- Email: [email protected]
Can Graphic Design Save Your Life?
Spotlight
Exhibition Can Graphic Design Save Your Life?
Can Graphic Design Save Your Life? Free exhibition at the Wellcome Collection, London, UK until Jan 14, 2018 https://wellcomecollection.org/ graphicdesign For the Tobacco Atlas see http://www.tobaccoatlas.org
854
For an insight into the progress made in tobacco control, take a glance at a few adverts from the 20th century. For example, “As your dentist I would recommend Viceroys”, “To keep a slender figure no-one can deny, reach for a Lucky instead of a sweet”, “L&M Filters are just what the doctor ordered”, and “I’d walk a mile for a Camel”, with the last one seeming less like a catchphrase and more of a comment on the nature of addiction. Such brutally deceptive straplines were typically accompanied by rich iconography. The Marlboro Man campaign adopted the imagery of the cowboy to insinuate that smoking was a masculine duty. Several of the campaign’s stars died from smoking-related illnesses. Virginia Slims were targeted at women; the company sponsored the first women’s tennis tour, and ran marketing campaigns that played on themes of emancipation under the tagline “you’ve come a long way, baby”. In the days when the tobacco industry was able to hawk its toxic wares on television, viewers could catch Fred Flintstone proclaiming that “Winston tastes good, like a cigarette should”, a perky bellboy trilling “call for Philip Morris”, and lantern-jawed heroes and seductive young women exhaling smoky curlicues with unruffled confidence. Then there were the endless instances of product placement. One brand appeared 22 times in the 1980 film Superman II. The same year saw annual worldwide sales of individual cigarettes reach 4·5 trillion, up from 50 billion in 1900. The inventive efforts of the advertising industry had helped to turn tobacco into one of the most popular products of the 20th century. The Wellcome Collection’s (London, UK) excellent new show “Can Graphic Design Save Your Life?” starts with a 1948 television commercial. Serried ranks of cigarettes march in formation before being enfolded in the familiar Lucky Strike packaging. The advert references Lucky Strike’s contribution to the war effort, which mostly consisted of freely distributing cigarettes to American soldiers. The gesture might have improved morale, but it also served to secure a squadron of customers once the fighting was finished. Indeed, the Tobacco Atlas points out that “globally, tobacco use killed 100 million people in the 20th century, much more than all deaths in World Wars I and II combined”. A copy of the atlas is on display in the exhibition. “By the 1980s, advertising agencies were starting to find creative ways around the growing restrictions on marketing cigarettes”, notes one of the exhibition’s information labels. “A classic example is Saatchi and Saatchi’s surreal and highly successful Silk Cut campaign”. The campaign, which was heavily influenced by the slash paintings by Italian artist Lucio Fontana (1899–1968), consisted of various images of billowing purple silk and some kind of incision on a crisp white background. The brand name was nowhere mentioned,
giving the scene a cryptic aura, and the absurd implication that smokers are part of a sophisticated sub-society. The dark arts disguised as conceptual art. The relevant question in that case is surely: can graphic design end your life? It was the ban on tobacco advertising that stubbed out the Silk Cut campaign. It marked a turning point. Since then, graphic design has become a weapon in public health campaigns. 65 countries have produced anti-smoking messages on postage stamps, some of which are on display at the Wellcome exhibition. Skulls are a popular motif, while a Malian effort depicts a cigarette emerging from the barrel of a gun. The Pantone colour scheme illustrates the quest to find the world’s most ugly colour—the sludgy green shade known as 448C is now used for plain packaging in Australia, France, and the UK. The section concludes with examples of the elegant posters of Biman Mullick; an upended turtle puffing on a cigarette is accompanied by a warning that “smoking is slow motion suicide”. Another poster helpfully suggests “if you must smoke, don’t exhale”. A subsequent section of the exhibition explores the work of graphic designers in establishing visual identities in the pharmaceutical industry. Designers were wrestling with the
wikimedia/Stanford School of Medicine
Published Online October 3, 2017 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/ S2213-2600(17)30375-2
www.thelancet.com/respiratory Vol 5 November 2017
Spotlight
GettyImages
question of how to differentiate and demarcate products intended for an international market, emphasising their cutting edge quality without referencing the unsettling details of the condition at which they were targeted. Geigy style, with its sans-serif typeface and abstract images, soon became the template for medical advertising and packaging. The penultimate section focuses on contagion. It includes a photograph of a hand-painted mural by Stephen Doe that stretches across a wall in Liberia, presenting the symptoms of Ebola to a mostly illiterate population. Posters by UNICEF follow a similar pattern. It is an enthralling display that is coherently arranged and organised, and consistently informative. Over the past 15 years or so, the tobacco industry has been deprived of the tools of graphic design, and these same tools have been deployed in the service of tobacco control. In the end, it is public health that has come a long way.
