bought a big bunch of colourful balloons in, having found them on her way to school. The children are going to be planting them on Monday. The Nursery children were very excited and interseted in the story behind the balloons and can’t wait to plant the seeds. What a lovely idea!!"

So our balloons flew up into a soggy sky and made it 66 miles at least. Totally lovely.

The event was staged to mark the completion of the planting of 20,000 new trees to create the Mab Lane Community Woodland on two former brown field sites in West Derby as part of The Mersey Forest.

Winning with ENWORKS

2010-06-22T15:18:00.004+01:00

Dead chuffed that we've won the contract to deliver communications support to the marvellous people at ENWORKS, the Northwest’s award-winning environmental business support service.

After pitching against a bunch of other agencies (there's some serious and talented competition out there by the way) we've won the three-year contract to help improve the competitiveness and productivity of Northwest businesses by building ENWORKS’ profile, regionally and further afield.

We've been lucky enough to work with ENWORKS before, as they've been going strong since 2001, and have helped more than 10,000 companies to date. ENWORKS is now a leading authority on environmental business issues, providing free support for businesses to become more profitable by reducing their use of CO2, water and materials.

Anyway we think they're fab and it's great to be working with them again. The YouTube clip above is an example of one of our previous campaigns for them, which did not involve harm or injury coming to the businessman involved. Honest.

There is an alternative

2010-06-16T08:45:00.003+01:00

We've just released our film for Cooperative Fortnight called 'There is an alternative'. We had luminaries from a host of cooperatives come into the studio for the shoot, and I'm dead chuffed with the outcome.

Driving out into a digital age

2010-06-04T09:21:00.008+01:00

This is me: I'm a geeky, early adopting cyclist. Love tech, hate cars.

The former is the future, the latter is the smelly, polluting past. Which is why I've got myself in a frothy little lather about a posting on the eminent and fabulous Streetblog in the States. The piece, by Sarah Goodyear, follows up an earlier article in Ad Age about young Americans driving less as they become ever more seduced by the tippity-tap texting and Twittering of the digital age.

The proposition is that a recent decline in registered drivers amongst younger people is coming about as 'the younger generation increasingly sees a wired lifestyle as incompatible with a motorized one'. Quoting one pundit in Ad Age, Streetblog sets out the case:

"William Draves blames the Internet. Mr. Draves, president of Lern, a consulting firm which focuses mainly on higher education, and co-author of "Nine Shift," maintains that the digital age is reshaping the U.S. and world early in this century, much like the automobile reshaped American life early in the last century.

"His theory is that almost everything about digital media and technology makes cars less desirable or useful and public transportation a lot more relevant. Texting while driving is dangerous and increasingly illegal, as is watching mobile TV or working on your laptop. All, at least under favorable wireless circumstances, work fine on the train. The Internet and mobile devices also have made telecommuting increasingly common, displacing both cars and public transit."

Now, I know the reality of some 'tech' on public transport (such as upstairs on the number 86 from Chorlton) is a yoof playing hardcore rap through the tinny speaker on his Nokia rather than elegant young metropolitans Twittering about Derrida but hey, there's something here that's hugely uplifting, not least because so much of this frenzied 'thumb action' is about connections, communications and social media.

Tune in, switch off and buy a ticket. Fabulous.

The latest on the Big Woody Plan

2010-05-11T16:53:00.004+01:00

Had a great meeting in Wigan today with the nice folks at Northwest Environment Link. I was pitching up with my woodland creation manifesto, the latest version of which you can click through to below. Select 'menu' in the viewer window below and 'full screen' to get full benefit of the marvellous Slideshare.

100503 nwff manifesto

View more presentations from Creative Concern.

More food... more urban greening

2010-04-22T16:27:00.001+01:00

There's a theme developing this afternoon, it's all about food. Have just come across a brilliant scheme outlined in Fast Company magazine, courtesy of my good friend Adam Lubinsky at URS Corporation. The project is a really exciting new rooftop farm in Brooklyn which opens imminently, is powered by photovoltaics, collects rainwater for irrigation and will see its produce delivered, by bicycle, to a number of outlets including Whole Foods. If stuff like this doesn't convince you that the world can be saved, nothing will. Totally fabulous.

Urban food AND bikes!!!

2010-04-22T16:00:00.003+01:00

Find more photos like this on MetaboliCity

This is how to totally get me wound up and excited - urban food growing which explicitly references green infrastructure AND which has a load of bikes thrown in for good measure. Totally brilliant stuff from Metabolicity.

Dwight Towers on academics

2010-04-19T08:37:00.002+01:00

Okay, I'm married to an academic and she is the absolute fulcrum, focus and filigree of my life, but I had to pass on the wise, wise words of Manchester's very own Dwight Towers. In the latest DT blog post there is a rip-roaring sideswipe on academics, citizen participation in Manchester and on the journey you'll encounter Foucault's notion of 'governmentality'. All I can say is that it is a fine way to start the week and gives me an excuse to use a picture of Michel Foucault.

Hide and seek, at Brockholes

2010-04-04T19:38:00.003+01:00

We recently finished a new brand for the exciting ‘Brockholes’ project, a Lancashire Wildlife Trust plan to create a new £8.6 million nature reserve and visitor centre on the site of a former gravel works just outside Preston. The project is being funded, to a large degree, by the Newlands programme which we’ve worked on for a number of years now for the Forestry Commission and NWDA.

We’re proud of our work on Brockholes - led by our senior designer Helen Thomas. It’s a pretty extensive brand work-up, stretching through to retail, interpretation, ‘play’ and the tone of voice of the people that will meet and greet when you visit the 106 hectare complex from Spring 2011.

We’ve liaised closely with the architect Adam Khan whose ‘Floating World’ design is genuinely inspirational and we’ve done loads of research, both on comparator brands and the brandscape, as well as focus groups with the target audiences for this ‘unreserved reserve’.

We’ve opted for a monochrome palette to reflect the Wildlife Trust brand and the word Brockholes is supported by a lexicon of spot words, which show some of the fun things you can do. The whole thing comes together as if visitors themselves had been involved in the creation of the site; as if they doodled Brockholes up out of the disused quarry next to the M6. This will be extended, we hope, to invitations to interact across the site, with black and white internal walls that come to represent giant blackboards – with fun headlines supplemented by chalk or charcoal so that adults and children alike can leave their mark.

The City Region Project

2010-03-30T09:21:00.004+01:00

Last night the world shifted, a little. Stockport joined the other nine local authorities across Greater Manchester and agreed to establish a combined authority for the ‘city region’ of Manchester.

I know, it sounds like a mouthful, and that’s even before you start talking about ‘Economic Prosperity Boards’ or ‘Agglomeration Economies’.

Put simply the Combined Authority is a permanent and statutory body that has powers over some fairly major issues like transport, planning, regeneration, skills and employment. Critically it will also (hopefully) make sense of Greater Manchester’s work on tackling climate change and creating a low carbon economy.

We don’t get the fun and games of an elected Mayor, which I’m a little disappointed at, given that such a figure would, to my mind, give us more ‘punch’ nationally and internationally. Instead we’ll get a slight reshuffling of AGMA deckchairs to create a city region executive (stay awake at the back there!).

If like me, you’ve been traveling on the slightly dilapidated trolley bus of devolution for some time (I was part of the aborted ‘YES’ for devolution campaign a number of years ago), then this is all a step in the right direction. We don’t have enough power, Whitehall doesn’t always serve us well, and there is far too little accountability at the regional level, in spite of the good job that our Regional Development Agency has done.

But that last point is critical. This has to boost the transparency of power.

If I’m honest, I think the workings of AGMA (the Association of Greater Manchester Authorities) to date have been related to the world at large with all the compulsion and flare of an incarcerated scoundrel scratching out days on the wall of his cell. Either that or a narcoleptic let loose with a word processor. Dig deep into the bowels of the web and you will find AGMA minutes, impenetrable research reports, crunchy and badly rendered maps.

You won’t find anything exciting. Trust me.

So that’s what we need to pull off now. We need to make this next great phase for the city Disraeli described as ‘the most wonderful of modern times’ a compelling, high profile tour de force. It needs to set the world alight. It needs to set a different model for our future prosperity.

Most importantly it needs to communicate. If it’s back to somnambulant business as usual, I’m off the bus.

Co-operating on carbon in Moss Side

2010-03-29T17:28:00.003+01:00

A few years ago we (Creative Concern and chums) launched Manchester is My Planet to generally positive noises nationally and regionally; the key to the whole endeavour was the very simple idea that a big, hairy, global problem like climate change possibly could be solved if you made it local, relevant and fused to a greater sense of civic pride. Later on this was an approach which we also adopted when helping to get Foundation launched.

It's a straighforward bit of thinking: climate change and melting planet - very scary - can result in paralysis through fear and dispair - not good! Local action, down your street, by people you recognise is not scary but really 'do-able'. People not scared. People empowered. Planet saved.

That's the theory, and I reckon it's sound.

Anyway the latest outing for this thinking is the fabulous new Carbon Co-op in South Manchester (more specifically Moss Side). The idea is a new, low carbon social enterprise that helps neighbourhoods co-operate to save energy and money. The Co-op launched on Saturday and will kick off across two Moss Side streets with residents working together on bulk-buying low carbon technologies, insulation, energy monitors and other such green gizmos.

The Carbon Co-op is being supported by NESTA's Big Green Challenge Fund and Manchester City Council's Carbon Innovation Fund and it includes a very good 'manual for living' that I'd recommend to anyone. Having tried on many an occasion to make climate change palatable, understandable and compelling on the printed page, I love to see it done well, and right. The project has a bunch of other people I respect involved, including one of the team behind 'Wythenshawe Forever' (Jonathan Atkinson) and the brilliant Charlie Baker from Urbed.

Can culture (help to) save the world?

2010-03-16T11:07:00.002Z

Can culture help to save the world? That was the theme of a presentation I gave this week to Renaissance Northwest, the collective of museums, galleries and libraries across England's Northwest.

