Da Gryptions - The Bixi Anthem

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

The Windmill Farmer

Mersey Forest takes to the sky...

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

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

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

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

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

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More food... more urban greening

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!!!

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

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

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

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

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?

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

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Clean city and the purpose of communications

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]