This is a transcript of the video David Berman speaks at Icograda design week 2006 Hong Kong: Design and Social Responsibility.
(David Berman appears on camera in front of his presentation displaying on screen and faces the audience for the duration of this video. David is wearing a beige suit with a black shirt.)
95% of every designer who has ever lived is alive today. Can you do the math? Think about that.
Yup.
This profession is still up for grabs. It’s up to us to decide what it’s going to be about. The first so many decades, this happened, that happened, everybody is engaged, and this set the pace. But it’s up to us to decide what graphic design is going be.
Some of you are saying, wow! There’s really something to this. How do I do this? And this is what I would like– those of you I’d like to speak to just right now. I’d like to ask you to do this.
I’m not suggesting you quit your jobs. I’m not suggesting you don’t work for good money. All I want to do is ask that in your professional life, whether you’re a student and it’s just coming soon, or whether you’re already a practitioner, to give 10% of your time towards projects that help repair the world.
And I’m not saying you have to donate any time. I’m not suggesting giving away any work. I’m just saying, make sure that at least 10% your time is spent working on projects that are helping make things better rather than worse. Now if everyone’s working a 40 hour week– and I know we all work longer than that– but let’s say you only work 40 hours, that’s four hours a week.
Now imagine four hours a week, how many designers did I say there were in the world?
95…
95% of them are alive today of the million designers. So that’s four million hours a week. Can you imagine how much good we can do as a group? Four million hours a week! Mervin, you know, you mentioned that we have a role to play. And we can’t do it alone. But you know, it’s up to the doctors, for instance, to take care of their special role they have in medicine. And they made a decision a couple thousand years ago to define what their profession would be about.
Because doctors could have said, well, we’ll just wait until people are almost dead, and then we’ll ask them for all their money for some drug that will keep them alive. Or they can do just cosmetic surgery. But they didn’t do that. They came up with this thing called the Hippocratic oath.
Doctors subscribe to an ethic which is higher than society expects. And I’m saying, let’s do that ourselves. Let’s define what this industry is going to be about. And let’s not just do good design. Let’s focus on doing good.
Reviewed December 16, 2006