Raising eyebrows raising awareness

What’s up with raising awareness? Why does it seem that every other design commission seems to have raising awareness as it’s only objective, what is the impact of this strategy? why does this strategy get so much attention? I would like to evaluate this notion of awareness raising as an activity in itself a bit more critically. It seems to take up so much space in the field of design that I sometimes wonder if anybody else is doing anything else at all. What are we doing exactly when we are trying to raise awareness?

One. Raising awareness about awareness-raising

If you are a charity or an NGO of any kind it is likely that you have a cause that is dear to you, maybe it’s access to education in rural Nicaragua, poverty in inner cities in the UK, oil drilling in the North Sea, violence towards LGBTQI+ people, minimizing risk to journalists in some parts of Mexico, the impact of privacy violations in citizens of digitised societies, the humane treatment of donkeys in rural Spain. The list of noble causes is never-ending. Humanity’s crooked nature is the source of many problems, all of which are worthy of attention to someone somewhere. Part of the fabric of civic society consists on people striving to have a positive effect on these problems and leave the world a better place than they found it. It might be that for many of these organizations the tallest hurdle that prevents them from taking effective action on any of these problems is ignorance about the issue.

To make a dent in solving any of these problems NGOs need to rally a group of supporters around the problem, so making people aware of the problem is a logical and necessary step. The mission of most NGOs however goes beyond awareness-raising, they often combine this strategy with others so that work in affecting the issue they work on can continue. Raising awareness is often combined with other activities such as fundraising, membership drives, advocacy work, pressure groups in the places where laws get made. An activist’s dearest hope is to change a situation, not merely make people aware of it.

Designers participate of these activities by working for NGOs on their awareness raising campaigns, and many that share an interest in the cause go beyond that. But somehow the world of design, has embraced the idea of awareness raising as an end in and of itself. Raising awareness has become decoupled from all the other strategies that activists use to be effective in their cause. We regularly receive briefs in which clients state that raising awareness is the objective, but no details are offered about what other mechanisms will come into action once the awareness-raising mission is reached.

Two. The case of food waste

Although food waste has been a problem for a long time, it has somehow become a favorite among the “awareness raising school of thought”. I remember the first time that I became aware of the impact of food waste, on people and planet, it was through some dumpster divers I met in a popular kitchen. People that would jump over a fence several times a week, to open the refuse containers of local supermarkets looking for items that were beyond the expiry date but still good enough to eat. From them I learned that daily, supermarkets were getting rid of tonnes of food that was in many cases in perfectly good condition and not only that, but their trash was still their private property, so jumping that fence to take that food so that you can feed people with it, was considered trespassing and therefore you could be arrested for doing that. I remember thinking how insane this whole thing seemed to me at the time, it still does.

There’s now a whole ecosystem of initiatives to address the issue of food waste. France passed a law forbidding supermarkets to destroy unsold food products. Initiatives like Too Good to Go, bring people who have unsold food items in contact with people that are willing to consume them at reduced prices. Many supermarkets everywhere in Europe are now more open to give some of these items a second chance, through food banks and various food-circulating initiatives. Chefs and restaurants have educated the public on cooking delicious and healthy meals with less-than-fresh ingredients. I have been to restaurants where only roadkill or animals killed under pest-control regulations were on the menu. There are caterers that specialize in low-cost catering with food items that would otherwise be wasted. The list is long and rich in initiative.

In my lifetime I have seen awareness about this issue raised substantially, making this issue more visible, which in turn resulted in action and various initiatives at different levels, activism, legislative, industrial, retail that have improved the situation slightly. France demonstrated some political courage by outlawing food waste in supermarkets and hopefully other countries will follow suit. Humans still waste a tremendous amount of food though, it is estimated that EU households waste on average somewhere between 95 and 115Kg of food every year. The problem is far from solved, the awareness generated and the activity around this issue, provide ramps that might make the problem more approachable but it is far from solved. There is a complex and interdependent set of factors that produce food waste, from industrial production, retail, over-consumption and lifestyle choices. There are different incentives at each of these levels that make the issue one that is hugely complex and difficult to solve once and for all. But I wouldn’t say that this issue exists in the darkness of complete ignorance.

What in this context is the value added of another awareness-raising campaign? What would we be trying to raise awareness of? Can we say that the tallest hurdle to overcome in this issue is ignorance?

Ignorance, it seems, exists in an inexhaustible supply about all matters human, earthly and divine. I can see how the work of the awareness-raiser is never done. Which takes us to the role of this strategy in the field of design.

Three. An end in and of itself

Raising awareness is a bit like the chores of a functioning household. You do groceries, you cook dinner, you wash dishes, you do the laundry now and then, you fold clothes, you vaccuum clean floors now and then and around it goes the circle of life. Child-rearing adds another dozen or so chores to this list of regulars. Most of us suffering from the human condition of being alive and not employing house service or an army of nannies, are stuck in this forever loop of vacuity. You are never really done when these tasks are part of your life. Awareness raising has more to do with child-rearing than it does with problem-solving, you are never really done either.

