Joining the Design Declares campaign
Snook joins other designers in the UK to start the Design Declares Campaign launching this week, to come together as an industry to declare a climate and ecological emergency, and take action.
Here’s why, how I and Snook got involved, and why you should join us.
Through our Thriving Planet mission, we’ve been working on adapting our practice to consider the planet as a project stakeholder. We also use service design and user-centred design to help organisations change, and make sustainable solutions, approaches and behaviours more widely adopted. We are also still learning how to change our ways of working to reduce our impact, and are working with our parent company to do so.
How this came about
A while back in 2019, members of the Snook team alongside other designers came together to start the Design and Climate community, organising monthly meet-ups to discuss the role of designers around climate action. It gained momentum and the community grew to more than 230 designers in a year, highlighting the appetite among designers to learn and do more in this area. It was however a challenge for a small group of founding members to sustain the community on top of our day-to-day jobs, and we’ve had to pause activities in 2021.
Last year, the conversations which Snook helped facilitate during the Design Council’s Design for Planet festival, reiterated designers’ need to come together as an industry; to have a unified way to share learnings and practice, inspire and motivate each other, and to put pressure on decision-makers to take more rapid and ambitious action.
Early 2022, I met with Alexie Sommer from Urge Collective who informed me about the idea of the campaign and got me on board to help make it happen. I was especially keen and interested in the learning and sharing aspect, as I’ve been developing the Design for Life toolkit to help designers and non-designers consider people and planet in their work.
Why now?
A lot of industries have declared two years ago, and so have other design disciplines (fashion, architecture, etc). Why now? We think it’s time that we come together as an industry, and make a big push to accelerate action.
For me the value of this campaign is really around bringing designer practitioners together to more openly share learnings, resources, case studies, so we can take actions at our individual levels more efficiently and quickly.
We aim for the Design Declares community to be constructive by celebrating action and successes, respecting wherever teams are in their journey; moving beyond risk management and compliance, to embedding sustainability strategically and proactively regenerating.
I’ve worked on developing the Design Declares toolkit, which anyone can access, which will continuously evolve to hopefully include more tangible examples and case studies from the community.
By sharing tangible examples and solutions applied to our design disciplines, and demonstrating the collective impact, we can have a ripple effect around us influencing our colleagues and wider organisations, partners, and clients.
I hope that this will also enable the design community to put pressure on decision makers around implementing more ambitious actions and policies, while ensuring that these are implemented in a way that is fair and benefits and doesn’t harm people.
What Snook is working on
Through the work around our Thriving Planet mission area we’re making some progress around how we tackle environmental challenges through our work with clients and partners, and internally to make our processes and ways of working more carbon efficient.
We’re planning to making our website green in the future, exploring the B-corp certification as a way to continuously improve our people and planet-centred practices, and applying an ethics and impact assessment framework across all our decisions and projects.
We’re also working with our parent company NEC Software Solutions to push our environmental practices and involve all our colleagues to take action and adapt our ways of working. We also see a lot of opportunities for impact by innovating through our parent company’s product and service offers, supporting public services, housing associations, local authorities to more efficiently meet their Net Zero targets and support their employees or colleagues to take action at their level.
We’ll continue to share our learnings and what we’ve learned along the way, so keep an eye. We’re also keen to hear from others who are on this journey. Get in touch if you’d like to chat: aurelie.lionet@wearesnook.com
Join us now!
We aim to get 1000 signatories by November at the Design for Planet Festival. Encourage your design team and organisation to join Design Declares: www.designdeclares.com. You can also access the toolkit through the website, without being a signatory.
