True Blue (thinking) is a response to our accumulating environmental problems championed by Kevin Roberts Worldwide CEO at Saatchi and Saatchi. It represents an approach strongly contrasting with Green Thinking/Desing with its connotations of denial, guilt and negativityabout stopping doing things we like and (for me… hessian underpants). True Blue presents a positive solution orientated pragmatic (read more here) approach that has links (also links with “Bright Green” approaches) and from Harvard The Awesomeness Manifesto, more about this here but this has 4 main pillars

Here are the four pillars of his Awesomeness Manifesto:

1. Ethical production: without an ethical component, awesomeness isn’t possible. The buy low, sell high mentality is yesterday’s mantra.

2. Insanely great stuff: put creativity front and center and you’ll get an emotional reaction from anyone who sees it. Delight the customer.

3. Love: Apple creates products people love. Their employees love to show off how awesome
these products are and customers love shopping in Apple stores. Compare this with Best Buy.

4. Thick value: this is real, meaningful, and sustainable. Thick value, not thin value, actually makes people better off.

The emergence and promotion of True Blue is not unsurprising coming from Kevin, a recent grandfather realising that rampantcapitalism is causing problems. It’s attractive for me for more fundamental reasons.

For me this engages with a bigger picturte of human happieness and citizenship but side stepps the rather moralistic approach that stopped me buying (into) Adbusters and similer iviry tower evangalistices. Philosophically I have a problem with domination/subjugation relationships and so with evangelism. This is prevalent in eco-design thinking in education. I have even experienced lecturers openly relishing the chance to indoctrinate students to adopt their particular view over the course of 10 weeks to their best to impose their view on a cohort (at the expense of the development of students).

In this respect I think True Blue is more ethically responsible and sustainable in the long term than green or echo indoctrination.