Renaissance Northwest Presentation

View more presentations from Creative Concern.

Clean city and the purpose of communications

2010-03-08T11:20:00.003Z

Is advertising an accident of capitalism? Is pervasive commercial marketing simply visual pollution that should be curtailed? Is the point of our industry (design, marketing, communications) to connect people and ideas together more strongly, rather than to serve those very paymasters who would simply like to shift stock and bolster their bottom line? None of these questions are new, but they have an added relevance at the moment and they’re playing on my mind on an almost daily basis.

It always pays to pick up an old, but trusted, book and remind yourself that stronger and more experience minds have wrestled with critical philosophical questions time and again; they may even have pinned down an answer or two. So I’m back with Raymond Williams, the man who shaped 1960s Cultural Theory. His 1962 book ‘Communications’ is helping me to shape some of my thinking about what our business, communications, is for, in the light of the current (overdue) debate about new economic models and prosperity without growth. Here are some of his opening words in the book, and as you’ll see, they have stood the test of time:

“In our own generation, there has been a dramatic tightening of interest in this world of communications. The development of powerful new means of communication has coincided, historically, with the extension of democracy and with the attempts, by many kinds of ruling group, to control and manage democracy.”

Critically, Williams goes on to assert that society and communications are one in the same:

“We have seen the central concerns of society as property, production and trade. These approaches remain important, but they are now joined by a new emphasis: that society is a form of communication through which experience is described, shared, modified and preserved.”

Williams also continues to state that modern communications has already (in the 60s) been abused for political control as propaganda and for commercial profit as advertising. It is this last point, the sense that communications has been abused through advertising for commercial gain, that is particularly powerful and appropriate for anyone getting their head around the question of what design, (social) marketing, public relations and communications is for. For me, what Williams is stating is the notion that communications, a powerful and creative shared conversation across society, has become synonymous with ‘selling stuff’ only as a direct result of its capture by capitalism. Extend this line of enquiry and reflect back to Williams’ assertion that society and communications are in unity, and the conclusion is a powerful one:

“Our commonest economic error is the assumption that production and trade are our only practical activities, and that they require no other human justification or scrutiny. We need to say what many of us know in experience: that the life of man, and the business of society, cannot be confined to these ends; that the struggle to learn, to describe, to understand, to educate is a central and necessary part of our humanity.”

There’s currently plenty of debate around what prosperity post-crunch should actually represent in our society and the idea that seeing economic activity as being our singular measure of progress is, to cut to the chase, barking mad. Williams’ fifty year-old declaration that communications is for something other than chasing profits and consumption fits right into this dialogue; it could almost have been drafted in the last twelve months rather than in the early 60s.

One thing that is powerful about Williams’ critique is that it is directed at the process and practice of communications itself, rather than more narrowly at the corporations that are driving communications or the consumers who are the recipients of their cajoling gaze. It was in a discussion with Jai from UHC last year, that I finally came to the conclusion that for too long the critique of advertising has focused on and ridiculed the consumer, rather than the creators of the ad or the promo. Adbusters is a good case in point here. Great creative, powerful analysis, but in their ‘Obsession’ or ‘McGrease’ culture jamming ads for example I can’t help but feel it is the consumer and not the superstructure of international marketing communications that is being deconstructed and ridiculed.

So perhaps it’s time to take the battle to the doors of the ad agencies and the marketeers. I’m still thinking and working this through, and tossing around the idea of the ‘Polluter Pays’ principle as applied to advertising, but one example of pro-active action does stand out: the Clean City Law of Sao Paulo.

In 2007 the mayor Gilberto Kassab was on a mission to remove the city of visual clutter. This, the fourth-largest city in the world, was to made beautiful as part of a Clean City Law. It was a bold programme and it included a push to remove virtually all visual advertising from the city. The idea was to let the city and green space and natural scenery take a higher level of prominence rather than ads for cars, knickers and consumer goods.

The advertisers did not go willingly, dragging their heels and getting slapped with an $8 million fine in the process, but as contemporary images of Sao Paulo show (such as those by the documentary photographer Tony de Marco), the city has been scrubbed clean of advertising clutter, and the result is not a Soviet-style denuded city of faceless buildings and lifeless streets. The programme has worked thusfar and has been met with some approval, with surveys showing seven out of ten residents happy with the new law.

Tony de Marco’s photography does show one strange outcome of the law - the billboards and supporting structures still remain even thought he shrill call to BUY BUY BUY has been removed, leaving a ghostlike remembrance of the art of selling hanging over the city like some angels in a Herzog movie. I don’t know if this is the outcome I’d be after.

Going back to Raymond Williams, if communications is one with society, and if it could just as importantly be an alternative force “through which experience is described, shared, modified and preserved,” then surely there should be a case not simply for a comprehensive teardown of the billboards but of a shared space where society gets some of its mental space back. Imagine ‘folk advertising’ that shared recipes for jam, DIY tips or the very latest available on Freecycle; imagine a new platform for emboldened social marketing that promoted health, sustainability or tolerance; imagine simply setting these spaces over to art and creativity.

If communications is society’s shared conversation, and it has been all about consumerism until now, then let’s shift the topic, and talk about something new, and better.

[image by Tony de Marco]

A Forestry Manifesto for England’s Northwest

2010-02-27T17:30:00.001Z

Imagine, for a moment, asking a team of gifted engineers to invent a single device that could absorb and then lock up carbon, provide a carbon neutral building material or energy source, help stabilise vulnerable soils, provide a flood management system and offer a source of shade and cooling as the planet’s temperatures begin to rise.

And then imagine asking them to make it a beautiful and inspiring object too, one that created a wildlife habitat and pollution filter, to boot, an object that made virtually every human being feel happier.

Trees – they hold so many answers. Which is why it’s time in our region to make much more of forestry and woodlands.

I chair the Forestry Framework for England’s Northwest and, this week, had my tenure renewed for two more years. More importantly, I presented and had accepted a shared manifesto for forestry across the region that will set a clear target for planting more trees: we want to double woodland cover within a generation - by 2050. See the post below for the presentation I gave on Thursday.

Our manifesto is shaped around seven points, with woodland creation as a starting point:

TREES
We will radically increase tree planting and double woodland cover.

CITIES
We will bring a cool green revolution to our towns and cities.

CARBON
We will play a major part in tackling climate change.

WOOD
We will produce more timber and use more timber.

JOBS
We will support green jobs and sustainable skills.

HAPPINESS
We will help to create healthier and happier communities.

BEAUTY
We will transform our region’s image, from the field to the city.

These are the seven points that embrace our region’s singular opportunity: to place trees and woodland centre stage in our region’s future. We want to double our regional woodland cover by 2050 and in the process deliver a greener, lower carbon and more prosperous future to forthcoming generations.

This ambition is the focus of our forestry manifesto and is borne out of a desire to tackle climate change head on, to improve our region’s image, provide a richer and more accessible natural environment and to create genuine opportunities for job creation and enterprise.

This manifesto sits alongside our more extensive Forestry Framework, Agenda for Growth, which has been drawn up by a host of stakeholders, experts and government agencies to monitor and shape the woodland and forestry sector in our region for the next twenty years. With six action areas and dozens of specific priorities the Framework has a wider focus than this companion manifesto, which is tightly structured around a singular goal:

...to double our region’s woodland cover.

Northwest Forestry Framework - The Manifesto

2010-02-27T17:05:00.002Z

This is my presentation from Thursday this week to colleagues from the Northwest's Forestry Framework - our plan is to double woodland cover, secure millions of tonnes of carbon AND create more green jobs.

100224 nwff manifesto

View more presentations from Creative Concern.

Communication responsables...

2010-01-31T10:16:00.000Z

I was in Brussels this week, for a pitch on sustainable transport, EU partnerships and the need to hammer down carbon emissions in the public transport sector. We should be in with a shout: the project is communications support for a number of partner cities (including Manchester) and our consortium was made up of a unique network of agencies specialising in sustainable or green communications.

There's always a chance that some monolithic, multinational, boring, über-agency will stomp in and promise the world, but our network of creative, smaller agencies with a strong record on transport and the environment, has to be a winner.

Other than the chance of winning the project, the collaboration has been really useful for swapping notes with other people who 'do what we do' in other countries. Here in the UK, I would only really cite Futerra as a fellow traveller of ours, so it's brilliant to discover like minds in Europe. The two other agencies at the pitch were Yuluka in Brussels (who brilliantly pulled together the partnership) and Sidièse in Paris. Both fab, both with ideas and approaches to share.

We're thinking about formalising our network into something more high profile, structured around the notion of 'communication responsables', a French-born approach to sustainable communications which I'm busy learning about and which it would do no harm to bring to a wider audience in the UK. Core principles include transparency and honesty; it also appears to be a direct attempt to block ever higher levels of greenwash on the part of major corporates. More anon.

Covering up for the Whitworth

2010-01-19T09:02:00.004Z

The new wallpaper exhibition at the Whitworth - Walls Are Talking - launches in February and our team at Creative Concern have been hard at work designing the promo campaign for the show, which we’re really proud of.

Walls Are Talking is the first exhibition of its kind in the UK, featuring wallpapers by more than 30 internationally known artists including Andy Warhol, Damien Hirst and Niki de St. Phalle. Already well known for its wallpaper collection, the Whitworth is pulling together a genuinely challenging show and we knew that the campaign to promote it had to be every bit as edgy.

We worked with the City’s Creative Director, Peter Saville and photographer Graeme Cooper to produce the artwork, which directly responds to some of the core themes that the exhibition explores: subversion, sexuality and imprisonment.

The image (see above) features a portrait shown from below the eyes. It is an anonymous face with the mouth torn away revealing a layer of wallpaper. We wanted to capture the concept of the exhibition which is the idea of something passive taking over; ‘if only the walls could talk’.

