Priorities and Propaganda
I’ve been trying to catch up on my newsreader, which at time seems a superhuman task (2,257 more entries to go), but I ran across this older post from Grist which talks about the Green Gauge Report, a “poll on environmental attitudes, based on the results of 2,000 face-to-face interviews”. The results of the poll attempt to reveal public opinion on a variety of environmental issues.
One thing that struck me while reading the review on Grist is that the questions of environmental issues are too often abstract. While we may decry the fact that Global Warming was last on a list of concerns, what exactly are people supposed to be concerned about with Global Warming? As a concept, it’s too abstract, too broad in scope. The name says it all: global warming.
It’s a similar problem I faced earlier in my thesis exploration, when I said I was interested in “sustainability” for my thesis. Sure, sustainability can form the backdrop for my exploration, informing the ultimate design solutions and the design process I undertake, but as a focus for a design solution it is too broad, too vague.
Perhaps we could produce better results, and more care, attention, and action, if such abstract terms as global warming were boiled down to specific things people could do to enact change. And, more importantly, if those actions weren’t primarily associated with environmental causes.
Again I’m talking about motivation. There are definitely things out there which motivate people: advertising agencies use them all the time.
And a thought just struck me now: let’s look at government propaganda posters from the Second World War. The posters say “Buy War Bonds!” and “Save Rubber!” not “Win the war!”—the overall goal of winning the war is implicit in the messages, but the overt thrust of the messages was to emphasize how every little bit helped, that the collective effort was what would win the war, that the path to victory consisted of bite-sized chunks.
Maybe there are ways to approach the issue of global warming in a similar fashion.
I’m constantly thinking of Paul Hawken and the RED group at the Design Council and countless others who point to the need for radical change. Yes, radical change is needed, but it must also incorporate incremental change as a means for achieving that radical change.