Segunda llamada

¿Merry Christmas?

Gus — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 05:33:34 +0000

Ladies and gentlemen, the time has come to end the year! (Segunda llamada´s least favorite time of the year, or at least speaking for me) the so familiar, expected and celebrated “Christmas.”

The reason for my previous -and bitter for many-statement? The fact that, in my particular opinion, Christmas has totally neglected the sense of celebration in the company of family and friends (and not to mention the religious significance for believers) in favor of a celebration based and supported by excessive consumption. Black friday was just a couple of weeks ago and now we face the last shot of sales and promotions, as if we were to die in 2 weeks. (Which may be preferable for many who begin to suffer in February with debts from the holiday season)

I dare say that this “misinterpretation” of the traditions is more linked to richer people and urban areas. No desire to generalize but in these groups very few people celebrates with sincerity, or at least show some a little bit of interest for the “birth of Christ”. The vast majority go to church for a while as part of a social ritual that ends for sure in the Apple Store in the local mall, the eyes move from religious icons to smartphones, tablets and other gadgets in the blink of an eye. Conversely, the vast majority of people I know in rural areas give greater value to the religious significance and spend hours on pilgrimages rather than Tower Records or Abercombie stores.

And to make matters worse, advertising will always be present contradicting the points I try to express. How? relying on arguments such as “time of giving and receiving,” ”the magic of Christmas in your hearts,” or worse: The illusion of young children. Christmas is all about corporate interests.

By now, I probably already won the Grinch label, but please read on and when you finish the article reconsider your posture. We now go on to my Christmas recommendations:

1 .- No need to BUY STUFF, in order to prove affection to your loved ones. Many people suffer at this time of the year because they feel obligated and sometimes do not have enough money. Unfortunately the most common solution is to use a credit card, and what really counts is spending time with loved ones, so take the opportunity to be surrounde by those who you couldn´t visit during all year.

Now, if you really like the “giving”thing:

2a.- Give gifts made by yourself:

Cakes, scarves, paintings, cards. The important thing is the intention and not the price or status value.

2b .- If the magic of Christmas really “fills your heart,” don´t go out on the streets to give away old toys and old clothes you no longer like to poor people. All of this after having spent the entire Christmas bonus on shiny new things for you and your family. It is very common in our society that kind of false charity Go Christmas spirit! ¿How about giving new thingsor donate the money you would spend on gifts for acquaintances to people who can not afford the same luxuries?

2c .- If you do not care about any of this and consider it essential to spend out and participate in all possible gift exchanges: Please take the time and attention to give away something that is liked and / or useful to the recipient. Do not throwyour money away. Example: You and give a Britney Spears CD to the metalhead in your office, The CD cost is 12 dollars, but for the recipient it´s probably worth 1 dollar (well, for anyone who values music). That loss of 11 dollars becomes lost money. Without going any further, how many times has this happened to you with relatives who don´t have a clue of what you wanted or needed?

*If you are interested in how money loses value with holiday gifts check out: Scroogenomics: Why you shouldn´t buy presents for the holidays from economist Joel Waldfogel

3.-Christmas trees

Sure they look good and decorating them is agreat family tradition, but is it worth stopping to think for a second where does my natural tree comes from? Is it from a certified forest? Are trees replanted so that throughout the year it benefits and counterparts CO2 emissions? Was it illegally cut down, harming the environment and impacting negatively? Are ther other sustainable options like renting trees, and how much do they cost? Is it better to have an artificial tree, or can I create my own version? Or we can ignore this tedious activity of thinking and questioning and jump directly to: In the department store parking lot there are some men who sell trees they cut from somewhere and then I decorate my living room for 2 months, then it´s dead and goes to the TRASH. Use and dispose, as gifts and their wrappings (yes, it’s also an illogical waste of paper).