Wallpaper was on my mind over Christmas actually, when I listened again to Stephen Fry’s ‘blessay’ on aesthetics and Oscar Wilde. In the podcast he recounts the time when Wilde was asked his view of the United States, famously responding that the reason that the US was such a violent, brutal place was because its wallpaper was so ugly.

As Stephen Fry then draws out, this is typical wildean flippancy at first hearing but actually stems from a deep belief in aesthetics and, critically, in the aesthetics of the everyday. It is the notion that if we care about design and quality and beauty then it will lift the spirits, enrich the human condition, make the world a better place.

Which is one reason why I’ll be just as focused on the Whitworth’s huge collection of ‘everyday’ wallpapers spanning several centuries, as well as the pieces submitted by the big name artists. Good design, and beauty, is something we should encounter from the moment we wake until the moment we finally stop Twittering and nod off to sleep.

And everyday aesthetics - finally - takes me back to one of my great Whitworth moments. The gallery has always been one of my favourites spaces, for over 20 years now. When I was a student I was there often, and one day a huge school group arrived to fill in work sheets, make some drawings and chatter their way through the galleries. As they emerged into the space, confronted by the rich collection of work, one of the children looked down, not up, and belted out the most lovely refrain: “What a beautiful floor!”
_

Walls Are Talking opens on February 6 and runs until May 3 and is collaboration with the V&A Museum. It includes specially commissioned work from artists Michael Craig-Martin and Catherine Bertola.

Green apples...

2010-01-18T06:45:00.001Z

Now I know that Mac Addicts the world over are ridiculed for the glazed, starry-eyed look that comes over them whenever their computers-of-choice are talked about, mentioned or featured in a Hollywood flick... we can see no bad in the cult led by Jobs. All is good in the land of Apple.

But even more than usual, I am currently a very, very happy Apple user. In the last few years, in spite of GORGEOUS machines coming out, and an ever-better operating system and the market-changing iPhone (swoon), Apple had a problem - it kept tanking in the environmental stakes. It repeatedly scored low in comparative reports between different manufacturers and so as a result became a target for campaigners; green Mac users like me kept our heads down.

Now we can take heart as Apple has topped a green computer league table published by Greenpeace. Due to innovations like the removal of PVC from cables, or that clever unibody that encases the laptop I'm typing into, Apple has emerged at the head of the league. Bloody lovely stuff.

Love your bike... just don't take a tram

2010-01-14T15:46:00.003Z

Here's a good quote for a dark and frosty winter's day, it's from Arthur Conan Doyle:

“When the spirits are low, when the day appears dark, when work becomes monotonous, when hope hardly seems worth having, just mount a bicycle and go out for a spin down the road, without thought on anything but the ride you are taking.”

Lovely... but just don't try and get on a tram when those legs get a little tired, as it looks like Greater Manchester is about to vote to continue its ban on tram-borne bikes.

It pains me to say it, but when it comes to bikes on the metro, London can do it. In fact a host of other cities can manage it. Here's just a snapshot of light rail or tram services around the world that let cyclists on board:

Vienna
Sydney Light Rail
Brussels
British Colombia SkyLink
Calgary Transit
Prague
Copenhagen Metr
Lille – Transpole
Berlin BVG
Bielefeld moBiel
Frankfurt VGF
Hannover USTRA
Munchen MVV
Nurnberg VGN
Stuttgart SSB -
Amsterdam GVB
Rotterdam RET
Charlotte LYNX
Dallas Area Rapid Transit
Denver RTD
Miami Dade County Transit
Minneapolis MetroTransit
Phoenix Valley Metro
Portland Trimet
St Louis Metro

So there you go; not impossible; which was actually the conclusion of the Greater Manchester Authorities in 2002 when they “unanimously agreed to the principle of allowing bikes on trams during non-peak hours”.

Understandably, our friends at the Friends of the Earth-run Love Your Bike campaign are not best pleased. They think that allowing bicycles to travel on off-peak trams would encourage more people to combine tram and cycle journeys for commuting, shopping and leisure, and be an effective way to reduce carbon emissions. This argument is given greater power once they point out that Greater Manchester's own transport strategy suggests that between 2 and 5 miles is a perfect cycling distance, and that around 90% of the Greater Manchester population will soon be within a 2.5 mile cycle ride of a tram (when the hugely welcome new Metrolink services are completed).

The vote on this takes place tomorrow and Love Your Bike is calling on anyone who can to urge the GMITA committee members to honour the pledge made in 2002 and vote to allow cycle carriage on off-peak cycle trams. If you fancy adding your voice, click here to send them an email.

Frost-coated windows

2010-01-07T01:43:00.001Z

P1032452, originally uploaded by shrinkingworld.

Loved this frost formation on a garage window this morning.

Shrinking cities versus sustainable cities

2009-12-22T14:46:00.000Z

A good meeting yesterday with Diana Balmori and her colleague Monica. We talked about a couple of projects that we're pitching on together and about the work we'd done at Creative Concern on place branding and creating a sense of place by working with communities, specifically the Real Lives campaign in Wythenshawe.

After that we talked on the related topic of the 'shrinking cities' concept that gets peddled around by planning academics (particularly a group led by Phillip Oswalt in Germany, who decided to label Manchester as one of their so-called Shrinking Cities). It strikes me that whilst, historically, cities may well have come and go, with the twin-tracks of intense urbanisation and resource depletion/climate change, we cannot entertain the idea of shrinkage - or even the death of cities - any more. We have to follow a course like Manchester's, and respond to industrial change through innovation and renewal... that's why the original modern city isn't shrinking any more.

After our chat I wandered along the High Line. Bloody amazing and inspirational. Photos here.

Breakfast Club at the Urban Design Institute

2009-12-15T20:43:00.001Z

Had a fab time this morning speaking to a breakfast session at the Urban Design Institute in NYC. The session was held at the Center for Architecture and the other presenters were Jake Barton (Local Projects), Jorge Colombo (artist) and Katie Dixon (Downtown Brooklyn Partnership).

With a good sized group of urbanists, architects and designers we discussed communication and urban design, and how the new accessibility of information is changing the way we experience our cities... we also had a good old poke at consumerism and bad branding... or at least I did.

My fellow presenters were fascinating. Jorge's work for the New Yorker, painting with an iPhone, was beautiful and insightful; Jake's work with interactive installations was utterly brilliant and I totally plan to collaborate with his group if I can; and Kate's work in Brooklyn is so close to some of our work, it was brilliant to make a connection.

Fab to be in the Center for Architecture, too - very much in the vein of our own, fabulous CUBE in Manchester.

Online with Tony Murray

2009-12-11T20:49:00.000Z

We've never had the easiest of relationships with How-Do, in all honesty, so it was with some trepidation that I agreed to do an interview with Tony Murray today, and gave him an opportunity to 'let rip' on subjects such as climate change or place branding that usually set the comment boards alight. Tony agreed that my replies wouldn't be edited, so I was happy to go ahead with it, and I hope the resulting interview will make it a bit clearer for How-Doers where we sit in the Pantheon of Northern Communicators.

Manchester. A Certain Future.

2009-12-08T20:30:00.013Z

Tonight we officially launched Manchester's new climate change action plan with the help of Ed Miliband, shortly before he disappeared off to Copenhagen.

Creative Concern worked with M Four and Manchester City Council on drafting the plan, editing the final text and we also built the plan's website.

We're very proud of the plan but even more proud of our city for signing up to some bold targets including the headline target of a 42% cut in CO2 emissions before 2020. Bold stuff, and as we wrote in the plan, if the world's first and definitive industrial city can get to grips with climate change then no city, anywhere else in the world, has any excuse to leave this issue in the tray marked 'too difficult'.

This Land is Our Land

2009-12-04T21:18:00.014Z

At the Bluecoat in Liverpool today, we helped with the launch of 'Adapting the Landscape', a framework vision for a new, productive landscape fusing together the two city regions of Liverpool and Manchester.

As well as producing some materials and a presentation for the event, Creative Concern was a key part of the project team, contributing to the new vision for a land that is home to 6 million people and an economy of £50 billion. The other members of the project team - led by URS Corporation - were WXY Studio in New York, West 8, Barnes Walker and the lovely people at Urban Practitioners. The project was funded - and steered - by the NWDA and the Regional Parks Xchange (where you can go to download the presentations from the event) as well as the Mersey Basin Campaign, Natural England, Homes and Communities Agency and Peel Holdings.

The ‘Adapting the Landscape’ research study is basically about using landscape, place and sustainability to help unlock even higher levels of prosperity, wellbeing and quality of life. It provides a framework for landscape adaptation and investment that can tackle climate change, support improvements in people’s quality of life and underpin economic growth. The framework we've come up with identifies the contribution that natural landscape resources can make to the future development of the Lower Mersey Basin, the area covered by this study. At the same time the approach provides a toolkit for identifying and prioritising investment that can be applied to any area.

The themes we explored through the project - initially as a set of future scenarios - included:

Mersey Bioregion
This is centred around a move towards a more self-sufficient, sustainable region with an emphasis on localism, renewable energy production, the growing of food and energy crops and a landscape well adapted to climate change.

Innovation Axis
Here, the key is to connect the city regions and major towns with stronger communications set in an area of attractive and marketable green infrastructure. There would be a focus on jobs and opportunities through the connection of knowledge centres and growth industries, including environmental technologies and services.

Mersey Playgrounds
This strand recognised the importance of high quality, accessible local environments where people can play, travel and work. Waterways will become destinations and leisure routes; flood alleviation measures will be used to create new landscapes and culture and art will be used to transform the visual experience of the region.

So what could be achieved? Some of the possibilities include:

Green the cities. Take the landscape of the Lower Mersey Basin into the heart of the cities with street trees and enhanced green infrastructure.

Embrace the waterfronts. Create and improve green access along the river and other waterways, stretching into the heart of the city regions and where possible, new water bodies.

Create a diverse landscape. Make the Mersey Bioregion the most dynamic, productive and biodiverse landscape through land art, farms and planting.

Manage a productive landscape. Produce energy from wind, tides, biomass and the sun.

