Communicating the Global Goals

On September 20th, 2017, the inaugural Goalkeepers event took place in New York City. The event was streamed live for viewers worldwide. Hosted by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the event coincided with the UN General Assembly in New York, offering an opportunity for attendees and observers to focus on positive progress toward achieving the Goals. We named the event “Goalkeepers” with the intent to create a community for action on The Global Goals.

We hope to engage and connect governments with the private sector, civil society and academia. More importantly, we need to engage young people, our current and future change-makers and innovators. They have the optimism, energy, conviction and knowledge that the future belongs to them. We also designed the overall event design concept, putting the Global Goals in focus and presenting them in new and unexpected ways.

On September 20th, 2017, the annual Global Goals Awards took place at Gotham Hall in New York City. The evening, hosted by United Nations Deputy Secretary-General Amina j. Mohammed and Melinda Gates, was part of the newly launched Goalkeepers initiative. The awards gathered global leaders, philanthropists, media, non-profit organizations and business leaders to honor, celebrate and support new and emerging Goalkeepers – individuals with extraordinary stories, accelerating progress towards the Global Goals.

We designed the event space, spotlighting the Global Goals in a more elegant and formal way. We focused on communicating the power of the Global Goals as well as the honourees and their important contributions toward achieving change.

On July 18th, Sweden presented its voluntary national review on the implementation of the Global Goals at the United Nations. The presentation was intended to illustrate the progress that has already been made as well as highlight the country's challenges and ambitions for the 2030 agenda. We created two video shots that introduced and concluded the presentation led by Sweden's Minister for Public Administration, Ardalan Shekarabi.

The first shot looked back on the groundbreaking progress Sweden has made in sustainability throughout the past 100 years. The second one transported us into the future to look at the year 2030, and what we hope to hear from generations of children to come. In addition to the videos, we designed the country's official report, which outlined all of Sweden's progress on the Global Goals. It can be viewed on the UN Sustainable Development Goals website.

The 2017 Global Festival of Ideas was the inaugural event in what will be a series of annual forums, hosted by the UN SDG Action Campaign and supported by the Federal Government of Germany. The Festival brought together leading thinkers, policy-makers and civil society, together with gaming experts and policy simulators, to deliver the world’s first playable policy conference.

We created the name and colourful identity for the conference, strongly linked to the Global Goals colors and iconography. Jakob also spoke at the event, delivering a brief presentation on how to communicate change and expand the communication system designed for the Global Goals.

We wrote two new manifestos and designed the Guggenheim Partners' Goals themed pavilion at the 2015 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. The structure, including the Goal 17 Partnership Space, served as a meeting point, and played host to discussions and strategy sessions throughout the WEF.

Along with the exterior graphic wrapping, we designed indoor meeting spaces, a wall installation of all of the Goal icons, and all aspects of the Partnership space made to discuss and support the Goals.

We created the graphics that wrapped the Swedish Pavilion- a unique structure built at the United Nations Habitat III conference, held in Quito, Ecuador from October 15th -21st, 2016. The Pavilion hosted various Swedish organizations and governmental representatives throughout the conference, and featured the distinctive typography and graphic style of the Global Goals.

We also branded The Quantified Planet Global Goals Lab, which presented innovative strategies for real and near-real time data collection on the objectives of the Goals, to be used to mobilize the tech sector towards inventive solutions.