I remember in elementary school when everybody would take care of the “little plants”, too bad all the kids grew up and they forgot … or pretend to…

4.- Those who bring gifts to kids

It is difficult (and even insensitive) to explain all this stuff to youn kids, specially when mass media is not helping us. Santa Claus (coca cola village included) and the 3 wise kings (depending on the country) sometimes both (like in wealthy areas of Mexico city) all this represents a lot of money parents must deal with. (More debts on February!)

I still do not face this situation, but I’m sure you can take part of these traditions, and make your children happy without falling into excess and consumerism, which is also part of their education.

Well, no more attacks on the poor Christian Nativity, already reviled is the original concept. I say goodbye to you and this year asking you to think a bit about this. My respects to those of you whoendow these dates with authentic meaning: emotional, family, personal, religious, spiritual, or whatever makes you happy. And by that I mean really happy, not what you fell when buying the latest Iphone.

Happy holidays and my best wishes. See you next year

Thanks to everyone who supported this website and the poster competition

Gus

PS Is it too vile to take advantage of all this Christmas thing, the illusion of children and the birth of Jesus to suggest you to buy the 2011 Segunda llamada poster catalogue?

Exhibition and awards ceremony at UAM

Gus — Sun, 30 Oct 2011 23:25:53 +0000

The first exhibition of selected posters and winners of the 2nd Segunda llamada competition will be held at Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana Azcapotzalco, Building L, Mezzanine., Mexico City. From November 28 to December 2, 2011.
Awards ceremony and cocktail: Thursday December 1st 7PM, Room K-001 (on invitation)
Interested in attending send an email to: gus@segundallamada.com

2011 Poster competition winners

Gus — Thu, 21 Jul 2011 01:19:57 +0000


Click here to visit the winners and selected participants gallery. 
Thanks a lot to all the participants, jury members and sponsors.
Award ceremony, exhibitions and catalogue starting in October 2011, soon news on dates, please be patient.

Additional finalists can be viewed on www.facebook.com/segundallamadamx

Results date

Gus — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 00:39:20 +0000

Thank you very much to everyone who participated in Segunda llamada´s 2011 poser competition.Having received 220 proposals from 8 countries in the first edition in 2009, I am happy to announce that this year we received 1,340 posters from 40 countries.Over the next few weeks will carry out the processes of pre-selection of finalists and then votation of the international jury to select this year´s winners.

The results will be announced on July 20, 2011 (one month after the original date).We appreciate your understanding and apologize for any inconvenience this delay may represent.

Good luck, and finally thanks to the sponsors (UAM Azcapotzalco and Natura Mexico) as well as all the people and websites that helped spread the word about the contest

Gus / Segunda llamada – Mexico

PRE-SELECTION COMMITTEE:

Lourdes Zolezzi, Felix Beltran, Alejandro Ramirez, Roberto Garcaa Madrid and Gustavo Morales Ainslie (MEXICO).

INTERNATIONAL JURY:Lourdes Zolezzi MEX, Felix Beltran MEX, Eric Olivares MEX, Susana Machicao BOL, Juan Carlos Darias VEN, Parisa Tashakori IRAN, Rene Wanner SWI, Luba Lukova USA, Javier Herrero SPAIN, Luis Carlos Herrera MEX and Gustavo Morales Ainslie MEX.

IT’S IN YOUR HANDS

Dam — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 22:21:07 +0000

Incredible campaign done by nonprofit organizations WMG (Us), Grampari (India) and filmmaker Pilgrim Films. Check it out in the website Tippy Tap. They recently won the Do-Gooder competition on Youtube. This is a clear example of excellent social design applied to very basic things that save water and lives.

Thanks for reading / Dam

A heavy burden

Dam — Fri, 01 Apr 2011 17:11:34 +0000

Safe drinking water and adequate sanitation services are vital to human health. They offer other important benefits as well – some easily identifiable and quantifiable, such as costs avoided and time saved, as well as other less tangible benefits that are more difficult to measure, including advantages in terms of convenience, increased well-being, and personal dignity, privacy and safety.But not everyone has the same opportunities to obtain this valuable liquid and all its benefits, searching for water and sanitation services is a heavy burden for the poor, especially women and children:

Burdens associated with inadequate coverage and inefficient service delivery fall heaviest on the most vulnerable and the poorest.Poor citizens, especially women and children, are also the most excluded from decision-making. Lack of access to safe sanitation affects women not only in terms of their health but also in terms of their dignity and safety. Women and girls especially find their productivity impaired by their social roles, which often include and the costly and time-consuming tasks of collecting and storing water.