Facilitate an accessible landscape. Establish a fine grain network of paths and bridges to accompany existing strategic arteries with an emphasis on localism.

Create a landscape for prosperity. Continue the Mersey’s history of innovation. In centres like Daresbury it is environmental technologies leading our way into a low carbon future.

Build a resilient and playful landscape. Utilise funding for flood defences to respond to flood risks and create iconic cultural landmarks, public space and new biodiverse habitats as part of ‘Mersey Playgrounds’.

Our next challenge is to build all of the above into the region's new Integrated Strategy (RS2010). Watch this space for more details.

Guerilla Lighting in Manchester

2009-12-01T22:44:00.001Z

Guerilla Lighting in Manchester, originally uploaded by shrinkingworld.

Photos of a guerilla lighting 'action' led by BDP in Manchester during December 2009. The photo is of an illuminated railway arch just near the old UMIST campus. More photos at Martin Lupton's dedicated Guerilla Lighting blog. There also more images at Walter Menzies' blog.

This is Manchester

2009-09-01T04:04:00.006+01:00

We've recently completed work on a new promo film for the city of Manchester, commissioned by Marketing Manchester, MIDAS and Manchester City Council.

The Director of Photography was James Henry, the film was edited by Monkey Tennis and the soundtrack was provided by Working for a Nuclear Free City [supplied by Woodwork music]. See what you think: http://vimeo.com/7266001

Benjamin on Klee

2009-05-22T20:48:00.000+01:00

The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward.

This storm is what we call progress.

Walter Benjamin,
Theses on the Philosophy of History

People power

2009-04-16T20:23:00.001+01:00

Today we launched a project I’ve been working on for two or three years now; a new climate fund for the Northwest that focuses on local, sustainable projects as a viable route to achieve carbon reductions whilst combating fuel poverty. It’s called ‘Foundation’.

Foundation, a climate fund for the Northwest is launching with a modest but significant scale and will deliver £1m per year for local, community based carbon projects. It will also give individuals and businesses the opportunity to donate to local community projects across the region that are helping to combat climate change whilst advancing social justice and tackling problems like fuel poverty.

Money raised will be spent on carbon reduction projects ranging from insulation, solar panels and wind turbines, to biological carbon sinks like peat bogs. The fund will be managed by Groundwork Northwest, chaired by United Utilities and with an initial investment of £1.6m from the Northwest Regional Development Agency, has a target to raise an additional £3m in donations over the next three years.

Foundation is as much about social equity as carbon reduction – projects must realise a reduction in carbon, but equally must deliver a wider range of benefits; including supporting families struggling to pay their heating bills, assisting local schools and community groups, investing in ‘green collar’ jobs and ultimately developing the region’s low carbon economy.

How did we help? Well we led the development of the entire concept (basically to develop a socially-engaged, local offset fund) with the help of a range of partners including Pannone, BDO Stoy Hayward, Arup, Quantum, Vision 21 and a host of others. Once we were into the launch phase, with Groundwork leading, we developed the Foundation name and brand, plus its website, media relations, marketing materials and we managed its launch.

Brand Earth

2008-12-22T20:47:00.003Z

This year sees the 175th anniversary of a milestone in corporate responsibility. In 1833 we finally made slavery illegal, or at least that was the headline.

For 30 years or so there’d been a loophole in the law that allowed companies to continue to trade, facing a possible £100 per head fine if they got caught. Or they threw slaves into the sea at the first sign of an approaching Royal Navy vessel.

Whatever, we closed the loophole.

Corporate behaviour being what it is, too often, a further loophole remained. Any slave over the age of six wasn’t freed, they became ‘apprentices’, indentured as before. Years would pass before their shackles were loosened.

Then there was a compensation package of £20 million for slave owners, and exclusions, too: one for the East India Company and one for Ceylon.

It’s an extreme example but an informative one. No matter how heinous the corporation’s behaviour, there always appears to be some wiggle room.

Leap forward to 1970 and a burgeoning social responsibility movement got a hefty thwack around the head from the arch monetarist, Milton Friedman. His now famous essay, required reading for rapacious MBAs worldwide, appeared in the New York Times, stating that “there is one and only one social responsibility of business, to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game”.

Ethical Corporation magazine - a good read - spoke on his death in 2006 of the service that Friedman did for the world of CSR. He made progressives in business sharpen up their act, add some rigour to their thinking.

They’re probably right and in some ways I may even be with Friedman on this one (at which point my oldest friends and colleagues will no doubt faint), my only major shift would be in what defines the ‘rules of the game’. Friedman’s stricture was legal compliance; mine would be about the corporation’s wider contract with society.

This fast and imperfect trolley dash through the history of corporations is designed to reveal that a) I’m good at looking things up on Wikipedia and b) that when you read the latest news report on ‘green brands’ or ‘ethical consumers’ or ‘fashionistas who wear hemp’ you realise that this is a dialogue that has been ongoing since King Magnus IV of Sweden created the oldest limited company - Stora Kopparberg mining corp - in 1347.

There is nothing new in corporations seeking profit but that pursuit has, from day one, been set against a context of wider social good. As a society we continue to fasten a judgemental eye on the corporation. A GfK NOP poll in May revealed that consumers rank the Northwest’s very own Co-operative Group as the most ethical corporation, retaining the top spot that it held in 2007. Next up come the Body Shop and M&S, with Innocent Drinks and Divine entering the top ten for the first time. Importantly though, the survey reveals some skepticism in the marketplace: just 18% of the 3000 consumers interviewed, compared to 21% in 2007, believed that business ethics have improved in Britain.

Those two new entries into the top ten, Innocent and Divine, are telling. They are brands - and products - that are constructed from the ground up as ‘eco-brands’. They follow a market appetite for sustainable products that has clearly entered the mainstream. They are not alone: ‘I am not a plastic bag’, anyone?

So can all of this be labelled ‘greenwash’? From the corporation that uses the gobbledegook of CSR ‘benchmarking’ or ‘continued improvement matrices’ to the conspicuous consumption that makes us feel better about using more of the Earth’s resources, is this another inflection of the free market capitalism which Friedman so adored and which a massive 82% of us still view with suspicion?

Perhaps. And can any brand or corporation be beyond intense scrutiny and examination in the age of mass communications where a 1,000 blogs can be updated in the blink of an eye? Ted Turner of AOL Time Warner once said that in the Internet Age it could take only seven minutes for your corporate brand to be damaged, globally, if you cocked things up.

If you want to take a more empowered look at what is, or isn’t greenwash then I’d urge you to download the greenwash guide recently published by our good friends at Futerra. As ever it’s pleasing combination of intelligent analysis with a tip-strip you can blue tack to your computer screen.

My closing comment would be this, however:

It’s not just corporations that have a contract with society: we have one too. People drive cars, eat meat, buy cheap shit and do too little to reflect their own value sets in their daily lives. We live in a dissonant fug for too much of the time and yet still reserve the right to judge corporations. If we shift our behavioural patterns then the marketplace changes too. The brightest and the best in the business world know this, they’re not stupid.

We are powerful, but we have to exert that power. We are complicit, and that should be in our frame of reference too. It’s a hippy mantra but Ghandi was right.

You must be the change you wish to see in the world.

Quote me happy

2008-12-22T20:24:00.000Z

“A new political movement is beginning to emerge. Rooted in protest, its advocates are not bounded by national geography, a shared culture or history, and its members comprise a veritable ragtag of by now millions of NGOs, grassroots movements, campaigning corporations, and individuals.”

Noreena Hertz

“To be truly radical, is to make hope possible, rather than despair convincing.”
Raymond Williams

“The bold evolutionary experiment of combining a large forebrain with opposable thumbs clearly has its dangers and drawbacks; the jury is still out on whether it was ultimately a good idea. But it has equipped us to avoid or solve the problems we’ve created.”
Amory Lovins

“My own belief is that a conscious thought can be planted into the unconscious if a sufficient amount of of vigour and intensity is put into it.”
Bertrand Russell

“Gross National Happiness is more important than Gross National Product.”
Jigme Singye Wangchuck, King of Bhutan

“Cast your whole vote, not a slip of paper merely, but your whole influence.”
Henry David Thorough

“My country is the world and my religion is to do good.”
Thomas Paine

Bluecoat goes green

2008-09-01T20:51:00.002+01:00

Last year we installed an indoor forest at the Annual General Meeting of the Northwest Regional Development Agency, with eco-films showing amongst the ring of native trees we'd put in place at the Manchester Central Convention Centre. Now Creative Concern has delivered a second tree-based installation, this time outside the Bluecoat Gallery in Liverpool as part of the city's Capital of Culture year.

The installation is made up of 16 mature maple trees, panels with quotations and reflections from famous writiers and a light and sound installation powered by a giant 'solar' tree which is an integral part of the installation.

Sustainability and climate change, improving the ambience of the streets and even the health benefits of trees in the city will be explored as part of the work, which is in situ until September 14 and which will be there tomorrow as we run our Form>Wood conference on the importance of timber as a building resource.

The project is a partnership between the Forestry Commission, NWDA, Regional Parks Xchange, Groundwork and the Environment Agency.

Form>wood>future

2008-03-26T19:42:00.000Z

We’re just in the process of finalising the details for a conference in Liverpool called Form>Wood. Its focus is on timber as a sustainable design and construction material and the event is a partnership between the Northwest Forestry Framework (which I chair), the Northwest Development Agency, Forestry Commission, Community Forests Northwest and Capital of Culture.

We’re aiming for a mix of architects, developers and timber industry representatives, we’ve got Ted Cullinan delivering a keynote address and we’re staging it at the newly re-opened, sublime Bluecoat on 15 May.

The principle aim of the event is a simple one. We want more people commissioning, designing and building with wood, timber and trees at the forefront of their minds.

Why? Because the buildings we live and work in, through their construction and then through the energy we use to heat or light them, account for over a quarter of our region’s carbon emissions. For the residential sector alone, this represents 17 million tonnes of carbon, a figure which the Northwest has committed to reducing by at least 7 million tonnes by 2020.

