Design+Climate Discovery

Learnings on establishing, running and now ending our role in the Design+Climate network

By Lucy Stewart and Ness Wright

Image credit: Josephine Flood

Beginnings

In April 2019 we held an event to bring together the increasing number of designers keen to act on the climate crisis. The event made it clear there was a need for a learning network around design and climate. Many designers wanted to include climate in their practice but didn’t know how or where to start.

We launched Design+Climate, a peer-learning network to build and share practical resources for including the planet at every stage of the design process. Through meet-ups and conversations, we aimed to hold each other accountable to design with the planet in mind.

2.5 years later, Lucy and I are winding our involvement in the network down. We know that endings matter. They’re especially hard when you recognise there is still a need for something that you can no longer be committed to deliver.

By capturing our learnings and sharing the assets, we hope to provide the opportunity for someone or some organisation to carry the good stuff forward. Which feels especially relevant after COP26 and the great Design for Planet festival.

The highlights

• We ran 15 events in London, Glasgow and online, published articles, gathered existing tools and made resources that people used, most notably our How to Run Remote Workshops guide. All this taught us that by making resources open-source, others contribute and make them better, which is an important principle for addressing the climate crisis too.
• We built basic infrastructure which created structure and enabled others to get involved. There’s a simple website, a hashtag and a Slack channel.
• Hearing how other designers were pushing to include climate in their work and organisations was inspiring and motivating, it can be lonely and tough challenging the status quo. We met some truly lovely, smart people who knew their design practice needed to shift and showed up on numerous occasions to figure out how to do that.
• Openly sharing learnings with others was just the best, the brief taste of a world where collaboration surpassed competition.

The learnings

• So much of mobilising designers around the climate crisis is about communication and community management. With this comes the need for a specific set of skills that are different from the ones we embodied as designers with climate expertise. Whilst we could see a clear need for a network, we realised we didn’t want to be responsible for running it.
• Managing a community is a real job and it’s certainly not a side project to be held next to a full-time role. We relied on the voluntary, unpaid enthusiasm of ourselves and others. Over time we realised this was not sustainable, nor is it inclusive of those who are unable to contribute time for free. Being sustainable starts with being sustainable with ourselves, and not burning out running passion projects.
• Growth of a network need not be the goal. Quick growth early on made the community harder to manage, before we had a reliable structure and team in place. We were also invited to share our work when we had not fully developed it. Now we have evidence, case studies and tools but we didn’t then, there’s an art to being quiet and doing the work first.
• Cross agency collaboration didn’t work as we wanted it to. There was early energy around agencies coming together which was exciting — we really just went for it. But we missed setting up formal terms of engagement and governance around the network. There was a fleeting moment when partner agencies considered a joint fund, but the commercial opportunity for planet-centred design superseded this effort. A real bummer.

A new opportunity

There are many ways in which a community can be run and managed. We have all the assets available should someone else want to take it on and make it their own. There’s a LastPass account with all the logins to our email, Slack, and Eventbrite accounts. There’s the active #designandclimate hashtag on Twitter. Our Slack is still active with 200+ members some of whom are still posting and sharing.

We see our work to date as a Discovery phase. From this we have created a mini brief for anyone interested to pick up and to guide the next phase of development:

Qualities of an effective Design+Climate community:

1. Ownership is distributed amongst a partnership of organisations to encourage open learning and overcome commercial barriers to knowledge sharing. Also to create resilience and avoid the community being dependent on the existence of just one organisation.
2. Organiser’s time is valued, resourced and paid for.
3. The community involves all design disciplines and is open to anyone who makes design decisions. Create space within this for specific disciplines to share tools and best practice.
4. Growth of the community is managed in a sustainable way, with clear boundaries set from the start. For example, UK based for the first 2 years.

Skills and capabilities needed to run the community:

1. A sound understanding of climate change and design, to influence others in an informed way
2. Event and organisational management to plan effectively and realistically
3. Communication and community building skills, to share learnings and organise a growing community
4. Facilitation expertise to create safe spaces for learning and sharing
5. The energy and networks to gather people and maintain enthusiasm

Over to you, you and you! The Design+Climate assets are available to anyone who wants to take it forward. If you feel inspired and are interested in running the next phase of the development, please get in touch with Lucy at hello@lucyworks.co.uk

A massive thank you to everyone who has been part of Design+Climate to date, whether turning up to events or helping organise behind the scenes. We’re looking forward to seeing where this goes next!