It started with a question that was written down over 12 years ago - Alarmism or Step Change? As with many of the URGE collective I have been working in the design industry for a long enough time to understand why we need URGE and, even with the timing of that question, why now. 

Original Alarmism or Step change question written down for The Big Brainstorm session at Greengaged 2008

Poster for Man-made Disaster Exhibition 2019, curated by Do the Green Thing. Printed using waste pure carbon pigment extracted from old car tyres reground into ink, featuring quotes from (male) climate deniers and overprinted with quote from Greta Thunberg

In 1997 I founded Thomas.Matthews communications studio on a foundation of sustainable design principles and practice. I co-created Greengaged for London Design Festival in 2008 to help bring to the fore some of the complex issues around sustainability that design could help crack. In the same year I co-created Three Trees Don’t make a Forest - a highly practical site that focused on sustainable design choices for graphic designers. Then in 2012, following a UKTI discovery trip to The Netherlands on ‘Designing out Landfill’, I created The Great Recovery project at the RSA, backed by Innovate UK. For four years we took thousands of designers, businesses, politicians, scientists, resource managements and others to the end of pipe for products. We investigated the opportunities of designing for a circular economy, starting at the waste piles and working back up to the concept. For over 20 years I  have been working with companies around the globe as a circular design expert and passing on my knowledge to the design industry. 

Image created from plastic waste, For Do the Green Thing

My alarm bells are ringing. For decades I have pushed, cajoled and argued for change – for our industry to tackle issues like waste and sustainability. Now we are running out of time. Now we must all become activists. But how do we use our creativity and imagination to really change the way we live and change our planetary behaviour, to give agency to us as designers to be able to make effective change?

This is my reason for starting URGE. 

John Grant and I have been talking about design’s response to sustainability and to climate change for over a decade – We were the ones that wrote down that question. But we’ve done enough talking: now we need action.

Letterpress poster

My URGEncy was the rise of panic and pleas for action from young people like Greta Thunberg and the declarations of a Climate Emergency that were being made by the likes of Architects Declare. I've spent years trying to work out how we can engage the creative industry in a really meaningful manner as a whole, because what's important is a mass shift. I want to see the next generation of designers activated and using their imagination to change our world and our broken economic systems. As Luisa Neubauer eloquently states, “We’re stuck in an unimaginative 20th century debate. Regardless of what we'll call the economic system, it is essential that it functions within the planetary boundaries.” Lots of people want to act but they feel frustrated because they are disempowered or feel ill-informed.

By coming together as a group, the URGE collective has more: More imagination to spread, more enthusiasm to push us further, more urgency to get ourselves and the world around us shifting. We all thrive on collaboration and will use this creativity and imagination to start to see the planet that we want to live in. URGE will work with companies, governments and people who really want to change and are committing to Science Based Targets and Circular Economy, to give the next generation a fighting chance. And we will be building out the collective to include people with the diverse range of experiences and backgrounds that we will need in order to create the responses required for planetary climate action.

‘No Shop’ was a temporary installation devised to draw media attention to the need to curb our buying habits in order to stop planetary exploitation of resources and people, created by Thomas.Matthews for Friends of the Earth for Buy Nothing Day, 1997

But fear not, we are not the new think-tank on the block. We will connect the thinking and the imagination with the creativity and the doing; to transform businesses for a green regenerative recovery. We will help businesses become circular and achieve zero carbon, inspire communities to build resilience and re-construct a design industry that is fit for a green creative economy.

And fundamental to URGE is our determination to inspire the next generation of designers and creative people and in turn, to learn from them too. We are still not seeing design for sustainability embedded into every single design school curriculum. Our ambition is to be open source and share our experience with the education sector through briefs and action, perhaps one day to set up Urge-haus for climate-design education.  Our first move will be to build an advisory board solely with the generation still at school who are interested in design and passionate about the planet. Young people have strong moral compasses and alongside helping them to develop their agency to be able to take this into their future career we want them to help us think more about the future, for they will be our ultimate client.

Thomas.Matthews stationery

Poster for Never Turn Your Back on the Ocean exhibition, 2015, printed using waste ink

Letterpress poster

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