Trees, woodland and the timber industry can play a pivotal role in helping us tackle climate change head on, whether it is reducing our energy use or helping us adapt to the changes in climate which, no matter what we do, cannot be avoided.

Imagine, for a moment, asking a team of talented engineers to invent a single device that could absorb and then lock up carbon, provide a carbon neutral building material or energy source, help stabilise vulnerable soils, provide a flood management system and offer a source of shade and cooling as the planet’s temperatures begin to rise.

And then imagine asking them to make it a beautiful and inspiring object too, one that created a wildlife habitat and pollution filter, to boot.

It’s a simple and powerful proposition. Trees and timber offer a sustainable and immediate solution to a host of climate-related challenges. Using wood as a building material, from timber frames or cladding through to entire constructions made from wood, has to be a priority for architects, engineers and developers who want to take climate change seriously.

The low energy solution

How much could this save? A significant amount. Replacing a single cubic metre of concrete or red brick with the same volume of timber can save around one tonne of carbon dioxide. Concrete uses five times as much energy to produce as wood; steel uses six times as much. If you expand this out to an average two-storey dwelling, using a timber frame alone could save four tonnes of carbon dioxide, roughly equivalent to driving 14,000 miles by car. If the 26,000 additional households forecast for the Northwest by 2026 were all built in this way, we could save over 100,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide, through timber frames alone.

The switch from materials with a high level of ‘embodied’ energy such as steel or concrete is just one way in which wood can help reduce the carbon footprint of our building stock, but wood is also a good insulator, too, whether used for frames, windows or cladding. Timber’s natural insulation properties mean that double-glazed or even triple-glazed windows for example can achieve the highest energy window ratings, beating alternatives such as PVC or aluminium.

Europe’s great carbon ‘sink’

Using wood as a construction material also increases the amount of carbon dioxide absorbed by Europe’s standing forest, this is because more than 99 per cent of the timber used in the UK is softwood from European forests and as these forests are managed sustainably, we plant more new trees every time we extract timber destined for sawmills and processing plants right across the continent. In fact, European forest cover is increasing by over 9,000 square kilometres every single year.

Add to the product mix the other environmental benefits of wood: it is organic, enhances biodiversity, can be easily recycled and avoids the need for quarrying and the extraction of aggregates, and you have an unbeatable case for timber as a truly sustainable construction material.

A growing market

The market is starting to see the value in wood. Timber frame housing increased by 15 per cent in 2005, for example, while other types of construction actually saw their markets decline. Timber framed housing now represents 20 per cent of new build and the projections for 2008 are that one in every four homes built will be timber framed, but we could do much, much more. Globally around 70 per cent of homes are built, often entirely, from wood and as close to home as Scotland, the market share for timber framed housing is a much healthier 73 per cent. We have ample scope for improvement.

We can do more with timber today, too. Traditionally timber framed houses could reach two or three storeys at most but these levels are increasing to five, six or seven stories and with engineering performance increasing all the time, the industry research body TRADA expects these performance levels to increase still further. The construction times for a timber framed building are shorter, too and they offer a safer, more efficient construction site with a typical house being weather tight in less than five days.

The beauty of wood

The materials are available, the environmental credentials are strong and the research shows that wood can perform when compared to the heavier, less sustainable alternatives. The challenge now is to achieve a significant ‘step change’ in the commissioning, designing and building of homes and workplaces that are made all or in part, from wood. Wood is certainly getting some good press. Ted Cullinan, keynote speaker at the Northwest Forestry Framework’s ‘Form>Wood’ event and RIBA Gold Medal winner this year is known for his timber constructions, in particular the Downland Gridshell in West Sussex.

Architects like Sheppard Robson are developing affordable new housing forms - such as the Lighthouse - out of wood and in the Northwest region have shown how spectacular wood can be through their proposed wood cladding of a car park in Penrith. Wooden buildings in the Northwest are also winning awards, with the Feilden Bradley Clegg-designed Formby Pool collecting a RIBA award in 2007.

And I used to live in an award-winning wooden building myself until we decided to start crazily renovating crumbling piles of brick as I was one of the first buyers to sign up for Stephenson-Bell’s superb Chorlton Park flats complex. Just along from our offices in the Northern Quarter, BDP’s new HQ is close to completion and is beautifully clad in wood.

What these great, innovative designs reveal is that building from wood offers a real opportunity from public buildings and cultural venues through to the new houses we know we will have to construct as our demand increases for new homes regionally and nationally. The beauty of wood - aside from its obvious aesthetic credentials - is that it offers a more sustainable future for developments both large and small.

The form really should be wood.

Green spot

2007-10-19T20:41:00.002+01:00

The latest natural media installation from Creative Concern took shape this week at the Northwest Regional Development Agency’s (NWDA) Annual Conference and General Meeting (Thursday, October 18) where we treated delegates to a wooded wonderland that celebrates the environmental renaissance of England’s Northwest.

A native forest of six-metre high beeches, elders and silver birches illuminated with low-energy LED lights was installed in the exhibition space of the AGM to form part of a ‘Green Spot’ exhibition. Three 42-inch plasma screens were set amongst the circle of trees to show a series of short films about the environmental land regeneration programmes and green schemes taking place across the region. The films highlight the work of the NWDA and the other Green Spot partners, all of which are working for the sustainable development of England's Northwest.

Partners in the exhibition included the Forestry Commission, Mersey Waterfront, Groundwork, Natural Economy Northwest, ENWORKS, Environment Connect and the Mersey Basin Campaign.

Helping us pull off the Green Spot were our partners at The Potting Sheds (who sourced and installed Green Spot), Mayhood Brothers of Burscough (tree suppliers) and Steve Massam and Peter Grimshaw Tree Surgeons (for wood and bark used in the installation.

Homo ethicus - beyond booze and fags

2007-10-04T20:31:00.001+01:00

We now spend more on ethical products than we do on booze and fags, according to the Co-operative Bank’s last Ethical Consumerism report.

There are organic clothes at ASDA. Virgin’s positioning is all about climate change. Coffee is fairtrade at Starbucks, with the option of frothy soya milk. You can even buy ethical erotica - whatever that might entail - from Anita Roddick’s daughter, Sam. And here in Manchester we’ve seen Tesco invest £25 million in a new Centre for Sustainable Consumption at the University of Manchester.

The high street, not to mention online retailers or out-of-town stores, is witnessing a seismic shift amongst shoppers. We have moved into a new era for retailing. The age of the ethical consumer has arrived.

Now none of this is news to those of us who were buying fairtrade Guatemalan body putty and veganic sausages back in the late 80s and early 90s, but this is totally mainstreamed activity now. We are witnessing a permanent change in the way that people make key purchasing decisions.
In other words, this is no consumer fad. The ground rules have changed.

So back to that market data. In 2005 the sales of ethical products in the UK for the first time exceeded the amount we spent as a nation on alcohol and tobacco, which netted £28 billion while the market for ethical goods, which reached £29 billion, up 11 per cent on the previous year. As you might imagine, within the detail of the report some fascinating trends are revealed. Ethical shareholding grew by 15 per cent over the year; we spent a quarter more on ethical clothing; our spend on green energy supplies grew by 42 per cent; and our appetite for organic food grew by 30 per cent. Remarkable growth, all in one year. In total the ethical market growth of 11 per cent was almost ten times greater than the rise in household expenditure.

It also contrasts with the annual rise in retail sales charted by the British Retail Consortium, which stood at 3.9 per cent in March of this year.

From cars, to cashpoints, to cotton, there is an ever-growing army of consumers out there switching allegiance to products that differentiate themselves in the marketplace not through price or celebrity endorsement but simply because they do less harm.

‘Buy different’

So how should we describe this new era? I’d borrow from the ‘Think Different’ campaign run by Apple Computer in the 1990s and suggest that what we have on our hands now is the ‘Buy Different’ generation.

Buy different. They want to change the way they shop. They want to balance affordability, desirability and sustainability. They also want the full story behind the brand, warts and all. They want connection.

Buy different. They want different kinds of products that are designed from the ground up. Like the CIS Sustainable Leaders Trust investment fund, the first ever green trust to top the UK All Companies sector. Or the Dyson, or the Prius, or the Innocent Smoothie. The motto is to ‘differentiate’.

Buy different. They want to know that the companies they engage with are different in the suppliers they use and the way they catalyse positive global trade. Are you greening the supply chain? They will ask. Do you respect union rights? Are you implicated in corrupt regimes? Are children involved in manufacturing your products?

Buy different. The new consumers want products and companies that reflect who they are and what they believe in.

In fact it looks as if the barcode - celebrating its 60th anniversary next year by the way - needs to be redesigned from black to green, and that we need to add a new set of lines and spaces to tell consumers the true cost of the products in their basket. We need to redefine the barcode, just as consumers are redefining our global patterns of consumption.

For corporations getting their head around the ‘Buy Different’ drivers covering new types of shopping and differentiated products there is still the third and most important driver: trust. You can’t sell a green product for example and expect to get away with the remaining 80 per cent of your portfolio having a poor impact on the environment or local communities. There is no place in the new retail era for tokenism, you will get rumbled. You can’t go ‘beyond petroleum’ and yet still make a fortune piping gas and oil across Kazahkstan. It won’t wash.

You can’t talk the talk without walking the walk.

The Co-operative Bank - one of Creative Concern’s clients - knows this. That’s why they’ve been publishing independently-verified sustainability reports now for almost a decade. Their reports examine in detail ecological and social responsibility, as well as performance in delivering value. The 2002 report for the Co-operative Bank was rated by the United Nations Environment Programme as the world’s best. They have won the European Sustainability Reporting Awards twice, in 2002 and 2004.

This is not a plastic bag.

As the round-the-corner queues for the celebrity-endorsed ‘This is not a plastic bag’ have shown, ethical consumerism is now a dominating force.

The rules have changed.

