Blog | Re-nourish | Advocating awareness and action for systems thinking in the communication design community.

Apr 13

TEDxUIUC + Re-nourish

To all who took a few minutes out of their Saturday morning (in the US) and evening (in the UK/China/etc.) to watch my quick explanation of our site – thank you! It was quite an honor to be asked to participate in such a highly regarded lecture series – TEDx.... read more →

April 13, 2010
Eric Benson
Conferences

Feb 09

Designing the Immaterial

As a university design student “making” was my raison d’etre. It was a ritual to trek up to my studio (in any form of weather) to meet a quota of the somewhat unrealistic number of explorations I aimed to meet daily early on in my career. I felt spiritually satisfied... read more →

February 9, 2010
Eric Benson
Articles

Feb 04

Sustainable Design Education Rethought: The Case for Eco-Modernism

Article abstract: In the 1990’s Graphic Design educators were faced with an almost overnight pedagogical dilemma: designing for the Internet. Up until that point Graphic Design educators were challenged by technology in so far as absorbing the rapid growth of operating systems, printing methods and design software and applying these... read more →

February 4, 2010
Eric Benson
Articles, Conferences

Jan 11

Design Education: Laying the Foundation for Sustainability

Graphic design education is missing a critical component. Students receive intensive training in many areas, such as foundation, design history, typography, and composition. But where does environmental sustainability fit on this list? At what point on our path as designers do we learn how to be better stewards of our... read more →

Jun 15

Reevaluating What We Make: A Call for Eco Modernism

Yvette Perullo, for her MA at the New England School of Art and Design at Suffolk University, collected direct mail for four months with her family to produce a 6'2", 106-pound installation for her graduate thesis exhibition. This was done to help the everyday citizen visualize how much direct mail... read more →

June 15, 2009
Eric Benson
Articles, Exhibitions, Research, Systems thinking

May 25

Collaboration is the Key For a Green Future

Four years ago I noticed a number of beautiful direct mail pieces that I spent countless hours designing in a trash bin near a bank of apartment mailboxes. It dawned on me that warm summer evening that everything I had previously created and in the future will design would end... read more →

Apr 20

Why a sustainable design revolution must and will happen. Part III: Sustainable printing and the graphic designer

"The single most important problem is our misguided focus on identifying the single most important problem." - Jared Diamond, Professor of Geography at UCLA. (From the book "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed." Penguin Books. 2005.) It is fairly simple to call a few printers in your local area... read more →

April 20, 2009
Eric Benson
Uncategorized

Apr 15

Why a sustainable design revolution must and will happen. Part II: Sustainable ink and the graphic designer

"Sustainable design gives an authentic value to the consumer." - Katarina Graffman (Ethnographer) In the second portion of this continuing essay, I turn my focus to another integral component to the graphic designer's daily language: ink. Ink was developed, for commercial purposes, by the Chinese thousands of years ago and was... read more →

Apr 10

Why a sustainable design revolution must and will happen. Part I: Sustainable paper and the graphic designer

"There is no business to be done on a dead planet." –David Brower, Sierra Club Foundation Founder We've heard a lot lately about global warming and its connected dangers posed to our civilization and current way of life. But what does this mean for the graphic designer besides possibly investing... read more →