at the recent icograda world design congress in beijing, the canadian communication designer david berman presented his book ‘do good design: how designers can change the world’. a chinese edition was released.

designers create much of what the world sees, wants, buys, uses and experiences. at this time of unprecedented environmental, social and economic crises, should we be creating the deceptions that encourage continuous consumption or figuring out a way to help counter it?

in this provocative and dramatically-illustrated book, david berman argues that global branding strategies are the most powerful tools used today to encourage over-consumption amongst growing developing world populations, the largest long-term threat to global harmony and environment. he believes that communications professionals have more conspicuous power than they realize, and play a core role in helping some corporations mislead audiences in order to invent unfulfilled ‘needs’ in larger and larger markets.