Our Design Research Society Sustainability Special Interest Group text was just published in Brand Magazine. This is what we wrote.
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Despite over 50 years of calls for action on ecological concerns, the design industry has not yet enacted a substantial response to the accelerating climate and ecological emergencies. Design institutions are slowly responding with attempts to bridge the gap between current design priorities and those that will enable the design of sustainable ways of living on the planet. How can designers facilitate responsive actions on a scale that could make a difference?
Sustainability discourses in design have grown and diversified. Originally preoccupied with the remediation of industry processes and practices to drive resource efficiencies (i.e., doing more with less), the field has broadened to recognise a much wider range of ways that design theory and practice can generate ecological value and social justice. This period of history has also witnessed alarming decreases in planetary health, evidenced through the overshoot of many ecological ‘planetary boundaries’ such as a warming climate, ocean acidification, high levels of biodiversity loss and extinctions. Alongside these physical impacts are a series of cultural ones found in the under-representation of voices from people with economic, health, security, and habitat poverties.
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The position and power of design education and design research for sustainability in creating both strategic and practical positive impact is fractured. The definition of ‘sustainability’ is a case in point. Shifting the language and activity of sustainability from responses favouring amelioration, ecoservice logics and resource efficiencies, to one instead revealed through critical ecological and social value, proves challenging.
Misappropriation of the terms ‘sustainability’ and ‘sustainable’ further complicate ways in which new knowledge and understanding can be adequately authenticated against pervasive green-washing, techno-fix reliance and oversimplifications of complex transition imperatives. We now face a critical, ecological turn. The crux of this shift for design research is the need to redefine this discipline space in transitionary times to create the ecological imagination of, and ways for design, as this century progresses.
The distinction between rigorous approaches to sustainable transitions and greenwashing discourses is a battleground in many design institutions. Outdated priorities, ideas and structures need to be challenged. The ways of thinking and doing that led to our current crises are not fit for purpose. Yet ecologically engaged perspectives are still poorly understood by many.
Perhaps I am biased because I did my PhD at this university, but last month’s Relating Systems Thinking and Design (RSD11) “Possibilities and Practices of Systemic Design” at the University of Brighton felt to me like the most ecologically engaged design conferences I have yet to attend. The RSD11 community are working in a wide variety of ideas and practices for systemic design. Often this work includes a focus on justice-oriented design for sustainable transitions. RSD11 included an impressive stream on confronting legacies of oppression. The systemic design research community (now formally established as the Systemic Design Association) has developed theories and practices over the last decade that are now being advocated by the UK Design Council as a design approach for Net Zero. There was so much good content I made some time to capture and share just a few moments, ideas, and reflections on key themes that I consider to be particularly relevant to current debates in design theory and education.
I will start with the Tony Fry, one of strongest voices on designing viable futures in an era of planetary crises. Fry emphasises that we must be careful about the definition of “sustainability” to build capacity to move beyond “sustaining the unsustainable” – which sadly characterises the defuturing work in much of the design industry today. Moving beyond defuturing practice will be done by “redesigning design” and depends on an expansive design practice and “informed futuring” based on critically and ecologically engaged design education.
This design education theme emerged in Fry’s keynote in response to a question by System Design Association’s board chair Silvia Barbero. The popularity of this theme is evidenced in Dan Lockton’s popular tweet (below) – and as a topic of conversation in the final panel and plenary. Judging by nearly two hundred people on Twitter alone are concerned about the capacity of design education to deliver the types of knowledge needed to meet design challenges of the futures. We discussed the narrow and instrumental focus of attention in some design schools and how this impacts our attempts to advance responsible design, design for sustainability, social design, decolonising design, etc.
On the topic of sustainability, systemic design has recently been recognised as a means of addressing climate change by the UK Design Council in the Beyond Net Zero: A Systemic Design Approach report. Numerous sessions presented strategies for redirecting designed worlds for dramatically reduced GHG emissions (including my own mini-workshop).
Design’s role in reproducing or even creating new discriminating structures and systems – or, alternatively, creating liberatory ones, was developed in the many sessions in the “Confronting Legacies of Oppression in Systemic Design” stream. Social justice oriented ideas have made impressive progress over the last five years in design theory and this was very much evident in these sessions. There was also time to consider some of the challenges this community faces now that our ideas are gaining some legitimacy in institutional spaces.
Josina Vink facilitated an intense fishbowl where tensions were discussed. One particularly troublesome issue that arose in this space and a problem that exists as real threat to both the justice-oriented design community and the sustainable design community, is the issue of appropriation.
