Bettina Richter

Barbara Junod

Michael Renner

Franziska Nyffenegger

Invar-Torre Hollaus

Teal Triggs

Amanda Unger

Corina Neuenschwander

Peter Vetter

Davide Fornari

Roland Früh

Leslie Kennedy

Robert Lzicar

François Rappo

Mapping Graphic Design History in Switzerland

Governments, rebels, and warlords have made billions of dollars by selling conflict commodities and have used the money to arm themselves and line their own pockets. But the cost of these conflicts has been extraordinary-more than 5 million people killed during the 1990's, as many as 20 million driven from their homes, and considerable environmental destruction. Renner assesses the anatomy of resource wars, examines a number of specific cases, and discusses efforts to break the link between resources and conflict.

The Anatomy of Resource Wars

Environmental Decline, Social Conflict, and the New Age of Insecurity

Fighting for Survival

Lester R. Brown

Brian Halweil

This ninth annual edition of Vital Signs takes the world's pulse by compiling a wide-ranging collection of trends that identify both problems and progress in the quest for a sustainable society. It highlights both alarming situations and encouraging developments. Part One is a comprehensive presentation of the key indicators in areas such as food, agriculture, energy, atmosphere, economics, transport and the military. Part Two provides in-depth special feature articles on: environmental features, such as transgenic crops and paper recycling; economic features, such as environmental taxes and corporate mergers; and social features, such as tuberculosis, prisons and women in politics.

The Environmental Trends That Are Shaping Our Future

Vital Signs 2000-2001

Ending Violent Conflict

Claudia Mareis

Moritz Greiner-Petter

In its constructive and speculative nature, design has the critical potential to reshape prevalent socio-material realities. At the same time, design is inevitably normative, if not often violent, as it stabilises the past, normalises the present, and precludes just and sustainable futures. The contributions rethink concepts of critique that influence the field of design, question inherent blind spots of the discipline, and expand understandings of what critical design practices could be. With contributions from design theory, practice and education, art theory, philosophy, and informatics, »Critical by Design?« aims to question and unpack the ambivalent tensions between design and critique.

Genealogies, Practices, Positions

Critical by Design?

The news is perplexing. Both the president and vice president of the United States have fallen ill with mysterious, flu-like symptoms. It is not long before both me receive the same devastating diagnosis: pancreatic cancer. But that is not the worst of it. Soon, many in Congress and the Supreme Court start to exhibit the same symptoms. In less than four months, the president is dead, the vice president is barely hanging onto life, and one-third of Congress is deceased. Unfortunately, the United States is not the only country ravaged by the scourge. By the time research leads medical experts to determine that only Muslims seem to be immune to the plague, most governments around the world are left with few survivors. As a Muslim takes over the presidency of the United States, he declares that the cancer spares no one except true believers in Allah. After he urges nonbelievers to convert to Islam in an effort to stop the population from dying off forever, a ban on pork and alcoholic beverages is put into place. But it is not long before experts discover what is truly causing the epidemic: a sinister virus. In this political thriller, the world is thrown into turmoil as a powerful group of evil saboteurs hold the future of humanity hostage.

The Conspiracy of Deception and Trickery

In 1987, a record 126,000 automobiles rolled off assembly lines each working day, and close to 400 million vehicles are used on the world's roads today. Prior to the 1970s the automobile's utility and sustainability were hardly questioned. A decade of oil price increases and worries about future fuel availability slowed automobile use somewhat, but in the 1980s improved energy efficiency and additional oil supplies combined to bring fuel prices down. This document calls for a fundamental rethinking of the role automobiles should play. It contains sections entitled: (1) "Whither the Automotive Age?" (2) "Depending More on Oil, Searching for Alternatives"; (3) "Enhancing Fuel Efficiency"; (4) "Reducing Emissions"; and (5) "Reshaping Transportation." (TW)

Rethinking the Role of the Automobile

Sarah Owens

Arne Scheuermann

Peter J. Schneemann

Swiss Graphic Design Histories' offers an entirely new redefinition of Switzerland?s graphic design landscape. Based on extensive research by scholars of design history and with a multiple and inclusive approach, it reaches beyond the usual canon and the well-known epicenters Basel and Zurich with the Germanophone fathers of what has become famous as the Swiss Style in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s.0In three volumes it features visual artefacts and archival documents, the majority published here for the first time, alongside likewise previously unpublished conversations with designers who have forged developments of the past decades, as well as new essays discussing key terms that refer to various design practices. The complexity of the undertaking is embraced through a system of keywords, thus enabling readers to connect contents within the individual volumes. A fourth volume comprising a glossary, bibliography, and an index of the keywords rounds out this long-awaited new survey of graphic design in multi-lingual Switzerland that sheds new light at networks, practices and media largely ignored so far.

Swiss Graphic Design Histories

Michael Renner

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