How can designers lead the way in climate action?

The Design for Planet Festival aims ‘to galvanise and support the 1.97 million people working in the UK's design economy to achieve net zero and make design regenerative.

Priya Prakash, designer and founder of award-winning Design for Social Change (D4SC), left us with the closing challenge:

With a 0.2% UK GDP growth rate, how do we create new systems that create abundance? It’s time to roll up our sleeves!

Here are our highlights from day one.

1. 🤯 Half the UK population find it complicated to shop sustainably, so they give up.

The sustainability market is confusing and fragmented. The challenge is building trust without sacrificing convenience for consumers.

To solve this, the Canopey, is a platform that guides the minefield of shopping green, whoever you are. It verifies claims and makes the experience accessible and trustworthy. Data is visual, and gamification helps shoppers see their impact whilst building the idea of collective action. 

Why this matters: The UK ethical market has grown 1000% in the last ten years and is now worth £121 bn. New regulation, culture and investment mean it will continue to grow. 

2. ⭕ AI can spark circular design decisions and eradicate prejudice if done well

In 2021, Forbes found that AI bias denied 80% of mortgages for black people. AI is predicted to be the technological revolution of our times, but it must be designed purposefully. One example is INDIGENOUS AI, an Indigenous Protocol and Artificial Intelligence (AI) Working Group that develops new conceptual and practical approaches to building the next generation of AI systems.

Furthermore, £2bn per annum is lost by ignoring disabled people. The purple pound has a disposable income of £270 billion, yet eco-ableism — leaving disabled people out of environmental-led initiatives — is another example of failure.

Why this matters: Barriers have financial implications. Organisations must create an inclusive innovation and design process that centres the product, process and technology on equality, diversity and inclusion.

3. 🔌 Accessing green energy will help us avoid the energy crisis.

Switching to renewables is one of the most significant actions to tackle the climate crisis, but home changes are a big challenge, especially when the majority don’t understand the energy system.

It also needs to be faster, easier and cheaper to get decentralised energy into homes. If not, it can't be mass. Local authorities need the option to install these options to create new homes as part of the market design process.

How can designers and energy companies collaborate to ensure the revolution in green energy is used by as many people as quickly as possible?

1. Understand who you are designing for.

2. Have good guidelines that inform the design of products and services.

3. Use digital/technology to enable and improve accessibility
   Google smart thermostat meant that a blind person could adequately engage with their electricity consumption for the first time.

4. Provide simple communication alongside training.

5. Create design interventions, learning from them to scale. 
   At Octopus, bills don't have a noreply@ email, and salespersons are energy helpers with valuable tips and tricks.

Why this matters: Creating a fairer, more equitable system requires market design, policy, regulations, and private sector adoption.

4. 💚 Rethinking UX design to create a regenerative future

Sustainability is complex. Today’s system and human factors prevent us from becoming a regenerative economy. Our goal, as designers, is to move organisations from conventional to regenerative design.

Here are three tools to help you start the journey:

1. Sustainable goal canvas
   This helps you consider sustainability across the end-to-end experience. The first swimlane examines a situation or context from a community, company, and individual perspective. The second breaks out what’s needed to achieve goals, and the third measures the results of ideas and concepts. 

2. Circular blueprint canvas
   This canvas blends service with business design by considering planet-positive business models through the product lifecycle. It designs the product from a circular, not a linear, perspective using circular principles that illustrate the desired change alongside the initiatives being considered.

3. Green website design
   Simplicity is not just user-friendly; it's green too! What are the key factors that significantly affect a website's environmental impact? Reduce your page weight. Ideally, a homepage should be less than 1 megabyte. Identify and reduce main images; less content equals less bandwidth.

Why this matters: As designers, we must relearn existing design practices, expand our perception of design, and better measure impact by applying new sustainability models, frameworks and tools that enable a regenerative economy and new value networks.

5. 🙌 We build what we believe so we must co-design with the community

How are design leaders using creative problem-solving and making skills to regenerate their neighbourhoods?

The first is working with young people and thinking about the type of world they want to leave behind. World building is a practice that everyone can participate in. We must not infantilise communities by coming in as experts; instead, we must cultivate a new posture. The second is co-design, a powerful tool for making users directly affected part of the process.

Considerations for collaborating with communities

1. Don't use co-design or research if you don't have the time to do it correctly!   

2. Play can be used to bring out people's lived experiences and as a tool to design with. 

3. Design to BUILD something.

4. If you value innovation, get new and diverse voices into the process. 

5. Be humble and open to learning from new voices.

6. Understand, recognise, and find things you can relate to. 

7. Find your place in the relationship and stakeholder community. 

8. Value the affected stakeholders in your stakeholder map 

Why this matters: As designers, we must be a bridge— the audience knows the problem — so our job is to partner with them to get them to the other side. 

The Design Council estimates one-third of businesses will use design to achieve their carbon footprint.

⚡️ Need to make sustainability a core part of your design process

Good resources

• Lowww directory — Examples of low-carbon websites 

• Sustainable web design — Calculating digital emissions

• Fruggr — Sustainable APP development

• Climate action tech

• Low carbon network

 🙌 Thanks to Michael Yates (Norwich BID) Sophie Whinney (Regen), Sam Wevers (Lunar Energy) Alexandra Meagher (Octopus) Marc Powell (RNIB), Gurmit & Amardeep Singh Shakhon (The Brothers), Almira Lardizabal Hussain (GLA) Marie Williams (Dream Networks), Arthur Perez (Design Differently), Amahra Spence (MAIA), Remy Bourganel, Nicolas Paries, (Hey Low), Amahra Spence (MAIA)