URGE is en route to Dundee for the Design Council’s Design for Planet conference. As an official partner of the event, we are contributing across the programme with practical tools and advice for designers on changing their practice to respond to the climate crisis.
Today, URGE’s Sophie Thomas is leading a visit to a state-of-the-art eco-innovation park in Perth, where she will host a seminar after a tour of the facility. Eighty per cent of the environmental impact of today’s products, services and infrastructures is determined at the design stage. Drawing on her years of experience in circular design, Sophie will be discussing how designers contribute to the production of waste, the conversion of waste into valuable new materials and the designer’s role in both minimising waste in the first place and helping to create value chains that mean more waste can be reused and recycled.
During the main event, Michael Pawlyn will be participating in a panel on Designing with Nature while Sophie Thomas will be on the Circular Design panel while also running a virtual workshop with Ella Doran on Waste as a Design Flaw.
Further virtual workshops will also feature John Grant and Federico Gaggio on how to frame sustainability briefs in the context of broader issues, trends, roles, and impacts. Alexie Sommer and Patrick Burgoyne, with xtonnes’ Bengt Cousins-Jenvey, on Carbon Management for design businesses. A live stream of the conference is available free here.
We’ll also be participating in the Unconference, working on “ideas for how to support the 1.69m strong design community to design for planet” and the discussions around Government Policy and to “co-design set of bold principles enabling designers to play their part in the climate crisis”. And we will be covering the talks and discussions over Design for Planet’s two days across our social channels (find us on Twitter @UrgeCollective, on Instagram @urgecollective and on LinkedIn under URGE Collective).
As ever, our focus is on action. URGE is a creative collective with decades of combined experience of working in sustainability and the climate crisis. In this critical moment for the future of our planet, it’s time to act. This is an emergency.
As designers and creative practitioners, we have a responsibility to use our skills to drive change. At Design for Planet, URGE will be asking the design industry not to settle for more “blah, blah, blah”. Changes to practices and processes will help, but only so far. We’ll be asking where the big ideas that will transform our response to this emergency are: How can we go further, faster?
This is design’s chance to come together to identify those radical, paradigm-shifting ideas that will save all of our futures. Let’s not waste it
The link has been copied!
