Recent Exchanges

The interweb can truly be a gift when you want to find out what other people are doing in other parts of the world. I've been receiving some great correspondence of late that I find incredibly helpful in my process of thesis research:

Information and education are critical resources in managing poverty in rural areas and there are numerous opportunities to use information and communication strategies and design to help local people cope with their issues and problems. Learning and expanding their cognitive abilities as well as awareness and ability building that maybe called soft skills are critically dependent on their ability to use information and have access to it as and when needed.

Prof M P Ranjan
Faculty of Design
Head, Centre for Bamboo Initiatives
National Institute of Design
India

He directed me to a former student who is showing how to engage the rural community in the process of design.

Lester Beall and Information Design

Lester Beall designed these posters in the late 1930s for the US Government's Rural Electrification Administration.

The Rural Electrification Administration (REA) was an agency of the United States federal government created on May 11, 1935 through efforts of the administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The REA's task was to promote electrification in rural areas, which in the 1930s rarely were provided with electricity due to the unwillingness of power companies to serve farmsteads. America lagged significantly behind European countries in rural electrification. Private electric utilities argued that the government had no right to compete with or regulate private enterprise, despite many of these utilities having refused to extend their lines to rural areas, claiming lack of profitability. Since private power companies set rural rates four times as high as city rates, this was a self-fulfilling prophecy.

These posters are an interesting point of discussion for me as I consider how communication design can articulate environmental messages to the rural communities of Africa. On one level, we can look at these posters as somewhat ironic (because of our current awareness of energy consumption). But the graphic design (in its modernist form and attempted function) are simple, seemingly clear and almost fit into an information design category. In these post-modern times, does Beall's poster have a relevance we might typically overlook? Can this form influence how one might consider communicating universally?

Clearly, the ideas inherent in the rural electrification administration process are outdated but I like how these images present data pictorially (and without being obvious suggest a place for some leapfrogging):