Ehud Tal: Designing a Symbol for the Majority
Americans are compassionate and pragmatic people, and both compassion and common sense dictate that surplus stem cells should be placed in the hands of researchers, who are looking for cures, rather than be thrown in red plastic bags full of contaminated medical supplies. I’m confident that reason will eventually triumph, despite the extremists’ delay tactics, which continue to prolong the suffering of millions. We need to make visible the fact that we’re the majority, and show our truth, to counter their bogus arguments, so that voters have no choice but to make the right decision and to rally for change. But how do you make the issue visible? What images do we need and how do we generate them?
History tells us that visual symbols play a huge role in this sort of case. Symbols can stand in for an entire story, highlighting values and a mission statement, driving them past our rational filters straight to the gut. This is a well-known and widely exploited concept in the commercial world as well, known simply as branding.
With this formidable challenge in mind we embarked on the journey of discovering our symbol. We started by gathering as some background information on the science and politics of stem cells. We also looked at symbol case studies paying close attention to both the failures and the success stories. The next stage is brainstorming, where the goal is to diverge and find the largest number of ideas, and not necessarily the best ones. You’re basically hoping to produce radically different and original concepts. This type of exploration requires a lot of free association but it isn’t a random process. In fact, to find our symbol we’ve begun brainstorming from a number of planned starting points:
Stories: What allegories and myths are related to this issue? For example, the story of the Galileo’s or that of the founding fathers of religious freedom in the United States.
Form: What do circles mean? How does a hexagon work as a symbol for a cell?
Visuals: What images are commonly used? Should we work with those images or against them?
Color: What colors evoke abstract concepts such as compassion, cure and action?
Words: Words come into play for us even when we’re focusing on coming up with visuals. We used writeboard to brainstorm on words as a team.
Medium: Thinking about how a symbol is going to be used is an important part of the process. For example, do we want to design something that can easily be worn, like the Live Strong band and AIDS ribbon? Maybe it should be easily translated into a hand sign, like “hang loose” or the peace sign?
Info-graphics: Sometimes a memorable and clear diagram that conveys important information becomes a symbol. Like the Red and Blue America statistical map or the hockey stick chart of global warming. We’ve had some experience that has shown us the importance of info-graphics in the political sphere (see the LibLab section of the empax website).
Family Resemblance: We look at symbols that have represented this cause in the past, for common traits that we can explore and develop.
Event: Thinking about how certain images will play out at protest sites and in the media are also useful angles.
Campaign: Finally we ponder which elements make any symbol contagious and memorable.
We jot down all our ideas as they come, and then group them into categories. We try to find the underlying dimensions that drive each of these categories, and build more ideas based on those deeper dimensions. The next step after this distillation process is narrowing the list down until we have a winner.
As I’m writing this, we’re still in the midst of our brainstorming process. Every couple of days, we get together and throw out more and more ideas. Since this site is a window into our kitchen, we invite you to comment and make suggestions of your own.
Comments (2)
This is indeed one of the most important projects mankind can undertake these days. Unfortunately, the current richest empire, which could have taken this mission many years forward, led by inconsistent-ultraconservative GW Bush, keeps blocking any significant progress and allows its President to veto legislation which could have otherwise increase the US involvement and support. This is the now the role of the people to lead the necessary change. Your project is certainly a brave landmark in this process. Good luck!
Posted by Lior | August 5, 2006 12:47 PM
I applaud and support your efforts. What a great project! My family shares a deep and passionate commitment to promoting stem cell research. As a designer, I believe I have a duty to use my work to aid such globally significant efforts whenever possible. I have been creating & distributing some pro-SCR designs on a very small scale, and I am delighted to see some of the leaders in the design field tackling this issue on a more meaningful scale.
I eagerly await the results of your project's design stage, and look forward to opportunities to take part in the campaign that will follow.
Good luck, and let me know if I can help.
Posted by Rob Gough | August 16, 2006 5:05 PM