D&AD President Naresh Ramchandani on activism
After outgoing D&AD president Kate Stanners, Pentagram partner Naresh Ramchandani has been named to the 2020-2021 role, with Central St. Martins Dean Rebecca Wright serving as vice president.
The key to Ramchandani’s tenure as president, according to a statement from D&AD, will be his focus on "exploring how creatives and their agencies can deal with their social impact, with the highest standards of creativity." The focus is on the investigation and elaboration of the connections between creativity, diversity and environmental activism, and this "from a D&AD platform and perspective," he told CR.
"I think we need to understand that excellence in this statement is not a solid idea," he says. “Design and advertising have always been created in the context of culture, and excellence in design and advertising is always required to make the strongest and most meaningful connections to that culture. It's about being relevant to the time and I think when the culture changes and when the times change the design and advertising quality need to change in response and I think here we are now. "
“We're in a culture that asks some pretty tough questions about design and advertising,” he says, citing the climate crisis as a key issue and the responsibility of creatives to “shine as brightly as possible on the best possible examples to help fight it. "
I think we're seeing the imagination on a new scale and at a new pace
As a co-founder of Do the Green Thing, Ramchandani had been involved in environmental issues long before it became part of everyday creative vocabulary and is a regular contributor to CR. He has seen a bias among brands and agencies dealing with the issue, both creative projects and burgeoning frameworks such as circular models and B Corps. But is the creative sector doing enough? "If you use global KPIs to judge what we need, where we need to be by when, we are on the wrong track, that is for sure, and therefore more and more needs to be done," he says. However, he remains optimistic – partly because we have to be ("I don't see the point in being pessimistic") and partly because he sees effective change.