The Design of Prosperity Conference in Sweden
I join the debate as a keynote speaker on the role of Commercial Creativity and finds a few kindred spirits too.
I am writing from Sweden at an incredible conference organised by the humanistic marketing genius Simonetta Carbonaro, lecturer at the Swedish School of Textiles in Boras. I joined Jeremy Rifkin, President of the Foundation on Economic Trends and a well-known expert on how technology and science impact the economy and environment, who discussed the beginning of a new energy era based on hydrogen cells that would carry alternatively-generated energies from clean sources. Jeremy is someone I have wanted to meet for a long time, and I'm sure I'll be working with him closely in the future. I also met the controversial photographer Oliviero Toscani who amongst other things is famous for shaping the United Colours of Benetton campaigns, and other great thinkers and doers. (Another favourite was Joe Friggieri, a philosopher from the University of Malta, and Derrick de Kereckhove, who talks about the impact of IT on culture and people's minds.)
Presenting to 700 business leaders, policy makers and students of fashion had me feeling a little nervous, but pushed on by 200 photographs that I've taken in the last year and a half, and a Madonna-style hands-free mike, I sped through the Fair Trade World of indigenous peoples in Peru, organic cotton farmers in India and Kenya, to show the true diversity of culture and skills that the People Tree supports through Fair Trade.
Oliviero and I brainstormed noisily over Swedish schnapps and wine on how to communicate Fair Trade Fashion in a new photographic style. Like me, he is frustrated with how much creativity and resources are wasted promoting rubbish; this has always been a pet theme of mine since working at Creative Review magazine and in the advertising industry when I left school at 18 and was made head of their Marketing Department at 20. He also doesn't have much time for marketing people who, he says, take no risks. The theme of the Conference was how designers can use their creativity to promote the key issues: solutions to climate change, poverty and social isolation.
There are so many social initiatives that could benefit enormously from the support of designers. Take the work of John Thackara, who in the North East of England is promoting urban-based food production and “the walking bus”, where parents and their children are reviving the good old fashioned healthy way to start the day by walking to school in a group. What is clear is that people will not wait for government and business to provide the answers, and are finding and promoting solutions themselves – the world is changing from the grass-roots up, whilst business and government must act now; and with the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change out, the writing is on the wall. Solutions will have to be developed quickly in all sectors.
Presenting at the Design For Prosperity Conference: hand-produced fabrics still provide livelihoods for over 10 million handweavers worldwide, enabling people to put food on the table. Surely machines shouldn't be used to replace people, when the global population is growing. Fair Trade is supporting these communities and raising awareness of social and environmental justice.
People Tree clothes are currently being stocked in Sweden at Uma Bazaar in Malmö and Marianne Dovemark in Varberg, and we look forward to others joining them.