Late last week, I watched Kapitaal by Studio Smack (link via TypeForYou) and was enrapt by the degree to which we are subjected to the power of design every day. Yesterday, walking through San Francisco’s Mission District, I had a flashback to Kapitaal and suddenly the answer to the questions I brought up in my last post emerged fully-formed, like Athena, from my head.

The Achilles Heel (lots of Greek metaphors today) of running corporate campaigns like RAN does is that corporations can outspend you. Markets campaigning goes for the jugular, in terms of reputation or branding, but a giant like Exxon or Ford can drop millions into a PR campaign to combat your educational outreach. Anyone who reads Stanifesto regularly has witnessed my ire for PR campaigns that do exactly that.

But these companies don’t do this all by themselves. They hire people to do it. They hire smart, creative people. They hire people who (and I’ve met a lot of them) are either completely full of self-loathing at being shills for gas-guzzlers, cigarettes, and war or are extremely thankful that they get to do something creative with their lives and merely rise to the abstract challenge of selling “n” units of product “x” with a budget of “$”. Design, at its core, is problem-solving. Lately, the problem has been stated in terms of units, products, and dollars… but it doesn’t need to be. We must change the challenge.

Joe Pytka has won countless Emmys for his creative and technically flawless commercials. A few years ago, he directed three spots for Chevron’s “Will You Join Us?” campaign. The campaign itself is merely to spread FUD about energy issues. A design community that recognizes any contribution to that campaign with an award, whether beautiful or not, is a community that is delirious. A magazine printed on 100% virgin paper cannot be great. A website inaccessible to non-sighted visitors cannot be great. The criteria for great design must be adjusted to reflect our modern values.

I’m not saying anything new. If you’ve ever read a copy of Adbusters you know that design is sick and needs medicine. If you’ve read Emigre’s “First Things First 2000” essay, or even the original from 1964, you know that these things have been discussed. Fists have been raised. So what’s any different now?

Now we can imagine a corporate campaign against design firms. We should name names instead of drop names. Which firms are perpetuating oppression and poverty, promoting greed and consumption, and rewarding want? Which designers are providing the skilled labor for the white-washing, green-washing, or any other CMYK combination of washing for Corporate America? Which designs, full of the spiritual investments by creative people, end up as just tools in the toolchest of maintaining corporate power? Find them. Expose them.

Markets campaigns work. Designers are sympathetic but need some tough love. With great creativity comes great responsibility.

Envision a world where the creative class realizes their power in shifting culture and stands accountable for doing it in healthy ways. Imagine advertising firms refusing to represent products untruthfully. Picture marketing becoming a new ally, not an enemy, to a sustainable world. Watch it spread across other creative lines: musicians refusing to license their songs to unethical commercials, writers forsaking puff pieces for real investigative journalism.

You and me free of the constant fear that people are trying to trick us into buying shit we don’t need, free to live our life in personally meaningful ways… that’s the world I want to live in. That’s the world I want to help design. Who’s with me?

I just finished reading “How to Be a Graphic Designer Without Losing Your Soul” by Adrian Shaughnessy. It was very heavy on the how-to-being part and a little less so on the without-losing part. While I’d recommend the book highly to anyone looking for more about running a studio, forming and developing client relationships, and forging their own path through the design world, it left me wondering where else we can go as designers to take an active role in forming a bright new world.

Bruce Mau’s Incomplete Manifesto for Growth (I do love my manifestos) has been hanging next to my desk for years now, and I was very pleased to see that his studio has joined forces with Institute Without Boundaries to form MASSIVE CHANGE. It endeavors to do exactly what I described above, move smart, creative people out from behind their drafting tables and in front of the social steering wheel.

They share this vision with (and were recently interviewed by) Worldchanging. I had a chance to hear Alex Steffan speak at South by Southwest Interactive this year and his presentation honestly brought me to tears. The simple idea of fostering giant culture shift via applied imagination struck me as not only plausible but immensely fun! In web design, I’ve always enjoyed the challenge of writing semantically meaningful, standards compliant code; creating a sustainable future is the same challenge raised to the power of the human race.

I just purchased the Worldchanging book (coincidentally designed by the same guy who wrote the foreword to “How to Be a Graphic Designer Without Losing Your Soul”) and the MASSIVE CHANGE book. I’ll let you know when they’ve cured me of this ridiculous obsession with saving the planet.

Finally, I’ve decided that Kevin Cornell’s “Design Vigilantism” would be the perfect way to begin my life of extra-curricular world-saving via graphic and web design. Victims that need avenging may be suggested in the comments.

Just to set the stage, I’m a bit of a social networking site junkie. I belong to far too many of them, mostly for “research purposes” since I’m a web designer myself. Note the quote marks around “research purposes”, stretching them across the gamut of “interesting use of tag-based folksonomies here, I’ll make a note of that” to “dear lord, that’s what 19-year olds are wearing these days?” Luckily I don’t have enough time to spend on any one of them to do too much research.

An elite list of bookmarks.

But anyway, UselessAccount.com vs. Change.org. Here we go.

On the one hand, Useless Account offers the following features:

1. Unlimited account editing
2. Truth in advertising

It’s #2 that really sets it apart from so many other sites out there. I can say, without a doubt in my mind, that Useless Account completely lives up to the hype.

On the other hand, Change weighs in with these promises:

1. Ending Global Warming
2. Empowering Women
3. Advancing Gay Rights
4. Eliminating Borders

Honestly, the list just keeps going on and on…

Some pretty tall orders there. A little ridiculous if you ask me. I mean sure, it hooks you up directly with Non-profits working on these issues and even allows you to find and commit to actions that help these issues, but who are we kidding. It clearly can’t compete with the “Under Promise, Over Deliver” that UselessAccount has going for it.

In this day and age of information overload, there’s something reassuring about UselessAccount’s simple interface. It is 90% an advertisement for itself, with a very, very tiny “Login or Create an Account” near the top. Contrast this with the, although immaculately well-designed, “functionality” of Change.org. For example, when my colleague and paramour Sarah visited the former she immediately burst into laughter, presumably over how laughably simple to use the site was, whereas the latter filled her dread. “It really shows you how screwed up the non-profit/industrial complex is,” she sighed.

Following her lead, I have to give the win to UselessAccount. No doubt some people will find use for a social network that allows them to describe, collaborate, and ultimately bring about a visionary new world, but do we really need another site reminding us how bad everything is? I just go to MySpace for that.

While we’re on the subject of social networking sites and the whole “Web 2.0″ thing, how much of a dork am I that this video actually gets me all choked up? Seriously. Tears.