The beautiful lovely thing* that’s missing when talking and acting on climate

Reflections on an evening with Susannah Raffe and Design + Climate

Another event about creating space and having conversations about climate. Surely we’re creating enough space and having enough conversations about climate? Surely with the ferocious time limiting constraints that planetary boundaries are imposing on us we need to get practical and focus on application?

Practicality is the root of the Design + Climate community. We don’t just want to talk about changing our practice but actually change our practice. So why were we together in a room holding space and having conversations about climate again?

Mainly because this is what the community said it needed; the confidence to talk about climate change at work. But perhaps more significantly, the beautiful lovely thing that’s missing from our ability to change our design practice is the mental space to accept change; both as practitioners adapting our practice and for our clients on the receiving end of it.

With the media now in overdrive it’s a constant challenge for even the most committed climate change advocate to make sense of it all. Giving people the time and space to connect with the issues on their own terms is essential if we are serious about turning climate inertia around. No tool, method, mindset or practical application will work without it.

Diagrams created by the Common Cause Foundation

Our top takeaways for the D+C community from Susannah:

1. Don’t rely on knowledge and facts. A conversation is not a debate. Our insecurity as an industry to talk confidently about climate means we often default to data. Let’s stop. Start with shared values instead. And if you’re insisting on sharing facts, make sure they’re evidence based.
2. Don’t start with the business case. When working with cash strapped councils or big business focused on the bottom line it feels intuitive to be given permission to apply a change in our practice this way. Problem is, when this is where you start you never deviate from this perspective — it’s limiting.
3. Embrace that an important function of D+C is to create this necessary space. Let’s relax, it can’t always be practical.

*All credit to Sustainable Stand-up for the phrase ‘Beautiful, lovely thing’