Ted Turner, the CEO of AOL Time Warner has gone on record as saying that in the new hyperlinked, globalised world of email, blogs and websites you could see even the largest global brands taken apart in as little as seven minutes due to an ethical slip of one sort or another.
Seven minutes, the time it would take to destroy brands built across decades.

We have entered a new era for retailing, the Buy Different generation is calling the shots. We have entered the age of the homo ethicus and there’s no turning back. Homo ethicus. A Prius-driving, American Apparel-wearing, turbine-touting new breed of consumer that will rock the retail world.

The Field

2007-10-04T20:14:00.000+01:00

Connect. Illuminate. Energise. What more could you ask for than a field full of fluorescent tubes drawing their power from overhead transmission lines? I went tonight to see Richard Box’s installation called ‘The Field’, an arrangement of several hundred regular flourescent tubes that draw their energy from the electro-magnetic field (EMF) generated by the overhead powerlines.

Richard Box was in attendance and after we’d stumbled through a darkened field along the banks of the River Goyt to get to the installation, he proved enthusiastic about the project which had nonetheless presented a bunch of technical challenges including the fact that the energy company had reduced the power running through the overhead lines. Anyone would think that they’d done it intentionally, to downplay the rather erie impact that the installation has on you when you realise the extent and power of EMFs.

The project itself is part of Stockport/Sustrans collaboration called ‘Connect 2’ which is bidding for Lottery money to extend part of the National Cycle Network.

Greening the Northwest

2007-10-01T20:40:00.001+01:00

Today (Monday 1 October) I’m chairing a Forum taking a good old peak and a poke at the Northwest’s Forestry Framework - the strategy for woodlands and forestry across England’s Northwest. It’s been in operational ‘mode’ for around a year now and I’m dead pleased that there’s been some progress made (though a good few challenges remain).

There is co-ordinated activity across the region taking forward a host of actions set out in our ‘Agenda for Growth’. Of the 47 actions in our plan, 43 are underway and the remainder will almost all be coming onstream in the coming year.

So across our six areas of action we are genuinely helping to bring the businesses working in woodlands and forestry together more closely into a recognisable sector; we are enhancing our region’s image through greenspace development and we have plans for the transformation of gateway sites; we are supporting ‘greener’ farming and seeing the restoration of natural areas; we are making good links with the health sector, with education and with the prison service; we are putting efforts into developing biomass as a sustainable energy source within the region; and we are staying focused, in our sixth action area, on how we can keep improving our performance as a sector not least with the launch of a new Rural Development Programme for England.

And I am particularly pleased that we are planning a few, signature projects out of the Forestry Framework ‘stable’ that hit a number of our targets across differing action areas.

These include a plan for a conference and PR campaign called ‘Form>Wood’ which will target the architecture, design and urban development sectors with the message that wood is the sustainable and contemporary material of choice. We are also launching a programme to really get to the heart of whether our urban tree cover is as healthy as we think it is or should be and will use the results of our surveying work to raise the game of our local authorities, in particular.

So there is plenty of progress in greening the region and supporting the sector, but there are many, many challenges that remain.

We must continue to expand our partnerships beyond the usual suspects. We need to develop more joint projects like the recent Land Remediation Network we’ve established with Envirolink and we seriously need to improve our linkages to the private sector.

We need to ask ourselves, honestly, if we are trying to do too much or if the Framework is adding enough value to the region’s endeavours in our area. We must ensure we are the very opposite of a talking shop: we must be a source of action, activity and transformation.

We have to reach out and ensure that a much wider audience hears of our progress and finds out what they can do to partner up with us and help deliver our programme. We must create more of a ‘buzz’ now that our projects and activities are taking form.

And we have to improve the entire sector’s performance in a few key areas.

We have to get better at influencing regional strategies and helping shape our region’s future; a new Regional Economic Strategy is being developed and we have on the horizon the prospect of an Integrated Regional Strategy which should have woodlands, forestry and greenspace as a key component; the true ‘setting’ for prosperity and growth.

We must do our part to deliver against the region’s Climate Change Action Plan, particularly in the adaptation to climate change impacts where woodlands forestry has the power seriously help to improve the resilience of both our rural and urban areas.

Finally we need to strive for ever better levels of design and delivery. If we are given the incredible opportunity of programmes like Newlands we must create spaces and places that inspire and transform communities; that rival anything, anywhere in the world; that make England’s Northwest a region that attracts talent, investment and trade.

In 2008 we will be working to freshen up our Action Plan in the face of new national and regional developments but there will be no new strategies or visions or frameworks in the next few years; we have our plan, our stakeholders have agreed it and we will be sticking at it until all of our actions are delivered and all of our promises are made good.

Alongside a few other key areas of regional endeavour, such as the knowledge economy, climate change and work to achieve greater levels of community cohesion; our sector - woodlands and forestry - has pivotal role to play in delivering a more sustainable region for the future, a greener future for England’s Northwest.

The future is Pennine Lancashire, the legacy is Tony Wilson’s.

2007-09-17T20:12:00.000+01:00

This week we formally launched a new brand for Pennine Lancashire, which we developed with our good friend and collaborator Peter Saville and Livesey Wilson Associates. The brand has been commissioned by Elevate, Pennine Lancashire’s Housing Market Renewal pathfinder and will be used both as a ‘flag’ under which regeneration projects will be taken forward and as a more conventional destination brand for the area.

The launch took place at Stanley House in the hills above Blackburn and included a string of tributes to Anthony H Wilson, whose vision of a ‘Seattle-style’ revinvention of the area has already launched a host of projects and brought in new energy and new ideas. We raised a flag, too.

The new brand is made up of a new graphic device called ‘Contour’ and a type treatment for ‘Pennine Lancashire’ that will be used by a host of partners across the areas of Blackburn with Darwen, Burnley, Ribble Valley, Hyndburn, Pendle and Rossendale.

The project was first conceived in the 2005 report ‘Dreaming of Pennine Lancashire’ which was written by tony and his partner Yvette Livesey, both of whom played a central part in the creation of the new ‘Contour’ brand.

For us, this is the latest in a line of place branding projects that have been strongly related to our region’s stunning natural environment.

The important thing for us - and I’ve said it before on this blog - is that a place brand has to represent the truth of environmental and social connections that the individual will make when arriving or experiencing place. For locals, they need to feel pride in a brand and recognise it as a faithful representation of their area; for visitors, they need to recognise the brand when they arrive and not feel that they have been duped or lied too as that is no way to build long term brand loyalty. In short, your brand is what you’re known for and should be a faithful response to the place in question.

Our new brand for Elevate and the partners across Pennine Lancashire has primarily been designed to inspire, engage and empower the people of the area to continue their work towards an economic and social renaissance. It is as much about pride as it is tourism.

The graphic device conceived by our design team is called ‘Contour’, a panoramic fusion of multi-coloured contour lines that does more than just replay the landscape of the Pennines that represents such an important framing element for communities across Rossendale, Burnley or Blackburn... it also suggests other important dimensions of Pennine Lancashire such as weaving, canals and rooftops. The lines of Contour are not static. They form a range of shapes to become suggestive of an urban landscape, for example, or of a lowland area bounded by canals or waterways.

The ribbon-like shape of the graphic helps to inform its deployment and suggests a variety of uses from panoramic boundary signs to illuminated fascias, gatefolded print and 16:9 screenshots.

The new Pennine Lancashire brand also includes a type treatment based on Res Publica Medium, a face that was selected as a modern take on the traditional serif and that would prove bold, robust and readable when used across a very wide variety of environments. It also provides a strong and solid anchor point for the more lyrical and dextrous graphic element of the brand.

And even though we’re terribly proud of the new brand we;ve created, there was much more on offer at the launch this week. The launch also included the unveiling of plans for ‘Weave’, an iconic multi-use redevelopment of a historic mill in the Weavers’ Triangle, Burnley that is being developed by Ralph Ardill of the Brand Experience Consultancy.

There was also an update on other key projects such as Chic Sheds, Sound Investments and Pennine Lancashire Squared.

Anyway, back to the new brand! Our recommendations are that it will have three key areas of use.

The first use of the brand will be a as a ‘flag under which we rally’ and builds on the words of Livesey Wilson Associates who wrote that “the disparate elements of East Lancashire need a flag to march behind, a unifying symbol to lead them to top of the mountain known as ‘successful regeneration’.

The second use of the brand will be as a more traditional ‘destination’ brand for promotions that will attract visitors or investors to the area or that will mark out your entry into, or experience of, Pennine Lancashire. Walking or cycling guides, targeted promotion at gateways, boundary markers or themed events are all good examples of where the use of the Pennine Lancashire brand will be considered.

Here the Pennine Lancashire brand has been designed to consciously connect to a ‘drivetime’ audience that is aspirational, creative and upmarket; the ‘creative class’ set out in the original Livesey Wilson report in 2005. It speaks to professionals in Liverpool, Manchester, Preston and Leeds and has the potential to unlock a day visitor market that could in time translate into new residents, new business start-ups and new investments in the area.

The third and final use will be as an endorsement or ‘kite mark’ for other projects denoting their shared lineage and set of aspirations.

We’re proud to have worked on it and proud to have worked with Anthony H Wilson.

The world's first living advert

2007-09-11T20:12:00.002+01:00

Creative Concern (celebrating five years in business this year by the way) has launched a new concept that is set to change the face of billboard advertising, with an installation in Merseyside that replaces carbon-intensive materials with a living hedge of native willow trees.

Here’s our press release about it: The Green Billboard is a sustainable advertising medium made entirely from willow trees with a range of environmental benefits conventional hoardings cannot offer – reduction of noise pollution, increase in tree coverage and a natural screen for unsightly developments.

And socially and economically a green billboard can also represent a long-term investment in the landscape with its fresh and unusual organic materials that make for a visual high point for local communities.

The first installation of the willow billboard is already in place and can be seen from the M53, situated on a new woodland development in Merseyside at Bidston Moss and follows months of meticulous planning by the ethical agency in partnership with Cheviot Trees and fellow design agency, Modern Designers.