Because of the lack of access and the poor quality of services, low tariffs often do not help the poor, who are less likely to be connected in the first place and rely on informal vendors. Some 1.4 billion people are classified as poor: 44% in South Asia, about 24% each in sub-Saharan Africa and East Asia, and 6.5% in Latin America and the Caribbean (WWDR3, p. 84). Those figures are expected to rise over the next few decades with projected urban expansion.

The urban poor often live in informal settlements following rapid urban growth, in situations lacking many of life’s basic necessities: safe drinking water, adequate sanitation services and access to health services, durable housing and secure tenure. Affordable, safe, piped water is available to only a small share of low-income urban dwellers. Financing of improvements to water services is the key to expanding access, but the illegal status of the large majority of slum dwellers is often a barrier to access to finance or support. Many informal settlements are also in flood-prone areas and are especially vulnerable to environmental hazards. Thus, large populations of slum dwellers live at high risk of disease.

New urban settlers need access to water and wastewater services. Yet many are lucky if these are supplied water through formal services via the municipal government. In more typical cases, they are served informally by vendors who regularly charge exorbitant rates for water of often questionable quality. Achieving a more equitable access to water is a critical task facing municipal leaders.

The costs of inadequate water supply and sanitation are high: 1.6 million children die every year from diarrhoea, mainly as a result of inadequate sanitation, water supply and hygiene. And the economic costs of lost time in fetching water and environmental degradation from wastewater pollution are also high – for example, this has been estimated at more than 1.4 percent of GDP in Bangladesh, 1 percent in Colombia, and 0.6 percent in Tunisia (World Bank, 2010).

Urban settlements are the main cause of the contamination of sources. More than 80% of residual water in developing countries are discharged without treatment, contaminating rivers, lakes, and coastal zones. Even in some developed countries, the treatment of urban residual water is far from satisfactory.

Those of us who live in urban settlements tend to view the use of potable water as something normal and don’t worry about how it reaches our homes. All we know is that if we open the faucet in the kitchen, bathroom or any pipe, the water we need will come out. But not in all cases is it this way, right this moment there is a person struggling to find a bit of this vital liquid, we must be conscious of the lack of water and take measures in our homes to keep from wasting it.

Thanks for reading / Dam

More info:UNESCO

Header image photography credit: Jan Grarup – Noor images

World Water Day 2011

Dam — Wed, 16 Mar 2011 17:35:30 +0000

International World Water Day is held annually on 22 March as a means of focusing attention on the importance of freshwater and advocating for the sustainable management of freshwater resources.

An international day to celebrate freshwater was recommended at the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED). The United Nations General Assembly responded by designating 22 March 1993 as the first World Water Day.

Each year, World Water Day highlights a specific aspect of freshwater.

This is the first time in human history when the majority of the world population lives in cities: 3.3 billion people… and the urban landscape continues to grow. 38% of the growth has it’s origins in the slums. The urban population is growing faster than the adaptation abilities of its infrastructure.

The objective of World Water Day 2011 is to focus international attention on the impact of the rapid urban population growth, industrialization and the uncertainty caused by climactic change, conflicts, and natural disasters have on urban water supply systems.

This year’s topic, Water for the cities: responding to the urban challenge, has as an objective to provide relief and encourage governments, organizations, communities, and people to actively participate in responding to the challenge of the provision of urban water.

Thanks for reading / Dam

More info: http://www.unwater.org/worldwaterday/index.html

Never Wasted- Lee bags

Dam — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 17:43:24 +0000

How many times do we design without thinking in the life of use of a container, package, card, paper, bag, etc.? We always assume that it’s normal for them to have a cycle and that they will inevitably end up in the garbage can, but why not think before creating? Let’s design with more thought on the life of use of each thing so that it takes much longer for it to become waste. And let’s utilize the materials more wisely too.

This was applied by Happy Creative Service, an Indian agency that has been in charge of elaborating the most creative bags for Lee, a very renown clothing brand.

Lee wants to unite its brand to the movement for environmental care and recycling in order to transmit these values in a fun and effective manner through 100% reusable bags they have created, a bag design to be decomposed into many useful things like games, bookmarks, book covers, calendars, and even the handles on the bag are shoelaces.

The idea is to make the bag reusable again as a bag or in the way proposed by the brand. The objective is to keep everything from going in the garbage can.

The interest the packaging has roused has forced the brand to raise its production of the bags by 100X, which at the beginning was of 3,000 units.

Hopefully more companies will implement strategies like these; and hopefully more designers will suggest them to their clients.

Thanks for reading / Dam

Source: Grafous

Think in more Water

Dam — Thu, 10 Mar 2011 19:30:39 +0000

The competition´s call for entries has been spread, and we want to help your inspiration and your posters to be better justified. Therefore we will launch periodically articles on the subject in question: “Water”. Let´s start with a short introduction to one of the many problems that this vital liquid goes trough.

Today, one in two people on the planet live in a city. The world’s cities are growing at an exceptional rate and urbanisation is a continuum. The main reason they are growing is because of natural increase in urban population, but also due to rural-to-urban migration and reclassification of rural areas to urban areas. and nearly 40% of the world’s urban expansion is growing slums. Between 1990-2001 the world’s slums increased at a rate of 18 million people a year, and is projected to increase to 27 million new slum citizens per year between 2005-2020.

What about the water in our cities?

Investments in infrastructure have not kept up with the rate of urbanization, while water and waste services show significant underinvestment. The central problem is therefore the management of urban water and waste. Piped water coverage is declining in many settings, and the poor people get the worst services, yet paying the highest water prices. Few urban authorities in developing countries have found a sustainable solution to urban sanitation, and utilities cannot afford to extend sewers to the slums, nor can they treat the volume of sewage already collected. Solid waste disposal is a growing threat to health and the environment.

And what are the opportunities?
Cities are complicated to manage: different approaches are needed for different types of urban environments. But
cities also provide the best opportunity to improve livelihoods and infrastructure development, including water and waste services.

The big opportunity is increased recycling and reuse of water and wastes; an integrated urban management. Adopting more efficient water treatment technologies and capturing water and wastes within the city will also minimize environmental and downstream pollution.

Have you adopted any actions to help solve this problem?
Thanks for reading!

Dam

dam@segundallamada.com

World Water Day 2011

Header image photography by: Jan Grarup – Noor images

2011 Poster competition

Gus — Tue, 15 Feb 2011 04:49:26 +0000

Segunda llamada, Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana campus Azcapotzalco and Natura Mexico extend the invitation to participate in the 2nd international poster competition with the theme: Actions for sustainable use of water.

Click to download call for entries and the 2009 catalogue.

More information about the jury.

Poster design: Gustavo Morales Ainslie / Photography by: Jan Grarup – Noor images

Please visit the other sections of this website and spread the word.

Thanks to: Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana Azcapotzalco, Alejandro Ramirez Lozano, Luis Carlos Herrera and Felix Beltrán; Natura México: Javier Herrero, Aurora Mateos, Idalicia Silva and Gabriela Sandoval; jury members: Lourdes Zolezzi, Luba Lukova, Susana Machicao, Parisa Tashakori, Juan Carlos Darias, Eric Olivares, Rene Wanner; Better World Translators: Luz del Carmen Chavarría and Bety Dabdoub; finally family, friends and collaborators: Damaris Caballero, Claudia Villacorta and Molcajete medios.