Veronica Simpson, design journalist and environmental psychologist visits a furniture company whose social and environmental practices are encouraging better impacts for clients, for their local community as well as the planet. The ground floor entrance to Goldfinger’s shop and workspace is buzzing on my first visit to this pioneering, West…

Every year, 400 million tonnes of plastic is produced globally, and less than 10% of it is recycled. We spoke to specialist, Smile Plastics about how they’re making recycled plastics pretty and their new collaboration with designer and founder of MAKE RELIEF, Will Atkins. What inspired you? Our inspiration was first sparked by…

With the ever advancing complexity of AIs we thought why not challenge one of them? We asked the most popular chatbot on the market, ChatGPT, ‘How can design help solve the climate crisis?’, here’s what it had to say: Design can play a crucial role in addressing the climate crisis…

We caught up with Jai Sandhu, Design Lead and Co-Founder of Wild Streets, an augmented reality app for citizens and professionals combining scientific data with high-quality 3D models of trees, plants and street furniture — allowing anyone to co-design the green, inclusive cities of tomorrow. What was the inspiration behind the idea? Climate scientist and communicator Johan…

Niall O’Connor, Designer, Design Council and Katie Hamilton, Marketing Manager, Design Council The marketing of the Barbie movie is one of the best recent examples of using design to create engaging, playful, and user-generated content. It’s a perfectly oiled machine fuelled by the budgets of Warner Bros and Mattel, hyping…

Two years on since announcing our mission to Design for Planet, a call to designers to make mother nature their key stakeholder, we have created a new logo (that is actually quite an old logo). The recent process to refresh the Design Council’s core branding took us on a journey…

Frederik Weissenborn, Programme Lead, Design Council The design world is going through a moment of rapid transformation. Recently, we have seen the emergence of generative artificial intelligence (AI) and deep learning models — like ChatGPT MidJourney and Dall-E — across the design and service sectors. …

Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino, Chief Design Officer (Maternity cover), Design Council For the Milan Design Week 2023, the Design Council collaborated with Laura Ferrarello to curate a panel discussion on climate agency that was hosted by Arup. The panel was chaired by Design Council CEO Minnie Moll and speakers included Maurizio Teora…

We spoke to Steve Davies about his pioneering new project to design a very different kind of surfboard, made from mushrooms. As part of your PhD you created a surfboard grown from mushrooms. Tell us about the project. This project was for my Product Design Masters (MSc) at Cardiff Metropolitan University. How did you come up with the idea, what was your inspiration? The inspiration for this product came from a long four year degree in design that taught…