As a disclaimer, I am going to point out that I am neither Republican or Democrat. I don’t think I could be easily categorized as a conservative or a liberal. And I’m all about the “Green Movement”. But these videos rub me wrong. I think they rub me wrong because I like to fancy myself a journalist and if I ever wrote an article this biased I’d get fired that very second.
I’m approaching this wrong, because I should only be approaching this from the perspective of an information designer. So I’m going to attempt to write this post in two parts: Information and Design.
I’ll start with design, because it’s more interesting to me. I actually really like these videos. I like that little FAQs pop up and let me learn more about which the horrible witch of a host is complaining. The design is well executed. I love the illustrations and I feel like the effectively. It’s very obviously built in Flash, but done so well that it makes me actually want to take Sang’s class seriously. The Story of Stuff does an excellent job in displaying and conveying information. But this is where they start to lose me.
Information is as important as design when producing media like this. I know that the infographic site “Information is Beautiful” has been notorious for misrepresenting information graphically. And The Story of Stuff is another information source that is delivering the convenient story instead of the accurate story.
They’re guilty of a tragedy in information and reporting: Marketing fear. Essentially, this is Fox news for hippies. For example, while talking about how corporations are evil because they want to make short life span products that will end up in a landfill and how they use toxic, cancer-causing agents to do it, they fail to mention that these companies employ people, pay them well, and that none of them are doing half the ecological damage a single volcanic eruption can do. “But Chris, where is the science that will back you up here?”
I will now proceed to quote rather lengthily from George Carlin, who is not a scientist, but instead a person who put these questions into perspective:
“ I’m tired of these self-righteous environmentalists, these white, bourgeois liberals who think the only thing wrong with this country is there aren’t enough bicycle paths. People trying to make the world save for their Volvos. Besides, environmentalists don’t give a shit about the planet. They don’t care about the planet. You know what they’re interested in? A clean place to live. Their own habitat. They’re worried that some day in the future, they might be personally inconvenienced. Narrow, unenlightened self-interest doesn’t impress me.
Besides, there is nothing wrong with the planet. The planet is fine. The PEOPLE are fucked. Compared to the people, the planet is doing great. Been here four and a half billion years. Did you ever think about the arithmetic? The planet has been here four and a half billion years. We’ve been here, what, a hundred thousand? And we’ve only been engaged in heavy industry for a little over two hundred years. Two hundred years versus four and a half billion. And we have the CONCEIT to think that somehow we’re a threat? That somehow we’re gonna put in jeopardy this beautiful little blue-green ball that’s just a-floatin’ around the sun?”
I realize that the point of this assignment is not to take a political stance on something like environmentalism, but I feel like we have an important obligation as information designers to publish the truth. Sure there are problems, but The Story of Stuff is very narrow on where it assigns guilt. There is a lot of blame on the corporations, but what about the Earth itself? Isn’t the Earth guilty of producing petroleum and lead and countless thousands of “toxic” materials?
Design is one thing. It’s important to have a quality aesthetic that conveys the information in an engaging way. But it is far more important to report accurate information. I personally feel like The Story of Stuff does a great job of visualizing the process, statistics and story that they are trying to promote. They’ve built a Flash program I actually like, which is a rare feat. They make their information very accessible and are very successful in the execution of their design. I just don’t think that the information is 100% reliable. It comes off biased, and loses the casual viewer. It forces the viewer to pick a side, instead of saying “here are the facts, go and do something with them”.