In July 2009, I noted a study concluding that Brazil’s telenovelas have inspired both a drop in birth rate and rise in divorce. Via the Communication Initiative Network, I found a a few other items on soap operas and public health:

• A German report looks at TV soap operas in Kyrgyzstan, the Dominican Republic, and Côte d’Ivoire as vehicles for HIV/AIDS education.
  
  
• A radio soap opera in Vietnam reached millions of farmers changing their attitudes and practices managing rice pests, fertilisers, and seeds.
  
  
• Authors of a 2006 paper on a radio soap opera in Bihar, India document how it spurred fundamental, sustainable shifts in people’s values and beliefs.
  
  
• A May 2008 Master’s thesis looks at the effect of two Ethiopian radio dramas on attitutde towards reproductive health and spousal abuse.
  
  
• Fans of a radio drama in Sudan learned about, or were reinforced in, the importance of abandoning female circumcision, giving girls more control of their reproductive health, having a small family, and staying away from drugs and alcohol.

And though I couldn’t find a study on its impact, straphangers in New York City may remember Julio and Marisol: Decision, an episodic comic strip soap opera dealing with AIDS that ran in English and Spanish in NYC subway cars from 1989 through 2001.

Back to school gear seen in YRB. (via)

I’ve added three new items to my growing list of design manifestos, all from 2010.

• January 2010: The Role of Design in the 21st Century, a manifesto and vision for the future of Danish design from the multidisciplinary Danish Design Association.
  
  
• September 2010: Anti-Design Festival Manifesto. Tomorrow the Anti Design Festival kicks off in the UK as a counter-event to the London Design Festival, both a protest against its “pretty commerciality” and attempt to “unlock creative fires and ideas, exploring spaces hitherto deemed out-of-bounds by a purely commercial criteria.”
  
  
• August 2010: The Obstructionist Manifesto. Mark Goldman writes against harmful, heavy-handed, insider-driven city planning.

I don’t usually blog about events, but I like how the model here approaches something of an incubator:

“A three day hands-on workshop (5 - 8 December 2010, in Jordan), for activists and NGOs in the Arab region, working on women’s rights, to explore how visual techniques can strengthen campaigning. The workshop will give participants the skills to plan and strategise visual campaigns, think about how to use information effectively and gain hands-on skills to develop a campaign using information design, mapping and animation/imaging techniques....

We invite applications for those working on women’s rights issues, in particular violence against women, the impact and role of women in political and violent conflict and women’s participation and leadership in public life. We also welcome communications specialists, designers, artists, illustrators, or technologists working with mapping techniques or data who can support women’s rights activists. 35 to 40 applicants will be selected to attend the launch workshop in Jordan in December. Participants will have to bring with them a campaign idea which will be developed over the course of three days. Of these, 10 campaigns will be provided with small-scale follow up support and mentoring to implement the visualisation element of their campaign in early 2011.”

They also have a project blog highlighting examples of visualisations. Applications to attend the workshop are due October 14, 2010.

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: