Michael Renner – författare

Accelerating social, economic, and environmental pressures are now undermining the security of societies around the world, according to security expert Michael Renner. Since the end of the Cold War, a volatile mix of environmental degradation, inequitable distribution of land and wealth, ethnic antagonisms, and rapid population growth is producing social and political strife, and even causing the wholesale disintegration of countries.The author argues that true security has less to do with how many tanks or soldiers a country can marshal and more with how well it protects its arable lands and watersheds and how well it manages to meet peoples social and economic needs. Military means are often irrelevant or even counterproductive in this new security equation; they are a depreciating asset. At a time when the United Nations has been devoting a sharply higher share of its resources to peacekeeping, while reducing spending on basic environmental and economic development, this new book provides a wake-up call for policy makers around the world.

This annual volume from the Worldwatch Institute shows in graphic form key trends that often escape the attention of the news media, world leaders, and economic experts, but should be integrated into their plans as they map out our global future. Written by the staff of the award-winning Worldwatch Institute, this book allows readers to track key indicators that show social, economic, and environmental progress, or the lack of it. These authoritative data have been distilled from thousands of documents obtained from government, industry, scientists, and international organizations into forty-five "vital signs" of our times. Vital Signs 2000 presents up-to-the-minute information on environmental and sustainable development topics such as global temperature, population growth, HIV/AIDS, fossil fuel consumption, Internet use, income inequalities, grain production, and fish catch. Each trend is presented in both text and graphics, providing a thorough, well-documented, and very accessible overview.

This annual volume shows key trends that should be integrated into the planning of our global future. It enables readers to track key indicators that show social, economic and environmental progress, or the lack of it, into 45 vital signs of our time. Each trend is presented as an overview using both text and graphics.

This ninth annual edition of Vital Signs takes the world's pulse by compiling a wide-ranging collection of trends that identify both problems and progress in the quest for a sustainable society. It highlights both alarming situations and encouraging developments. Part One is a comprehensive presentation of the key indicators in areas such as food, agriculture, energy, atmosphere, economics, transport and the military. Part Two provides in-depth special feature articles on: environmental features, such as transgenic crops and paper recycling; economic features, such as environmental taxes and corporate mergers; and social features, such as tuberculosis, prisons and women in politics.

In its constructive and speculative nature, design has the critical potential to reshape prevalent socio-material realities. At the same time, design is inevitably normative, if not often violent, as it stabilises the past, normalises the present, and precludes just and sustainable futures. The contributions rethink concepts of critique that influence the field of design, question inherent blind spots of the discipline, and expand understandings of what critical design practices could be.With contributions from design theory, practice and education, art theory, philosophy, and informatics, »Critical by Design?« aims to question and unpack the ambivalent tensions between design and critique.

Swiss Graphic Design Histories offers an entirely new redefinition of Switzerland's graphic design landscape. Based on extensive research by scholars of design history and with a multiple and inclusive approach, it reaches beyond the usual canon and the well-know epicentres Basel and Zurich with the germanophone fathers of what has become famous as the Swiss Style in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s.In three volumes it features visual artefacts and archival documents, the majority published here for the first time, alongside likewise previously unpublished conversations with designers who have forged developments of the past decades, as well as new essays discussing key terms that refer to various design practices. The complexity of the undertaking is embraced through a system of keywords, thus enabling readers to connect contents within the individual volumes. A fourth volume comprising a glossary, bibliography, and an index of the keywords rounds out this long-awaited new survey of graphic design in multi-lingual Switzerland that sheds new light on networks, practices and media largely ignored so far.