Questioning the corporate responsibilities of the advertising industry to become more sustainable in their practices, Steve Connor, managing director of Creative Concern said:

“Our urban environments, which are predominately those areas where we see the biggest collections of hoarding are set to suffer a ‘heat island effect’ due to climate change. The green billboard goes some way to respond to this challenge as well as addresses the problems of air and traffic pollution by utilising trees as a natural filter.

“Finally green hoardings help bring a little bit of nature into the urban realm and offer an antidote to the modern architectural venacular of concrete and steel upon which any kind of advertising or art installation can be mounted.”

The natural medium offers the creative community a new challenge, too, according to Modern Designers' Mat Bend:

"For the Bidston Moss design, which celebrates the greening of the Northwest, we've created a billboard that literally allows the leaves of the trees to grow through it, fusing a dramatic and powerful message with the very same medium that is carrying it; green billboards have great potential for innovative design responses, particularly as part of regeneration schemes like this one."

Measuring 30m by 2.5m the only sustainable outdoor advertisement in this world was delivered on behalf of the Northwest Regional Development Agency (NWDA) and the Forestry Commission (FC), and displays the partnership’s message ‘ One Tree Is Planted Every Ten Seconds In This Region’. The billboard has been established on a new community woodland area at Bidston Moss on the Wirral Peninsula, one of a number of derelict or under-used sites being reclaimed as part of the Northwest's £70 million Newlands programme.

By utilising hand-cut letters fixed onto the hoarding, the organic nature of the NWDA and FC’s advertisement will be able to evolve, allowing the branches of the growing willow to show through, becoming an integral part of the green billboard.

And unlike traditional outdoor advertising mediums, including digital and mobile street furniture, the green billboard offers a fresh and innovative communication channel that demonstrates real social and environmental commitment to their customers.

More photographs? Click here.

Branding places, loving spaces

2007-09-04T20:46:00.001+01:00

Creative Concern is busy working with Peter Saville on a new brand for Pennine Lancashire. The process has involved discussion ‘place brands’ afresh with a whole host of local stakeholders, agencies and politicians. The launch of the brand is on 17 September and we hope it will be a fitting tribute to Anthony Wilson, a good friend whose vision we are working to in this project.

For us, branding spaces and places is a creative activity that stands well apart from the creation of logotypes and graphic banners for consumer goods, service companies or fashion labels. The first and most obvious distinction is that the brand has to be true to the experience of the place itself, both for the indigenous population and for the visitor.

As Peter Saville says: “Your brand is what you’re known for.”

A place brand has to represent the truth of environmental and social connections that the
individual will make when there. Put most simply, your brand is ‘what you are known for’ and to
overlay that knowledge with anything other than a faithful creative response is misguided and ultimately flawed. If you promise sylvan wonderlands, polished palaces of alabaster or streets paved with gold then the reality had better meet that promise, or visitors and residents alike will lose faith in the brand immediately.

Another vital distinction is that its brand is not simply a slogan or a strapline with a colourful badge attached to it, designed to attract and secure a notional horde of peripatetic tourists or international investors who may, or may not exist. Too often when towns or cities create a new logo or strapline it is more of a civic cry for help than a call for the partners to rally around a shared vision of the future.

This latter mission, a rallying call, is the intention of the Pennine Lancashire brand. It is much better to describe this brand for Pennine Lancashire as a banner under which partnerships come together to achieve great things.

And if that banner attracts visitors, too, then all the better.

Topophilia

2007-08-21T20:00:00.000+01:00

We’ve had the good fortune to work on a number of place brands recently, including brands for Wirral, Sefton, Manchester, Salford and now, Pennine Lancashire. One piece of pure, raw inspiration for this work is the Chinese-American geographer Yi-Fu Tuan whose thoughts on ‘psychogeograpy’ and what he calls ‘topophilia’ are really powerful.

Our work with Peter Saville on the brand for Pennine Lancashire has developed a wide range of visual themes exploring landscape, connectivity and diversity. As a starting point for their deliberation, the design team here at Creative Concern were embracing this concept of ‘topophilia’, a phrase coined by the Yi-Fu Tuan in his 1973 book of the same name.

Literally meaning ‘Love of Place’, topophilia moves beyond what has become known as ‘sense of place’ branding or ‘placemaking’ and reaffirms the need for place branding to be more about emotional connection, knowledge and belonging. As an approach it helps to strengthen ownership of a brand and as a result leads to a more robust and longer-lasting brand that draws people and organisations toward it; it helps creatives to develop a brand that acts as a rallying point or focus of shared attention.

Here are some words from his book of the same name:

“The word ‘topophilia’ is a neologism, useful in that it can be defined broadly to include all of the human being’s affective ties with the material environment. These differ greatly in intensity, subtlety and mode of expression. The response to environment may be primarily aesthetic: it may then vary from the fleeting pleasure one gets from a view to the equally fleeting but far more intense sense of beauty that is suddenly revealed. The response may be tactile, a delight in the feel of air, water, earth. More permanent and less easy to express are feelings that one has toward a place because it is home, the locus of memories, and the means of gaining a livelihood.” Yi-Fu Tuan, Topophilia

The banal destroyer

2007-05-04T20:16:00.000+01:00

Jeffrey Sach’s recent Reith Lectures series kicked off with a timely reference to the concept of the Anthropocene as created by Paul Crutzen. The concept is pretty simple if sobering - that we are now in a period of Earth’s history where humankind’s activities are having a permanent and marked impact on the biosphere.

Sach’s second lecture, Survival in the Anthropocene, is totally worth a listen.

The Crutzen reference got me thinking about the phrase that Oppenheimer quoted from the Bhagavad Gita as they tested the first atomic weapon at Los Alamos in the States. “Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds,” he pondered as the mushroom cloud ascended.

The Oppenheimer moment triggered off a further thought.

As a generation x-er I grew up with a mortal fear of Oppenheimer’s creation and considered Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) to be a world-crushing threat that hung over us each and every day. A couple of decades on and the CND badge (perhaps sadly) is no longer on my lapel but I work now on behavioural change campaigns to help save our small blue planet, developing strategies for jamming the moments of dissonance where we commit those small, incremental acts of ecocide, such as leaving the lights on or trashing the paper rather than recycling it.

And it got me to a final conclusion that one of the great tragedies about the Anthropocene and our unsustainable slide towards environmental collapse is how banal our planetary destruction is. There is none of the bleak and chilling heroism of an actor-president and a vodka soaked comrade with their fingers poised over nuclear arsenals that have the megaton-power to pulverise the planet thirteen times over. A big bang, and no tomorrow.

Instead our collapse could be a traced along a trail of SUV brochures and disposable nappies and pissed-up cheap flights to Marbella; of new TVs and second cars and lazy school runs; of badly designed plywood palaces and of pointless trolley-dashes around out-of-town mega-malls just to fill the aching chasm within.

What a way to go out. At least nuclear oblivion had a certain level of grim panache, whereas environmental collapse, when you think about it, is just embarrassing and sloppy.

So here’s our new reason to save the planet: humankind deserves a much better epitaph.

Think global, talk local

2007-03-29T20:11:00.000+01:00

Communicating sustainable development. The phrase itself makes it sound like you’re speaking Klingon. You can place it alongside ‘capacity building for community empowerment’ or ‘centres of excellence for best practice’ in the hideous jargon jamjar of obfuscation.

In short, the words don’t help.

The other challenge for those of us dealing with communications and sustainability is the fact that so many people can feel paralysed by the sheer scale of the issues and problems we’re seeking to tackle. Global warming? Quick, hide beneath the duvet! Species extinction? Heads in the sand, comrades! Deprivation and global poverty? Pass me the remote, it’s time for Dancing on Ice. This is territory that our colleagues at Futerra have explored really well in their ‘Rules of the Game’ for communicating climate change. Creating fear without agency is not a smart move.

If you’re planning a major campaign on something like climate change then one winning strategy for success is to root your creative work in something that the audience can strongly relate to: their own lives and the place where they live. You need to think global but talk local.

We did this when we created the Manchester is my Planet campaign towards the end of 2005 for our clients at Manchester: Knowledge Capital. The phrase itself was conceived to fuse civic pride and a very Mancunian cockiness with the global challenge of climate change. As well as the campaign title, there was a slogan of ‘Save your planet, start with Manchester’ that worked really well. We even drilled further down with the campaign and created more local variants; ‘Trafford is my Planet’ is a campaign by one of the Greater Manchester authorities that is running to this day. We used local celebrities and more than 100 large organisations across the city (transmitters, in the comms jargon) to help reach out to our target population of three million, using local, trusted networks to give our global message added relevance and connectedness. It worked as a strategy, and so far 17,000 people have taken a pledge on climate change across the Manchester city region. I’m particularly chuffed that elements of the campaign strategy have been employed elsewhere in the UK, including for cities like Sheffield and Nottingham.

Another example of ‘think global, talk local’ in the Northwest of England is a campaign called ‘SMYLE’ run by Vale Royal Borough Council. I really like this campaign - which I hasten to add we had no part in professionally. SMYLE stands for ‘Supporting MY Local Environment’ and is strongly grounded in the idea that each and every one of us has the power to make a difference to our local environment, as part of our collective contribution to a better environmental future. Campaign highlights for me have to include the ‘Rubbish Heads’ street theatre (strangely terrifying, could be off Doctor Who) and a campaign video narrated by Derek Griffiths (TV presented and voice of SuperTed... holds a special place in many a thirtysomething’s heart).

SMYLE, alongside Manchester is my Planet, is a great example of a campaign that doesn’t use disconnected, global disaster imagery and unrooted, difficult to contextualise global statistics to try and appeal to someone who happens to be out shopping for spuds or who has just opened an email from a friend. Good campaigns connect to their audiences and take them on a journey; bad campaigns preach to the converted and leave the rest of us stone cold.

