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

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

Each year Project Censored compiles a list of 25 urgent stories that are grossly underreported. But on this year’s chilling list, the scale of this one is just staggering:

“The US military is responsible for the most egregious and widespread pollution of the planet, yet this information and accompanying documentation goes almost entirely unreported. In spite of the evidence, the environmental impact of the US military goes largely unaddressed by environmental organizations and was not the focus of any discussions or proposed restrictions at the recent UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen. This impact includes uninhibited use of fossil fuels, massive creation of greenhouse gases, and extensive release of radioactive and chemical contaminants into the air, water, and soil.

The extensive global operations of the US military (wars, interventions, and secret operations on over one thousand bases around the world and six thousand facilities in the United States) are not counted against US greenhouse gas limits.…

As it stands, the Department of Defense is the largest polluter in the world, producing more hazardous waste than the five largest US chemical companies combined. Depleted uranium, petroleum, oil, pesticides, defoliant agents such as Agent Orange, and lead, along with vast amounts of radiation from weaponry produced, tested, and used, are just some of the pollutants with which the US military is contaminating the environment.”

The horror goes on and on and on.

And it makes me think a lot of sustainable designers may be fighting the wrong war.

Nancy Duarte’s Slide:ology is one of my favorite design books. And this bit is particularly great: seven questions to help understand your target audience. Though intended as a guide for your design process, I think this touches something very human and applies not just to information architecture and design, but to political advocacy as well.

I’ve shamelessly adapted a version of this for a talk on design and advocacy, but here’s the raw source:

“The audience didn’t come to see you, they came to see what you can do for them. If you fill out this audience persona slide, it will give you insights into how to present in a way that will resonate with your audience.

Seven Questions to Knowing Your Audience

1. What are they like?
   Demographics and psychographics are a great start, but connecting with your audience means understanding them on a personal level. Take a walk in their shoes and describe what their life looks like each day.
   
   
2. Why are they here?
   What do they think they’re going to get out of this presentation? Why did they come to hear you? Are they willing participants or mandatory attendees? This is also a bit of a situation analysis.
   
   
3. What keeps them up at night?
   Everyone has a fear, a pain point, a thorn in the side. Let your audience know you empathize—and offer a solution.
   
   
4. How can you solve their problem?
   What’s in it for the audience? How are you going to make their lives better?
   
   
5. What do you want them to do?
   Answer the question “so what?” Make sure there’s clear action for your audience to take.
   
   
6. How might they resist?
   People vary in how they receive information. This can include the set up of the room to the availability of materials after the presentation. Give the audience what they want, how they want it.
   
   
7. How can you best reach them?
   What will keep them from adopting your message and carrying out your call to action?

You can also download it from Duarte Design as a PowerPoint slide.

The board of the largest professional organization of designers in the US, the AIGA, has quietly amended their Standards of Professional Practice to include these new additions:

“7.2 A professional designer is encouraged to contribute five percent of his or her time to projects in the public good—projects that serve society and improve the human experience.

7.3 A professional designer shall consider environmental, economic, social and cultural implications of his or her work and minimize the adverse impacts.”

While it’s not quite a Hippocratic Oath for designers it’s great to see the AIGA finally institutionalize and push an ongoing commitment to design in the public interest.

From Peter Linebaugh in CounterPunch:

“On the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month the Great Powers of the World signed the armistice laying down arms after four years of the bloodiest war in history. That was 1918.

Now, we call it Veteran’s Day.

What caused the armistice was the refusal of soldiers to fight. They refused ‘to go over the top’ anymore. In Russia, France, England, Italy they refused to participate in the slaughter which had begun in 1914.

What we learn from Armistice Day is that the soldier is the front line of the peace movement.”

GI refusal also helped end the war in Vietnam, and it’s spreading in Iraq and Afghanistan, too, encouraged by veterans speaking out.

The holidays are coming! Could you use 100 full-color palm cards? Perhaps an end of year greeting or donation appeal? A little agit-prop or calling card? And don’t travel without your atheism cards!

Next Day Flyers is offering one of my readers free printing of 100 1/6 page flyers (4.125 x 3.375 inches) printed on 14 PT card stock, with full color on the front and black on the back. They will print with next day turnaround and include ground shipping to anywhere in the Continental U.S.

Next Day Flyers is an offset printing company that prints posters, flyers and business cards.

To enter, just leave a comment on this post before midnight EST Friday, November 26, 2010. You must be 18 or over to enter and must include your email address (though it will not show publicly on the site.) One commenter will be chosen at random to win the free printing.

Update: Comments are now closed. Congratulations Jesse!

Via Language Log I found this bit on Another battle of the alphabets shaping up in Central Asia:

“A statement by a Kazakhstan minister that his country will eventually shift from a Cyrillic-based alphabet to a Latin-based script and reports that some scholars in Dushanbe are considering dropping another four Russian letters from the Tajik alphabet suggest that a new battle of the alphabets may again be shaping up in Central Asia.

Russian commentators have reacted by suggesting that this is yet another effort by nationalists in those countries to reduce the role of the Russian language and hence of the influence of Russian culture, but in fact the controversy over any such change is far more complicated than that.”

Not a new story, Kazakhstan conducted a feasibility study on the switch back in 2007, but it seems to be gaining momentum. And not just a matter of international geopolitics either — Kazakhstan has a sizable Russian population in the north, a source of tension within the country.

While Cyrillic is the official script of Kazakhstan, the Latin alphabet is already used by the Kazakh diaspora in Turkey, Western Europe and the US, while Kazakhs in China use a modified Arabic alphabet. There’s more on Kazakh alphabets on Wikipedia and more on typography and nationalism here.