Talha Khan Burki
The future of medicine: a 30-year perspective Utopia or dystopia, what does the next 30 years have in store for medicine? This is the question ten experts—from fields including cancer and veterinary medicine—attempted to answer in a panel discussion entitled The Future of Medicine: a 30 Year Perspective, hosted on Sept 15, 2017, at the Royal Institution of Great Britain (London, UK). The talks were rapid-fire, as the experts explained the history of their field before giving the audience their view of the future, all within 15 minutes. So what does the future of medicine hold? One perspective is that the provision of health care will improve as a result of advancing technologies and drugs. This improvement will largely be driven by changes in the behaviour of consumers, who want to live longer and healthier lives, explained Luke Johnson (The Institute of Cancer Research, London, UK). As technology advances and drugs become off-patent, the associated costs will decrease. However, new therapeutic breakthroughs will cost more money than their predecessors—eg, the treatment for nonsmall-cell lung cancer with the novel 2016 drug osimertinib costs about £4700 per month in the UK at the time of approval, whereas the novel 2017 drug nivolumab costs about £5000 per month. This economic trend could be even more divisive in the future as the gap between the rich and poor becomes ever wider. For the wealthy, the question will not be whether they can receive life-prolonging treatment, but when they should stop receiving it so that they can have a dignified death. For those less fortunate, however, the questions will relate to whether they can afford novel expensive treatment and, if so, for how long? Another perspective is that wearable technologies and artificial intelligence will play a much larger role in health www.thelancet.com/respiratory Vol 5 November 2017
care in the future. Who will want to visit their general practitioner on a regular basis when the smartwatch on their wrist can continuously monitor their physiological wellbeing and diagnose them pre-emptively, asked Martin Cowie (National Heart and Lung Institute, London, UK). Data from these wearable devices could be streamed and analysed by intelligent software that never gets tired and is not prone to human error, unlike an exhausted doctor who has been on call for the past few days. So are we heading towards a future where doctors are replaced with artificial intelligence and wearable technologies? Probably not, argued Ameet Bakhai (The Royal Free Hospital London, London, UK), who went on to explain that the process of clinical decision making requires emotion and empathy, and therefore input from doctors will always be required. Allowing clinical decisions to be made only by robots will possibly break two laws, said Bakhai—the Hippocratic Oath and Isaac Asimov’s first law of robotics: “A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.” Bakhai argued that because machines are governed by pre-written algorithms and do not have emotional awareness, a situation could arise in which a robot withholds treatment because its pragmatic algorithms do not have the required data to adequately judge whether a patient’s disorder is curable, or missing data edges the algorithm towards reducing costs of treatment as opposed to protecting human life. Bakhai asked several questions, including how will artificial intelligence ever be able to value human life? Current algorithms do not handle uncertainty well and cannot intuit doing the wrong thing for the right
The Future of Medicine: a 30 Year Perspective was held at the Royal Institution of Great Britain, London, UK on Sept 15, 2017 http:// www.howtoacademy.com/ conferences/the-future-ofmedicine For the cost of osimertinib see https://www.theguardian.com/ society/2016/oct/04/lungcancer-drug-tagrissoosimertinib-available-on-nhs For the cost of nivolumab see http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk41318417
855
Exhibition Can Graphic Design Save Your Life?
