Designing a climate community
Reflections on 2020
Hello! Take a deep breath. It certainly has been a year.
While we all adjusted to new ways of living and being in 2020, the Design + Climate community took a break as we all learned to adapt to remote working. In our respective bubbles we continued to quietly consider what a pandemic meant for the planet and the remit of our work. Finding comfort in community, we rallied to support each other to continue to pursue design with the climate in mind. Together we:
- Flexed how to improve our climate chat with Greening Digital and the Common Cause Foundation
- Held each other accountable in bringing the planet into our design practice. Our friends at Idean shared their ‘Operation Greenfist’ and practical actions they’ve taken to make the agency sustainable by default.
- Challenged our practice with Snook’s introduction of their open source Principles for Designing Sustainable Services. Collaborate with us on this Miro board.
- Showcased the progression projects. Our good friend Pip from The Helix Centre shared ClimateCares work which she’s using to understand and support mental health in the climate crisis.
- Found our feet in the system. Our friend Becky Miller together with Ben Carpenter helped us to understand the styles of government intervention and showcased the quiet but important work happening across government.
Collectively this work is helping us to build a systems picture of the design sectors efforts. Next year we’ll aim to better mobilize our actions together.
We also had some collective highlights. Our ‘Mastering Remote Workshops’ guide, crafted pre-pandemic to consider the contributions of in person workshops, exploded as we all turned remote. At its height it received over 200 contributors and has been translated into multiple languages. A small thrill and a nice reminder that preparing for next helps you to design better things now.
To keep us moving we have established a working group to test the Principles for Designing Sustainable Services and if you like early mornings and climate chat you should definitely join us.
Our top takeaways
- Bring your values to work and to life. It encourages others to do the same and opens things up to more reflexive work.
- We have a responsibility to frame the climate crisis more widely than carbon emissions. It is a crisis of equality, health and social justice. Design for that.
- It is possible to consider things meaningfully and work at pace.
Thank you to those who have signed up and tuned in and supported each other in making sense of this year and for reminding us all to look forward at the other crisis that confronts us.
If you like what we’re up to, whatever your discipline or perspective, join the Design+Climate community by signing up to our Slack channel, joining our mailing list at www.designandclimate.org, or following #designandclimate on twitter, instagram and medium.
Join us early next year to reflect on what we’ve learnt this year about work, life and designing for the climate crisis. Community feedback will shape our direction in 2021.
