Anne and others who've replied off-list,
Many thanks. Anne, your point about matching actions to policy changes is of
course tantalizing, and I am trying to capture some of that "correlation" in
my work. However, the caveat is that in social movement scholarship (a
well-developed academic field) it rarely proves easy, or even possible, to
untangle all the forces at work in bringing about policy change.
This is perhaps best summed up by the remark, ³If it would be foolish to
claim that any one of these [social] movements was entirely responsible for
changes in the social problems they address, it would be equally foolish to
think that they had no effect² (Taylor and Jordan 2004: 51). Earl is more
specific in commenting that, ³Social movement consequences are notoriously
hard to define. Even within the relatively more settled area of political
outcomes, numerous scholars have bemoaned the difficulty of defining
outcomes² (Earl 2007: 509).
Still, in cases where we see cities and states adopting an advocate's green
building rating system (the US Green Building Council's LEED rating) as
their own building standards, the correlation seems very strong.
In product terms, David Hess has written about "product-oriented movements"
in which the struggle is often over the definition, position, and scale of
alternative technologies and products. In these cases (for example wind
energy, or nutritional alternatives to pharmaceutical treatments), he notes
that the alternatives tend to "stick" to the extent that they can be
transformed to complement existing commercial and regulatory paradigms. The
question becomes--is this success? Or is it cooptation of the alternative?
What did the movement really achieve?
Earl, Jennifer. 2007. Cultural Consequences of Social Movements. In The
Blackwell Companion to Social Movements, edited by D. A. Snow, S. A. Soule
and H. Kriesi. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.
Hess, David J. 2007. Alternative Pathways in Science and Industry: Activism,
Innovation, and the Environment in an Era of Globalization. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
Hess, David J. 2005. Product-Oriented Movements: Approximating Social
Movement Studies and Science and Technology Studies. Science, Technology,
and Human Values 30 (4):515-535.
Taylor, Paul, and Tim Jordan. 2004. Hacktivism and Cyberwars: Rebels with a
Cause? London: Routledge.
Ann
Dr Ann Thorpe
.....................................
Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London
Wates House, 22 Gordon Street London WC1H 0QB, United Kingdom
+44 (0)77 1747 1606
.....................................
book: The Designer's Atlas of Sustainability (www.designers-atlas.net)
blog: http://designactivism.net
twitter: @atlasann
> Date: Fri, 19 Aug 2011 17:18:56 +0000
> From: "Schiffer, Anne" <[log in to unmask]>
> Subject: Re: Timeline on design activism (public interest design, social
> design)
>
> Hi Anne,
>
> now I'm not sure how relevant this is but I'm volunteering on a Friends of The
> Earth campaign on 'greener products'. It's early days yet as the campaign will
> be launched at the beginning of next year. The campaign deals with
> strengthening EU policies which in turn will have an impact on the wider
> design and manufacturing industry.
>
> I have some information on current policies and guidelines and would be happy
> to forward documents to you if you think this might be helpful. I think it
> would be interesting to see if there is a correlation between key moments in
> design activism and policy change. I would also be really interested to know
> if anyone else is aware of designers' actions that have shaped policies in the
> past.
>
> Kind regards,
> Anne Schiffer
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