Can Graphic Design Save Your Life? Free exhibition at the Wellcome Collection, London, UK until Jan 14, 2018 https://wellcomecollection.org/ graphicdesign For the Tobacco Atlas see http://www.tobaccoatlas.org
854
For an insight into the progress made in tobacco control, take a glance at a few adverts from the 20th century. For example, “As your dentist I would recommend Viceroys”, “To keep a slender figure no-one can deny, reach for a Lucky instead of a sweet”, “L&M Filters are just what the doctor ordered”, and “I’d walk a mile for a Camel”, with the last one seeming less like a catchphrase and more of a comment on the nature of addiction. Such brutally deceptive straplines were typically accompanied by rich iconography. The Marlboro Man campaign adopted the imagery of the cowboy to insinuate that smoking was a masculine duty. Several of the campaign’s stars died from smoking-related illnesses. Virginia Slims were targeted at women; the company sponsored the first women’s tennis tour, and ran marketing campaigns that played on themes of emancipation under the tagline “you’ve come a long way, baby”. In the days when the tobacco industry was able to hawk its toxic wares on television, viewers could catch Fred Flintstone proclaiming that “Winston tastes good, like a cigarette should”, a perky bellboy trilling “call for Philip Morris”, and lantern-jawed heroes and seductive young women exhaling smoky curlicues with unruffled confidence. Then there were the endless instances of product placement. One brand appeared 22 times in the 1980 film Superman II. The same year saw annual worldwide sales of individual cigarettes reach 4·5 trillion, up from 50 billion in 1900. The inventive efforts of the advertising industry had helped to turn tobacco into one of the most popular products of the 20th century. The Wellcome Collection’s (London, UK) excellent new show “Can Graphic Design Save Your Life?” starts with a 1948 television commercial. Serried ranks of cigarettes march in formation before being enfolded in the familiar Lucky Strike packaging. The advert references Lucky Strike’s contribution to the war effort, which mostly consisted of freely distributing cigarettes to American soldiers. The gesture might have improved morale, but it also served to secure a squadron of customers once the fighting was finished. Indeed, the Tobacco Atlas points out that “globally, tobacco use killed 100 million people in the 20th century, much more than all deaths in World Wars I and II combined”. A copy of the atlas is on display in the exhibition. “By the 1980s, advertising agencies were starting to find creative ways around the growing restrictions on marketing cigarettes”, notes one of the exhibition’s information labels. “A classic example is Saatchi and Saatchi’s surreal and highly successful Silk Cut campaign”. The campaign, which was heavily influenced by the slash paintings by Italian artist Lucio Fontana (1899–1968), consisted of various images of billowing purple silk and some kind of incision on a crisp white background. The brand name was nowhere mentioned,
giving the scene a cryptic aura, and the absurd implication that smokers are part of a sophisticated sub-society. The dark arts disguised as conceptual art. The relevant question in that case is surely: can graphic design end your life? It was the ban on tobacco advertising that stubbed out the Silk Cut campaign. It marked a turning point. Since then, graphic design has become a weapon in public health campaigns. 65 countries have produced anti-smoking messages on postage stamps, some of which are on display at the Wellcome exhibition. Skulls are a popular motif, while a Malian effort depicts a cigarette emerging from the barrel of a gun. The Pantone colour scheme illustrates the quest to find the world’s most ugly colour—the sludgy green shade known as 448C is now used for plain packaging in Australia, France, and the UK. The section concludes with examples of the elegant posters of Biman Mullick; an upended turtle puffing on a cigarette is accompanied by a warning that “smoking is slow motion suicide”. Another poster helpfully suggests “if you must smoke, don’t exhale”. A subsequent section of the exhibition explores the work of graphic designers in establishing visual identities in the pharmaceutical industry. Designers were wrestling with the
wikimedia/Stanford School of Medicine
Published Online October 3, 2017 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/ S2213-2600(17)30375-2
www.thelancet.com/respiratory Vol 5 November 2017
Spotlight
GettyImages
question of how to differentiate and demarcate products intended for an international market, emphasising their cutting edge quality without referencing the unsettling details of the condition at which they were targeted. Geigy style, with its sans-serif typeface and abstract images, soon became the template for medical advertising and packaging. The penultimate section focuses on contagion. It includes a photograph of a hand-painted mural by Stephen Doe that stretches across a wall in Liberia, presenting the symptoms of Ebola to a mostly illiterate population. Posters by UNICEF follow a similar pattern. It is an enthralling display that is coherently arranged and organised, and consistently informative. Over the past 15 years or so, the tobacco industry has been deprived of the tools of graphic design, and these same tools have been deployed in the service of tobacco control. In the end, it is public health that has come a long way.
