Design for Planet Festival
It’s 100 days to go until COP26 — the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference — and the most important summit on climate change in a generation. As part of the government’s #OneStepGreener campaign, we are proud to announce that we will be hosting a two-day Design for Planet festival alongside the conference, on 9–10 November, held at V&A Dundee. This is a landmark event to galvanise the UK’s design industry into committing to a sustainable, climate-first future.
We need to do this because design shapes the world. As Sophie Thomas often quotes, 80% of the environmental impact of today’s products, services and infrastructures is determined at the design stage, and 45% of emissions comes from producing the products we use everyday. These figures alone tell us that design has a fundamental role to play in getting to net zero and beyond. Design can — and must — help us fundamentally redesign the way we live our lives, putting the planet, and the people that it gives a home, at the heart of what we do.
Design for Planet Festival
Hosted at V&A Dundee, Scotland’s centre for design, in the UK’s first and only UNESCO city of design, this two-day event will bring together people from the full spectrum of the UK’s design industry, with around 100 attendees convening in person, and thousands more joining through live-streaming and digital workshops.
It will include illuminating keynotes, incisive debates and expert panels, alongside hands-on workshops and energising masterclasses to inspire the design community and ignite action, in the unique architecture of Kengo Kuma’s first and only British building.
We want people to leave the festival with constructive insights and tools to champion design as a powerful agent of change. We aim to stimulate the systems shift required in the design industry to address the climate emergency.
The festival is supported by The National Lottery Community Fund, Architecture & Design Scotland and Snook. We would love further organisations to get involved too — to lend support and amplify to new networks (read on to find out how). Together we want to reach the 1.69million people working in the design industry, plus the those who use design skills in their work and/or commission design.
Working together
By coming together we can bring about real change. Over the last 18 months, we have been convening partners to ask 1) What does design need to do to address the climate crisis? 2) What do we need to do together? 3) What should our role as Design Council be?
A couple of weeks ago we brought together 30 design industry partners who are working to use their design powers in support of the climate crisis, following up on a session in May. They have been working, often for decades, on this area. And they have huge expertise and experience, along with access to communities of designers who all want to lend their energy to creating a more sustainable world.
Picking out just some of the things they’re doing across the design economy…
- Purpose Disruptors have just launched their #ChangeTheBrief alliance, in association with the Advertising Association and Ad Net Zero.
- Loch Lomond and The Trossachs National Park is using design thinking to tackle some of the trickiest issues it faces in striving for a truly sustainable, nature-rich future.
- Climate Framework is an incredible self-initiated piece of work by Mina Hasman, bringing together different types of knowledge for climate action across the built environment.
- Urge is a creative collective, which helps organisations to create and enact radical responses to the climate emergency. It’s founded by Sophie Thomas, and includes other amazing designers such as Ella Doran, Harry Pearce and Faizia Khan.
- Protolabs and Jude Pullen ran inspirON, an online sustainability training festival with a wide array of speakers, for any product designer keen to upskill around how to design for climate.
- The UK Green Building Council has its Advancing Net Zero programme and are hosting the Built Environment Virtual Pavilion for COP26.
- Ellen MacArthur Foundation have just published The Jeans Redesign update. It’s just one of the many circular economy programmes they run including Make Fashion Circular in partnership with the RSA and the Circular Design Assembly with the British Council.
- The British Council have an extensive programme of events in the run up to COP26 under the Climate Connection umbrella. Design highlights include the Fashion Open Studio programme with Fashion Revolution highlighting the work of climate-focused fashion designers from around the world and Future by Design, in which students from Scotland and Ghana will work together to address climate issues through design.
- The British Fashion Council has its Institute of Positive Fashion, which is a celebration and set of resources for fashion designers to work sustainably.
- Planted are running the first contemporary design event and digital forum aimed at reconnecting spaces with nature at London Design Festival.
We know there are lots of other orgs doing great stuff too and would love to hear from you about what you’re doing too!
Our role in encouraging design for planet
Design Council is the only organisation that brings together the whole design economy, so we asked everyone, where can we add most value?
What they said is that we can bring collective value through sharing and distilling knowledge and skills across our design disciplines, joining forces to influence and advocate for sustainable design, creating connections and hosting events, and collaborating with each other.
We also heard the importance of upskilling existing designers, as well as focusing on young people; giving a collective voice and feedback from the many, many SME design firms to government about how policy is working in practice; bringing in different, often marginalised and non-human perspectives; and ensuring design is brought in early and challenges the brief — and even the fundamental narratives and assumptions that govern our world.
We’re listening closely to this, and see our role across three levels: campaigning, convening and knowledge-sharing.
The festival, along with the film we’re producing for it (and which can be used by all designers to show the need for climate to be built into any design from the start) are great examples of us fulfilling this role.
Harnessing the power of design to respond to the climate emergency is something that we’ve supported before. In 2009, Design Council supported Sophie Thomas and Anne Chick to host Greengaged, a two-week series of activities as part of the London Design Festival. Sophie and Anne brought together designers from different disciplines (including Dan Epstein who worked on the London Olympics and Michael Pawlyn, an expert in biomimicry), and non-designers (e.g. chemists and regeneration specialists). They curated their own workshops to explore and raise awareness of how design needs to change to tackle the climate crisis.
Taking care to use a circular mindset, we’ve been digging back into the archive to listen to the recordings and read the activities from this event, re-using what knowledge we can. So much of the content is still absolutely relevant, if anything it is just more urgently needed.
How to get involved
That’s why we’re looking for people to join us on our mission and at our forthcoming Design for Planet festival. There are many ways for organisations to support us. We’d love to connect with:
- partners to amplify the reach and impact of the Design for Planet — let’s attract and involve the design industry at large through our shared networks
- speakers to inspire designers to create a climate-first revolution — to be a champion for the power of design and showcase it to our audiences
- like-minded sponsors who can support our ambition to deliver an impactful and inclusive festival experience and widen our audience — if you don’t already have your COP26 strategy in place this could be it.
Speak to us about opportunities to get involved: kapila.perera@designcouncil.org.uk
Or, to find out how to attend as a participant, look out for further announcements on Twitter @designcouncil or sign up to our newsletter here.
We should also say that we’re practicing what we’re preaching and strengthening our own sustainability and regenerative policies, and thinking carefully about the carbon impact of our forthcoming projects such as the next Design Economy. We’re looking at our existing work, all the resources we’ve gathered together in our Beyond Net Zero report, brilliant frameworks such as those created by Julie’s Bicycle, the Carbon Trust, and the UNFCC’s Race to Zero commitment. We’re going to write it in a simple way so it can be used as a starting point for some of the 78,000 design firms across the UK that do not already have one, and that have not been already pioneering these approaches. But we’re also going to be open and transparent about our journey, because this is not an easy process and starts with a deep look at our values. We want to inspire, support, and share our sustainability story with all of you. This is just the first page.