As a business plan for a design studio it’s actually a fairly good source of faithful clients that will keep coming back. You can more or less get a steady stream of work working as a graphic or digital designer for NGOs and make a name for yourself while specializing in effective awareness-raising campaigns. And why wouldn’t you? You are a good person that wants to make good for the world, and the fruit of your labor is needed to get attention to the worthy causes of your favorite NGOs. You naturally expect the NGO to disseminate your carefully planned campaign and then use it to further activate that newly created awareness to further their cause, that’s their expertise, that’s what they do well.

But what if that design brief comes from an organization that has absolutely no intention to follow up on the awareness-raising to right the wrongs of this world?

Then, I would say, you are being co-opted. You are a tool now.

You might even be effectively contributing to the world becoming a worse place. A place where your campaign contributes to helplessness, disempowerment and fatigue.

Four. Only the medicine, never the healing

I am an educator, and one thing that is clear to me is that providing a person with information is not the same as educating someone about something. Ideally, education should result in a transformation of how a person engages with the issues that they have been educated about. Perhaps it involves a particular perspective, a skill, an ability to analyze and work through a problem. Awareness raising is a form of information dissemination that seeks engagement and it doesn’t automatically do any of the things that education does. The psychological message that awareness-raising delivers, is that you live in a world with an inexahustible supply of problems, about which you can do very little, but you can help spread the word and raise awareness about these important issues. Join the movement!

Awareness alone is useless. It doesn’t automatically result in a meaningful call to action. In fact I would argue it is worse than useless. It’s a disenfranchising, hollow optimism that is very effective at grabbing eyeballs while keeping the status quo. It is very far removed from action, transformation and change.

If for example I were to go raising awareness about people dying of electrocution, I could wax lyrical on statistics of accidents involving electricity, the effects of electrocution on the body, the horrible death that electrocuted individuals experience, how Edison used to electrocute elephants to demonstrate his inventions, etc. But I could also show you how you can push an electrocuted person away with a wooden broom, cut off the main’s switch and if the person is unconscious give that person CPR. Education necessitates of that second part to be empowering. Awareness raising doesn’t empower anybody, quite the opposite, it keeps you scared, surrounded by an ever-growing mob of scary problems that you know you can’t solve.

The mission of a solution continues well after the task of raising awareness. If the world is on fire and we fly around the world to give talks about how the world is on fire, the world will still be on fire after our awareness raising world tour. Our awareness raising is not in itself a problem-solving activity.

Many activists know this quite well, because they understand that raising awareness is the first step in the long road that allows them to ultimately have some effect on the issues they seek to transform.

Gently decline to donate to charities whose only stated objective is to raise awareness about something. If that’s all they have to offer in their plan for transformation, sorry but I am not interested.

Five. Design is complicit

Being a designer means that we carry a lot of baggage on our shoulders. We have probably been educated in a tradition that makes us complicit in the damaged state of our planet and our social fabric. Our business help transform ores into products and data into engagement. Maybe not you personally, as we just determined that you are a good person. And good people are not complicit in mass extinctions or collapsing democracies. But the historical background of much of the profession is and continues to be.

If you are a designer you are in the business of craftily nudging desire. Chances are that the fruit of your labor is regularly used to persuade, appeal, drive attention, be on trend or generate lust for work that results from a transformation of either matter or data that has been likely obtained through extractivist methods often neglecting any form of consent. We are complicit in a system that pushes consumerist vanity into self-destructive overdrive. The guilt trip is so unbearable that we must conceal it under the thick and warm sheep-skin of ethical incantations.

We are tools. Design is complicit in overconsumption.

Every year a new generation of students enters my life, and every year inevitably a good number of them say “I have worked in design doing so and so, but I got tired of just designing useless stuff just so my employer made more money. I came here because I want something else…”

Six. I am a pretty good person

I am a pretty good person. Pretty Good Personhood is a thing these days. It is not enough with doing good deeds alone and remaining anonymous, known only to your family, friends and neighbours as the nice person that feeds the pigeons in the park. Pretty Good Personhood (PGP) is a manifestation of the designer as an agent of social transformation. To be deemed a Pretty Good Person, the good deeds must be part of our identity-building and our projection onto the social network, a form of personal branding. We are, after all, what we do. Only good deeds allowed during working hours.

We are not just designers, we Design for Good. We are not just gathering requirements, we are Empathizing with our stakeholders. We are not just makers, we are Critical Makers. Our Web3 startup isn’t just revolutionizing DeFi by democratizing yield farming, we are doing so for the Unbanked. We are not just designing soon-to-be-forgotten waste that nobody needs, we are doing so by making ethical choices along the way. Our waste can be recycled in a virtuous loop from Cradle to Cradle. We are the Pretty Good People.

