Creating Net Positives as a Creative
This article was co-written with Human NYC, and originally published in VAULTE Magazine earlier this year. It’s an open letter to our creative network.
We’re stuck. We shrug away pangs of guilt as we dispose another Amazon box. We leave perfectly good items on the street, hoping someone grabs them before being taken to landfill. Lost, we commiserate with friends about how little there is that we can do. We compost our food scraps, avoid plastic bags and sip through metal straws, hoping to do our drop-in-the-ocean part. Even as the current onslaught of environmental reports continue to shock us into greater consciousness, we’re left standing quiet, watching our planet buckle and sag.
As a creative, however, it’s been easy to ignore the real opportunity we have to effect change. To earn six figure salaries and healthy day rates, we’ve had to scrape by, honing our craft by working internships in box-filled rooms with no windows, entertaining bottom of the barrel app ideas, and sitting in meetings, nodding in agreement that consumers definitely want another “X, but for Y”.
Building our creative rigor has always felt like a clean pursuit, but in the process, we’ve become comfortable leaving our values at home, and swallowing ever-more repetition from MBA founders with a market gap.
This is an open letter to our creative community. We have the ability to adjust our culture. It should no longer be good enough to make yet another nice thing. Packaged with our case studies, and obvious in our work tweets should be a crystal clear message of net positivity for our society. Without this, the work can not justify its own existence — it is meaningless.
There are very simple, practical ways to help in (re)-setting the tone.
Our experience has made us into sharp tools for VCs and CEOs to employ in their hunt for recurring revenue and higher valuations — and for good reason! We’ve all seen our work pay off in big ways for our partners. We’re the reason their customers love them, and keep coming back. In this sought-after position we have special ear-time with those in charge. Our planet and kids are their stakeholders, so it’s in those moments we can ask pointed questions about the sustainability of the project: How are we contributing back to our planet? What damage are the suppliers doing to the environment? Are we using recycled materials? How much packaging is being produced?
With the pressures they’re under, it’s unlikely they’ve really considered their effect (sustainability currently feels like more of a nice-to-have). By making these points a part of your negotiation, you can encourage founders to sign on to meaningful practices as a part of your involvement (after all — it’s better storytelling for them!).
A similar curiosity should be reflected inward. When choosing to retweet a project, or upvote a thing, we should first ask: is this project helping our planet regenerate? Is it taking less than it’s giving back? The work we choose to raise up should be meaningful, responsible, and pushing for sustainability; everything else should fall by the wayside.
We’re still seeing agencies praised on AdWeek for their ability to churn out Direct to Consumer brands that pour crazy money into advertising budgets. These are rarely the type of company with an eye toward giving back. Effecting change in agencies can start with simple staff organizing, such as a unified request to the higher ups. If made a big enough issue, bringing in meaningful work will eventually become a workplace happiness and staff retention strategy for management.
The call to consumers is to buy less at higher quality, and we are starting to do the same with our work and businesses. We want to work with less clients of a higher quality. Once we’ve “made it” in our career, we can turn our attention on our own fulfillment — considering our impact on the earth, and our future generations is a good place to start. This journey goes from payroll to privileged position, and with that privilege comes the space to choose what we do for work.
A culture-shift can stem only from us; and has potential for tremendous economic change. The younger cohort can imitate their mentors and professors, bringing up a new generation of responsible designers, architects and developers. In search of the best work, design blogs and tech publications will end up mostly highlighting sustainable projects, because that’s where we’ve chosen to focus our time. Founders and VCs would know to come to us prepared to demonstrate a tangible net positive in their mission.
It’s time to accept that as makers, everything we create causes some damage. Our creative community needs to hold us accountable for our work, as we should our employers. Our actions build on one another — we can all play a role in shifting this culture, and watch the ripples fan out across our planet.
— Human NYC & Sanctuary Computer
You can read more about Vaulte Magazine on It’s Nice That, over here:
