Ideas and Actions from Design for Planet festival
In September, we launched our new mission, Design for Planet, to galvanise and support the 1.69m strong UK design community to design with the welfare of the planet as a priority. In November, we hosted a 2 day Design for Planet festival which brought together designers from across the design industry, to both inspire and show the valuable role design can play in creating a path out of the climate crisis, but also to develop collective action to pool all of our resources and energy into work to achieve it. We deliberately used the words ‘galvanise and support’ as we recognise as Design Council that there are many designers who have been working at the forefront of sustainability for decades, and we want to support and amplify their work, as well as galvanise and support those who want to join them.
This blog sets out some of the ideas that emerged during day 2. The exam question was ‘what can we do to shift the 1.69m strong UK design community to design for planet’? Or as Sophie Thomas asked in our short film, ‘When you have a sector of really creative, talented people, what could we do as a group?’ They had listened to some of the 54 inspiring speakers, self-organised into 12 conversations in an unconference format facilitated by Snook (and with Policy Lab hosting a policy roundtable), and were joined in spirit by design advocacy bodies from 20 other countries in a session jointly hosted by Design Council and the British Council.
An unconference is an open event where the agenda is set by the attendees. Anyone could put forward a conversation or topic which could support the overall Design for Planet mission.
As Sarah Drummond, who hosted the unconference, said, not all of these ideas need to be led by Design Council. And indeed, our role is not to lead on it all, but to do what we’re uniquely placed to do: make connections across the whole design economy, showcase and champion the role of design in creating a better future, create the enabling conditions for design for planet, to create new markets for design, especially in more ‘traditional’ sectors of the economy. The ideas below will all inform our new strategy in one way or another, and our role in them will depend on where we are most needed.
If you want more detail, you can find a full write up of all of the ideas from the unconference here.
Demonstrating what is possible:
Places
Conversations across the two days were about designing places with nature and communities. In order to support this, we need greater regulation for planning and development that recognises and invests in the wider social and ecological value of place, adheres to circular principles and therefore co-designs with community and nature.
For inspiration see talks by: Resilient Places track talk (with Sowmya Parthasarathy (Arup), Simon Jones (Loch Lomand & The Trossachs National Park), Kees Dorst (TU Delft) and Anthony Dewar (Network Rail), Designing with Nature Track Talk with Jane Findlay (Landscape Institute), Michael Pawlyn (Exploration) and Pippa McLeod-Brown (Hub for Biodesign in the Built Environment), and workshops on Green and Blue Infrastructure (Paul Hogarth Company).
Communities
At one level, this means co-designing with communities. One conversation was about developing a community-led programme around an important transition: heat. Here, designers’ role would be to support communities by using tools of storytelling, narrative development and prototyping to help them reimagine how they could heat their homes. Another conversation dug into the imagination infrastructure needed for this, which was not just about giving communities the digital and in-real-life space for connection and imagination, but looking at the structural policy issues which give people time to create this physical and temporal space to dream. These spaces are critical for some of deep thinking that needs to happen to allow designers to reframe challenges and design systemically.
For inspiration see talks by: Payal Arora (Erasmus University Rotterdam), Immy Kaur (Civic Square), Rhiannon Jones (S.H.E.D) and Andy Llarwarne & Rosie Blake (Climate Beacons) as part of the Co-design with Community Track Talk, Tessy Britton (Participatory City) and John Knights (TNLCF) as part of the Circular Economy Track Talk, Joycelyn Longdon (Climate in Colour), Araceli Camargo (Centric Lab) and Jason Tester (Queer the Future) as part of the Just Transition Track Talk, and workshops on inclusive design (with Snook & Andy Hyde).
Consumerism
There were two big conversations about the need to shift the paradigm around consumerism, which design has played such a huge part in shaping. The question was how can design disrupt and reimagine it? What would an innovation programme look like that made re-use the dominant consumer activity and created a new narrative around endings? This would not only need the creative skills of designers to create (or indeed remake) things that are circular, use less, or better regenerate natural resources, but also build skills in this type of design and be supported by policy that incentivises it. Regulations could be both ‘carrot’ and ‘stick’ by revealing and making visible true value in its widest sense. Measures and metrics that show all aspects of value across a lifetime of a product (e.g. whole life carbon accounting) would show the ‘true’ cost of a product making more regenerative design cost competitive, but also demonstrate wider value which could attract a different type of investment.