If you are reading this, chances are that you are a good person too. Isn’t it nice? You are a good person, I am a good person, we find each other on the Internet. Lovely. We follow each other on The Gram in an eternal web-ring of virtue signaling and clicktivism, and a little self-care too because we risk burn-out when we care about others too much without caring for ourselves first. Wink. Fingerguns.

The attaining of PGP is what makes the designer enthusiastic about participating in the greenwashing, artwashing, whitewashing, sportswashing or any-washing activity. When I was a student I paid for my studies by doing dishwashing, but now that I am a designer I pay the rent to my studio by getting hired for greenwashing. We took that commission from Shell Oil because we want to help align their mobile app with their sustainability goals, but the CEO of our agency also sheds tears for the pledge of the polar bears. Our executives want a better future for their children too.

It is people like us that give me hope in that things can still get worse, much worse while we are busy congratulating ourselves. Granting each other awards and showing the world What Design Can Do as the world is literally on fire.

We are tools.

Ok now, on the count of three I will snap my fingers and you will wake up and have forgotten everything I just said. One. Two and Three. Snap.

Seven. Awareness raising fatigue

“It’s just so much, so many issues, you know, so much to take in that I just ignore it now. Now it’s breast cancer, then it’s prostate cancer, then it’s sclerosis, the coral reefs, microplastics, climate collapse… too much. I don’t care anymore. I just can’t” - she said as she took a bite out of her pork sandwich - “I suppose that the more I learn about this sandwich the more terrified I will be of eating it”

This feeling expressed by one of the people I interviewed for this article, seems commonplace these days, specially among those who tend to listen to appeals, those PGP that actually listen. Awareness raising activities become less and less effective as PGP get saturated with calls to action. This saturation of disempowering awareness-only of the world’s greatest problems results in the opposite of the intent of raising awareness, people feel frustrated, overwhelmed and they stop caring. But now it’s not just about this one issue that they don’t care about, it’s about all of them that they can’t care enough about.

It seems like there is such as thing as too much awareness-raising. And that the too-muchness of it is leading many to indifference.

Eight. The nay-sayers

“But there are so many people that don’t believe in human-made climate collapse, how can you say that there is too much raising of awareness? There’s so much work still to be done!”

That’s a good point. If this question is also in your mind, perhaps you are looking at this from the perspective of the designer. You think there are still people out there that need to be persuaded of the cause. But perhaps they have been persuaded already, persuaded by a different cause, one of denialism.

Tragically some people experience childhoods that do not permit them to grow a conscience and they reach adulthood without the psychological mechanisms that afford awareness or experience guilt. They are perfectly fine individuals that we share the world with but they have a different take on what it means to live in civic society sharing responsibility with other people.

They do things such as driving drunk or without a seatbelt, argue that climate change isn’t caused by human activity, or that the Earth is flat and say things like you can cure covid by injecting bleach. I am not here to make judgement on any of these issues, some of these people have solid arguments in favor of their case and are very persuasive in making that case. But awareness-raising is not the thing that is going to change their minds, if raising awareness about any topic is your mission, targeting the denialists is not a good use of your time.

Denialism exists despite of overwhelming evidence.

Nine. Errare humanun est

It isn’t just denialism that is the vane of the awareness raiser. At the height of the HIV epidemic in the 90s there was an abundance of campaigns about this disease, many focused on promoting the use of the condom as the safest prevention method against HIV, as unsafe sex is its primary transmission vector. Despite of repeated global campaigns, lasting years, between 40% to 70% of people (depending on world region) had high-risk sex without a condom at some point.

I eat meat despite knowing that eating meat, from all the things I do in my life, is the one with the most impact in the future of climate and living ecosystems, as well as being aware of the cruelty to animals that are reared for food. I do not feel like a hypocrite, my decision is conscious. I consciously fail to live by the moral standards suggested by my awareness. I live with this friction and I know that thousands of other people do too.

One thing that frustrates the idealistic awareness raiser is that humans are not perfectly rational and consequent creatures. We fall through irrational gaping holes in our moral standards and many of us (though hopefully not all of us) fail to live by the highest moral standards. We are fallible beings made of meat and bones, desires and contradictions.

This is not the same as saying that raising awareness is a hopeless endeavour and that human nature is doomed in its crookedness. But it does hint at a limit to the usefulness of raising awareness.

Ten. How to decide if you want to get involved in awareness-raising activities?

• What is the cause? And what other strategies beyond raising awareness is the organization planning?
• What does the brief state? is there anything more to it than raising awareness?
• Who is the audience? Is that audience likely to be ignorant of the cause?
• Is there any elaboration on a follow-up plan?
• What other strategies can be deployed if we were to decide not to focus on awareness? How can we design effectively for those strategies?