This is not a logo. This is Manchester.

2007-03-27T14:55:00.000+01:00

If a city commissions a new logo, crafts a strapline, or launches an advertising campaign then four times out of five you could see it as a cry for help; a civic flare gun being fired into murky international skies. Not so with Manchester.

We’ve been lucky enough to spend the last nine months working with Peter Saville on his brand vision for Manchester: Original Modern. It’s a project Peter has been working on for around three years now and through workshops, media relations and now a new book, we’ve been helping him and Manchester City Council bring the brand vision to life.

The full story can be found in the book we produced for Manchester’s Marketing Partnership entitled the ‘Manchester Edition’, but in short, Manchester is following a different course and its brand development project is not about a quick visit to the logo shop, it is much more about new ways of thinking and about a shared vision and shared values.

These values include creativity, sustainability and the value of communities, making this project a dream fit for Creative Concern.

This development of shared values and a shared vision is how you become your brand. For a place - rather than a product - your brand is what ‘you’re known for’ to borrow a phrase from Peter Saville. It’s probably sacrilegious to cite Ghandi in relation to brand development but here goes - in relation to civil disobedience, Ghandi said that you should ‘be the change’ you wish to bring about in the world and that’s a lesson that cities can learn as they seek to ‘project’ themselves onto the world stage.

Modern cities operate in an increasingly competitive global marketplace. To be relevant in this millennium they have to be known for something; they have to be bold and ambitious in all that they do; they need to take every neighbourhood, every citizen and every enterprise with them; they need actions that project the city into a global media environment that shifts dramatically with the single click of a mouse button; they have to be unabashed and unafraid of chasing dreams such as creating bold new projects or staging major events; and most importantly they need strong, stable leadership that pulls together a city wide partnership that’s singularly focused on working together to make things happen.

Place branding - something we’re increasingly involved in at Creative Concern - is all about the product and the interpretation of that product. It’s about subtleties, about nuances and about storylines. When people get overly obsessed by logos or straplines they’ve lost the essence of what good place branding is all about: you must become the brand you want to be.

Note: Images above are of the Original Modern light installation we created in Manchester's Great Bridgewater Street Tunnel in September 2006.

Climate of confusion

2007-03-19T19:44:00.000Z

When climate scientists wobble on the public stage, their misfired and misjudged statements are quickly seized upon by the flat-earthers who think that global warming can be put down to a combination of natural variation, sunspots and nu-communist gasbaggery.

And so it is with Carl Wuncsh, the MIT professor who was hoodwinked by WAGTV (the clue’s in the name) into taking part in the ‘Great Global Warming Swindle’ on Channel 4.
Plenty of blog-space has been taken up with deconstructions of Martin Durkin’s anti-green polemic, so here it is sufficient to say that Wuncsh now says he was ‘duped’ by the filmmaker into taking part. He’s not a happy camper and his full response can be read alongside a comprehensive analysis of the film on Real Climate’s website.

It doesn’t stop there. This weekend two scientists appeared on stage in Oxford to decry the ‘exaggeration’ by the media of the risks of climate change when it comes to major disasters or ‘sideswipes’ like the turning off of the Gulf Stream. Once you begin to exaggerate the science in either direction the debate gets out of control,' warned Paul Hardaker.

Fair enough, stick to the science: quite right.

The only problem is that the submission of Paul Hardaker and Chris Collier of the Royal Meteorological Society to the switched on and no doubt highly qualified crowd at the Sense About Science conference on Saturday didn’t stay in the seminar room in Oxford. Quite the opposite. It was on the world’s most visited website - BBC News - that afternoon and by yesterday was on blogs and websites all over the world, including those dedicated to undermining international efforts to fight climate change.

Granted, it didn’t hurt that Hardaker and Collier had indulged in a bit of spin themselves and coined the term ‘Hollywoodisation’ to describe the overplaying of climate fears. They clearly intended for their work to have an impact - but did they also intend for their no doubt timely warning to be misused?

So in the Edinburgh Evening News they are recorded as ‘Slamming climate fears’. On ‘globalwarminglatest.com’ they are arguing against the predictions of their peers. On ABC news they are warning other scientists not to overplay their hand. If you Google ‘Paul Hardaker’ right now, you’ll see just how quickly and globally word has spread of his Saturday afternoon lecture. It’s the kind of viral messaging that marketeers would give their mouse-button-finger for.

The contributions of Carl Wunsch, Chris Collier and Paul Hardaker were all well-meaning and in a saner world they would be listened to in the kind of balanced, non-partisan way that they no doubt expect from their scientific colleagues or students, but when they get in front of a camera or microphone, they’re playing a different game, and they need to work harder at not being misrepresented. Each of these stories has been read by someone on the cusp of conviction with regard to climate change, and will have helped to have put them off. I’ve already heard of one senior director in a major government agency calling for an explanation in the light of the alarming news that climate change may not be as much of a threat as we thought.

From a small soundbite or moment to camera, so can spread the idea that maybe, just maybe, climate change isn’t such a problem after all. The viewer or reader goes back to their carbon-laden lifestyle; the world moves on, a little warmer and a little less concerned; action on climate change is put off for another day.

Scientists need to know that their words will be used and abused across the world and that they may be responsible for seriously damaging public understanding, no matter how valid their single conjecture or conclusion may be. We are all gagging for a get out on global warming and having leading scientists suggest that it’s all been exaggerated, overplayed or simply made-up is telling us exactly what we want to hear.

Head soup

2007-03-15T19:37:00.000Z

Communications is becoming harder to track, less predictable, and much, much more personalised. Word of mouth and personal advocacy counts for as much, in some cases, as raw spend on promotions. For issues-based and cultural organisations this is vitally important as issues-based messages have the potential to carry farther and more dramatically than products or services, provided that they are designed effectively.

Barriers to entry and competition for ‘headspace’

In Information Anxiety the author Richard Wurman noted that the average weekday edition of the New York Times contains more information than a person would be likely to encounter in an entire lifetime in 17th Century England. The works of Shakespeare pale in raw information terms alongside the output of just one global news outlet; whether they represent a greater degree of intelligence is of course another matter.

So how much raw data are we taking in? According to UC Berkeley's School of Information Management and Systems as long ago as 2002, the combined output of print, film and computer data created each year mounts up to around five exabytes of new information.

How much is this? If you digitised the nineteen million books and printed materials in the US Library of Congress you’d get around ten terabytes of information; five exabytes of information is equivalent in size to the information contained in half a million new libraries the size of the Library of Congress.

Per person, this stacks up to a substantial information flow. Given a world population (in 2003) of 6.3 billion, this represents almost 800 MB of recorded information per person each year.
If you wanted to store that information on paper, it would take over nine metres of books.
The volume of information impacting upon individual headspace is dizzying in its scale, but what kind of information are we absorbing and what new forms of data are we seeking out?

It’s time to turn to Google.

For the week ending 9 October, 2006, these were the top ten search terms hammered into Google via keyboards all over the world: Amish (no doubt due to recent school shooting in the USA); Shanna Moakler (former Miss USA, starring in film with Dennis Quaid); You're beautiful (James Blunt, we thank you); Mark Foley (scandal-hounded Republican caught salaciously emailing boys); Bj's Wholesale (shop); Texas Chainsaw Massacre (gory film); Tatana Kucharova (18 year-old Czech student wins Miss World); Johnny Cash; Hips Don't Lie (by Pop Princess Shakira, featuring the majestic Wyclef Jean); Line Rider (online game).

Edifying? Hardly. It doesn’t get any better if you narrow things down to the UK. Our Google searches in February 2006, for example, were as follows: 1. National Lottery; 2. 50 Cent; 3. Dictionary (rather highbrow!); 4. Wikipedia; 5. Holidays; 6. Paris Hilton (babe search one of three); 7. Eastenders; 8. Simpsons; 9. Paintball (why? why?); 10. Car Insurance (practical); 11. Train Times (ditto); 12. Cheap Flights; 13. Chantelle (two of three); 14. Katie Price (aka Jordan); 15. Weather.

There it is, our intellectual DNA courtesy of Google. The stuff we’re thinking. Our Head Soup. A few also-ran searches included dogs, Crazy Frog and the Pope. It’s as surreal as it is sobering. We all Google so we’re all culpable. This is not a highbrow snub. We have our work cut out.
A crucial question then for those of us with something more important to communicate than the bust size of Jordan or the nearest paintballing venue, is this: how do we cut through the 800 MB of shopping, boobs and cheap holidays to get our message through to the people that matter, the public?

Chances are it won’t just be an ad and a press release.

Talking works

2007-03-14T19:19:00.003Z

Word of mouth? In spite of huge adspend, 53% of moviegoers still rely on personal recommendations. 57% of Palm Pilot owners bought because of personal recommendation (echoed in recent Blackberry growth).

Palm called this their ‘humble marketing’ with a mantra to ‘under promise and over deliver’. It’s a strategy many of us would do well to adopt.

According to Malcolm Gladwell in the ubiquitous ‘Tipping Point’, the essential rules are that people can ‘hardly hear you’, are skeptical, and are very, very connected. Social networks are incredibly complex - even a network of just 100 people has 4,950 possible linkages. It is still easier to talk than send an email and an increasingly interesting interaction is people combining word of mouth with web-based communications. Drive traffic via people and advocacy.

Importantly, events create buzz, so it is vital to examine this output - what do you want people to talk about post-event and how? Emotion, loyalty and advocacy - these are three key factors to successful word-of-mouth.

Creative Concern learnt this through its climate change pledge campaign for Manchester is my Planet. This was largely a networked and viral campaign that achieved an audience penetration level of 12% in just two months and accessed a total of 350,000 people through known networks. The campaign accessed a media audience of 4 million - but the conversion rates were much poorer through conventional media than for networks. When the employees of the University of Manchester were emailed saying ‘Hey, let’s all take a pledge and do something about climate change’, there were 200 instant pledges online; when the campaign got a spot on breakfast radio, only 20 pledges were made.