For inspiration see talks by: Joe MacLeod (Endineering), Orsola de Castro (Fashion Revolution), Naresh Ramchandani (Do the Green Thing) as part of a Behavioural Revolution Track Talk, Sophie Thomas (URGE) as part of Circular Economy Track Talk, workshops on ‘Waste is not a Design Flaw’ (Ella Doran & Sophie Thomas), Sustainable Materials (Chris Lefteri), and Sustainable Fashion (Natasha Mays).
Supporting designers to work in a more systemic way
The big theme running through the festival was around supporting designers to work systemically. Not to make the current system faster or better, but radically imagine it to thrive within our planetary boundaries. Designers need to to reframe the brief to put people and planet at the heart, to design beyond economic to social and environmental value, and to work more collectively. There are a number of ideas to support this:
Upskilling designers: tools, methods & practice
Bringing together tools, methods, training and experiences that helps designers design for planet. John Thackara’s proposition for an Hour of Ecology, similar to an Hour for Code, would create experiences that reconnect designers with nature. And everyone who went on Sophie Thomas’s waste processing visit agreed that should be mandatory for designers. The international roundtable asked that this be a global design for planet hub, as there is so much to learn from each other.
As a start, the Design for Planet festival microsite will contain all the talks and workshops (and a selection from Protolabs Inspiron festival), a list of resources and tools shared during the 2 days, the Design for Planet film which designers can show to clients to give permission to put planet in the brief, and the updated set of Design for Planet principles which were co-designed at the festival which designers and commissioners can use to develop their work together.
Some specific talks and workshops to look at immediately are: The Big Picture (Indy Johar (Dark Matter Labs) and Kate Raworth (Doughnut Economics), Leyla Acaroglu’s barnstorming talk and workshop on Disruptive Design, Jonathan Wise on ‘How to Talk about Elephants’ and John Grant & Federico Gaggio on Changing the Brief, Tayo Adebowale and Nat Hunter’s workshop on the Systemic Design Framework, and workshops on measuring carbon (Bengt Cousins-Jenvey), Ecology Hour with John Thackara, and Life Cycle Analysis with Protolabs.
Supporting each other
As well as methods, what is needed is a community of learning, support and confidence. A safe space to learn together, and know that you are part of a wider community helps provide confidence to challenge the brief. One conversation was about the idea of a Design Union: which could be a number of things ranging from bringing together existing design x climate communities into a safe learning space, to a place for businesses to find sustainability designers, to a legal framework and way to hold designers to account (and back them) to stand up to unethical client requests.
Enabling policy & market for designers
There is also the need for stronger policy, regulation and standards to set the context in which designers are commissioned, and which designers — particularly smaller firms — can point to in order to say it has to be designed this way. Regulation around places and material use have been discussed above, and there is much to learn from other countries as well. The international roundtable suggested that we create a COP27 manifesto of policies that can apply to design the world over.
Education
The above is focused on current designers, but we also need to think about future ones, especially as our talent pipeline is reducing (if the decline in people taking design at GCSE is anything to go by). Talent does not just need to come from young people, and through working with communities we can open design up to non-professional ideas about design. We talked about a new national curriculum that had design throughout, or as a stepping stone, reforming the D&T curriculum to be environmentally focused. And to extend this to lifelong learning for those who are already in work or with other caring responsibilities.
Next steps
These are some of the ideas for action and policy that will help to shift the 1.69m strong UK design community to design for planet — and beyond — to our global design community and society as a whole. We will be taking some of them forward immediately through the following:
- Our Design Economy research will be showing the environmental, social and economic value of design and informing policy to help designers achieve it
- We will be working with the All Parliamentary Design & Innovation Group on an enquiry to take forward some of the themes coming from the festival
- We have just launched our Design for Planet fellows programme, which alongside our Design Council Experts Community of Practice, will weave together knowledge from across design practices around some of the festival themes.
Sign up to our newsletter to follow this mission, and in the meantime please watch and use the resources on Design for Planet and use this film with your clients.