Talha Khan Burki
The future of medicine: a 30-year perspective Utopia or dystopia, what does the next 30 years have in store for medicine? This is the question ten experts—from fields including cancer and veterinary medicine—attempted to answer in a panel discussion entitled The Future of Medicine: a 30 Year Perspective, hosted on Sept 15, 2017, at the Royal Institution of Great Britain (London, UK). The talks were rapid-fire, as the experts explained the history of their field before giving the audience their view of the future, all within 15 minutes. So what does the future of medicine hold? One perspective is that the provision of health care will improve as a result of advancing technologies and drugs. This improvement will largely be driven by changes in the behaviour of consumers, who want to live longer and healthier lives, explained Luke Johnson (The Institute of Cancer Research, London, UK). As technology advances and drugs become off-patent, the associated costs will decrease. However, new therapeutic breakthroughs will cost more money than their predecessors—eg, the treatment for nonsmall-cell lung cancer with the novel 2016 drug osimertinib costs about £4700 per month in the UK at the time of approval, whereas the novel 2017 drug nivolumab costs about £5000 per month. This economic trend could be even more divisive in the future as the gap between the rich and poor becomes ever wider. For the wealthy, the question will not be whether they can receive life-prolonging treatment, but when they should stop receiving it so that they can have a dignified death. For those less fortunate, however, the questions will relate to whether they can afford novel expensive treatment and, if so, for how long? Another perspective is that wearable technologies and artificial intelligence will play a much larger role in health www.thelancet.com/respiratory Vol 5 November 2017
care in the future. Who will want to visit their general practitioner on a regular basis when the smartwatch on their wrist can continuously monitor their physiological wellbeing and diagnose them pre-emptively, asked Martin Cowie (National Heart and Lung Institute, London, UK). Data from these wearable devices could be streamed and analysed by intelligent software that never gets tired and is not prone to human error, unlike an exhausted doctor who has been on call for the past few days. So are we heading towards a future where doctors are replaced with artificial intelligence and wearable technologies? Probably not, argued Ameet Bakhai (The Royal Free Hospital London, London, UK), who went on to explain that the process of clinical decision making requires emotion and empathy, and therefore input from doctors will always be required. Allowing clinical decisions to be made only by robots will possibly break two laws, said Bakhai—the Hippocratic Oath and Isaac Asimov’s first law of robotics: “A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.” Bakhai argued that because machines are governed by pre-written algorithms and do not have emotional awareness, a situation could arise in which a robot withholds treatment because its pragmatic algorithms do not have the required data to adequately judge whether a patient’s disorder is curable, or missing data edges the algorithm towards reducing costs of treatment as opposed to protecting human life. Bakhai asked several questions, including how will artificial intelligence ever be able to value human life? Current algorithms do not handle uncertainty well and cannot intuit doing the wrong thing for the right
The Future of Medicine: a 30 Year Perspective was held at the Royal Institution of Great Britain, London, UK on Sept 15, 2017 http:// www.howtoacademy.com/ conferences/the-future-ofmedicine For the cost of osimertinib see https://www.theguardian.com/ society/2016/oct/04/lungcancer-drug-tagrissoosimertinib-available-on-nhs For the cost of nivolumab see http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk41318417
855