Design for India: World Economic Forum – Sustainability & Design at Davos

Sunday, February 1, 2009

World Economic Forum – Sustainability & Design at Davos

World Economic Forum – Feedback from Davos.

Image 01: CEO’s of major global corporations at the Sustainability session at Davos using the NID designed posters.

We got a brief message from Davos on 31 January 2009 from Marcello Mastioni of the World Economic Forum on the successful completion of a collaborative journey between NID and the WEF that started last year with the Sustainability Design Charette in New Delhi on the 15 November 2008 about which I reported earlier on this blog. The event on sustainability took place at Davos on the 29 January 2009 using the visual materials that were designed for the purpose by students and faculty teams at NID through a two day workshop on the 26 and 27 December 2008 which was followed by an intensive effort to capture all the insights into an expressive set of five posters shown below.

I Quote this below:
“Dear NID Team,

The Sustainability meetings have been successfully completed, but the Davos Meeting is not over yet, and we are still busy closing it. You will forgive us for now for not reaching out with as many details as it would be appropriate.

The sessions went very well, with extraordinary participation and with the definition of a clear mandate for action in 2009, which was our primary objective. The visuals contributed greatly to creating a conducing environment that would inspire the CEOs towards innovation and collaboration.

The pictures the official photographer took are not yet available to me, but I wanted to attach a few pictures to show you how close we put our leaders to the visuals, and the type of environment we created for the event.

Many thanks again for your extraordinary support.

We look forward to talking to you in one week or so for a more thorough debrief.

All best,

Marcello”
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Image 02: World business leaders meet world thinkers on sustainability at Davos 2009 and use the NID designed posters on Visualising Sustainability.

In an earlier message on 23January 2009 sent to us after we had submitted all the five posters Marcello informed us of the intentions of the WEF in using the posters at Davos this year.

I Quote from his mail below:
“Dear NID Team,

I wanted to take a moment to say a big thank you to all of you.

The posters are printed and on their way to Davos, where they will be featured in an event with 50 participants, including the CEOs of companies such as Nike Inc., The Coca-Cola Company, Unilever, Land O'Lakes Inc., Nestlé SA, Monsanto Company, Young & Rubicam Inc., METRO Group, Best Buy Co. Inc., Yara International ASA, IDEO Inc., The Olayan Group, nGenera, The Reitan Group, S. C. Johnson & Son Inc., Kraft Foods Inc., General Mills Inc. and Dow Jones & Company Inc., amongst others.

Everybody here expressed wonder and admiration on the work done. You have been very courageous to tackle such a complex systemic issue as Sustainability with an open universal approach, and then go through the immense task of distilling the discussions into meaningful conclusions and relevant visuals.

You had success at your mission, and you can proud of that. Please let us praise your achievement.

I won’t of course miss to keep you in the loop as things develop here.

All best,

Warmly,

Marcello

Marcello Mastioni
Associate Director, Head or Retail and Consumer Goods Industries
Global Leadership Fellow
World Economic Forum”

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I will make a detailed post about the process of exploration, cooperation and design that we used to make these posters and the various players involved in this process at NID and at Geneva office of the WEF. I include below images of the five posters for immediate reference and pdf files will be made available soon along with the posts that follow as the story unfolds.