A tale of two cities
By: Design Council
Tags: Design, Climate Change, Sustainability, Festivals

‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.’

So wrote Charles Dickens, Victorian serialist and general caricature of nineteenth century figures, in opening ‘A Tale of Two Cities’. The novel was set in the 1790s to the tumultuous upheaval of the French Revolution tearing through country’s cultural fabric and political hierarchy. And with apologies to Mr Dickens and geographers, this week I have experienced conversations in two cities with vastly different trajectories.

At the start of the week, I attended an excellent event hosted by OnePlanet as part of the COP26 fringe. Mulling over the tone of statements and commitments thus far released at COP, the mood of panellists was not overly buoyant. The focus of discussion was very much on the necessary tasks of adapting to a 2, 3 or even 4 degrees rise in mean global temperatures. Conversation topics ranged but often settled on a few core topics: a paucity of leadership, an inflection of responsibility back onto civil society to mobilise action; and the scale of challenge that required re-imagining our tools and systems in preparation.

This felt like the worst of times. COP26 had huge expectations for delivery and leaving Glasgow in the late afternoon mist, the metaphorical fog that enveloped my optimism felt hard to lift.

The following morning, I wondered whether the pale azure skies of Tayside signalled better days. The Design for Planet festival convened by Design Council, held at the phenomenal V&A Dundee, brought together over 100 participants and over 5000 contributors online from most design sectors across two days to explore designing with climate and nature.

Design for Planet Festival delegates gather outside of V&A Dundee to mark the launch of the two-day event.

This melting pot of practice, expertise and insights, may have been a cacophony of competing voices talking excitedly across one another. However, my reflection is that there emerged a core and cadre of practice and practitioners who somehow fused a common purpose to establish something tangible and transformative, with an appetite to continue this collective mission. This was far bigger than a single design discipline, or even a collective focus, such as placemaking. For me, these signals might be summarised in a few big ideas centring on people which emerged across the days’ diverse talks and workshops.

Agency. Put simply, if you’re not part of the solution, then you’re part of the problem. A host of existing practices, which you may think were good enough, need revision and improvement. Kate Raworth and Indy Johar were inspirational keynotes, signalling a fundamental need to be empowered agents in overhauling all aspects of our practice to sit within the constraints of planetary thresholds. It means questioning concepts of consumption and growth and revising the fundamentals of governance, finance and ownership on which they are based. Remake yourself, your practice, your community; this is the innovation we need.

Systemic. The clear need for systemic, integrated action and intervention. Everything is connected. Indy introduced us to a useful concept of ‘entanglement’, which resonated through all subsequent sessions. This is useful both to see the implications of our choices from multiple perspectives and understand the different frames of value that coincide within the same things, be those a product, a tree or our health. So we must design for entanglement, not single value outcomes.

Equity. Treating each other as equals is clearly not something the global system does well. Nor at a local level can we honestly say that design has addressed imbalances comprehensively. But contributions from Payal Arora, Immy Kaur, Dr Rhiannon Jones and many others illustrated the ways to address this; in generating the opportunity space for people to have respect, trust and control in making the decisions affecting their lives, livelihoods and localities. Inverting top-down with neighbourhood-oriented leadership is fundamental to mobilising action.

Lifeflow. Simply, as Leyla Acaroglu said, good design transforms ‘life into life’. We can talk in technical detail about carbon emissions or measure impacts with life cycle analysis but as biologists and ecologists know, life is a constant, regenerative flow. It is our responsibility as designers to work with and be inspired by natural systems’ bounded circularity, not against it.

Leyla Acaroglu’s rousing closing speech.

Underneath these big concepts time and again we saw interventions where design’s known strengths were illustrated and reinforced key qualities for change-making, especially when focusing on working with lots of diverse needs.

· Trust and relationships. Put people central to making informed choices to do the right thing and creating the space to be able to make those choices together.

· Care and empathy. Explore origins, journeys and endings: of people’s lived experiences; of materials’ and artefacts’ life cycles. These insights are invaluable in questioning what is valuable and what needs to change.

· Visual and narrative. Craft the stories which help translate the significance of and emotional attachment to the transformation in what can otherwise be a discourse on climate framed by more abstract scientific and technical perspectives.

This event did something special. We may not consider this as the ‘best of times’ but thinking and doing together created a shared feeling of optimism and action. The transformation ahead is of a significantly greater magnitude than anything preceding it. But let’s take one lesson from history, a movement of people based on the ideas of the Enlightenment, transformed multiple societies the world over. If that degree of upheaval was possible in pre-industrial eighteenth century France, then we can have hope for our future by rethinking ourselves and our relationship with each other, products, places and the planet.

With heads spinning, we turn to the challenge of the next step. The scale of the problem may induce paralysis, but inaction is not an option. Faced with that task, what are the practical takeaways? There are many but might I suggest three:

- Challenge the brief and ask the uncomfortable questions

- Work together not apart to build collective momentum

- Share emergent tools and approaches to design for multiple value outcomes

And even more simply… just, start, somewhere.

Edward Hobson, Director of Place

You can watch the Design for Planet festival talks again here.