Appropriation occurs where ideas generated in the margins of dominant discourses (often by marginalised groups) are extracted from the communities that have nurtured these ideas and practices, decontextualised, rinsed of their transformative potential, and used in ways that destroy the value of the idea or practice. Some examples of appropriation could be:
Where people who are not engaged in a field (or in a particular social or environmental struggle) assume they can re-define key terms – and typically do this in ways that undermine the concept and its potential to enable social change.
When an important sustainability or social justice concept is used in ways that undermines and/or neutralises it.
When environmental ideas / social justice concepts are used in inappropriate ways to greenwash or whitewash unsustainable or oppressive, discriminatory, and unethical practices.
When academics use the ideas and work of activist-scholars without citation.
Where progressive ideas are used as statements of intent or vision statements with no attempt to put the ideas into practice.
The list above is a partial list of the various ways that the appropriation of the language of justice and sustainability devalues the work of scholars and activists who leading these movements. This list describes just a few ways appropriation can happen in academic spaces. Appropriation not only delays (or wrecks) progressive movements – but it also harms individuals working (often on the margins) for social change. Appropriation was a dominant theme in the fishbowl as those who have been involved with building capacity for social change in design witness the appropriation of their work.
Also speaking to the theme of justice was Lesley-Ann Noel who described the work of moving beyond good intentions: “learning how to see oppression so we don’t reproduce it.” Noel highlighted Arturo Escobar’s version of the pluriverse in design theory and asked: “could design be guided by different design principles?” Noel presented her “positionality wheel” as a tool to prompt reflection and better understand power, agency, and relationality.
Another highlight was Mathilda Tham’s keynote, with her Earth Logic proposal, and metadesign practice. There were many helpful reflections here. The idea about the importance of self definition (see below) for feminist designers struck me as particularly helpful, and echos Noel’s ideas on positionality – especially for designers who are advocating on behalf of traditionally marginalised groups.
Danah Abdula described the contradictions of sustainability in graphic design. This keynote illustrated the various ways graphic design is so complicit with greenwashing – but also, potentially, able to help re-imagine and remake the material world. Abdula’s presentation illustrated the politics in communication design and how agency is diminished with uncritical approaches to communication design. The article Against Performative Positivity captures these themes in more detail.
Peter Stoyko presented his new Pattern Atlas that I highly recommend checking out for those interested in systems and/or illustration. There are lots of creative commons resources here that can be freely used in systems mapping and other work.
Also see Chantal Spencer’s paper on participatory research with insights on inclusive practices.
Finally, System Design Association’s Board Chair Silvia Barbero discussed the role of designers and systemic design in planetary health using the Planetary Health Framework. She played the “Nature Is Speaking” video below. I am sharing here as a good example of story telling on the environment.
For RSD11 colleagues, please forgive me but I can only capture a few moments of so much good content. This blog is very partial. I have not even made time to describe my own mini-workshops on net zero or a second one on design education. These were good too! I want to thank the whole team at the University of Brighton for hosting such a great event. Also thanks to everyone involved with building the Systemic Design Association from scratch over the last 11 years. I have learned to much from this community since I attended RSD1 is Olso – and this was probably the best conference yet. Papers and posters are on the SDA website.
What could be more important than sustaining habitable living conditions on Earth? Climate change, biodiversity loss and other environmental problems demand changes on an order of magnitude well beyond the trajectory of business-as-usual. And yet, despite accumulative social and technological innovation, environmental problems are accelerating far more quickly than sustainable solutions.
The design industry is one of many industries mobilising to address environmental imperatives. While sustainability-oriented designers are working towards change from many angles, addressing climate change and other environmental problems on this scale demands much more dramatic transformations in economic ideas, structures and systems that enable – or disable – sustainable design.
Put simply, designers cannot design sustainable future ways of living on scale without a shift in economic priorities. Human impacts on planetary processes in the Anthropocene require new types of ecologically engaged design and economics if the necessary technological, social and political transitions are to take place.
World making design
Design is crucial to this debate because it is key to the creation of future ways of living. Designers make new ideas, products, services and spaces desirable to future users. With the shape of a font, a brand, the styling of a product, the look and feel of a service, the touch of a garment, the sensation of being in a particular building, designers serve the interests of customers (generally, those with disposal income). They do so according the logic and modes of governance generated by what is valued by economic structures. Design is the practice that makes capitalism so appealing. Continue reading →
Enabling Difficult Confrontations for Intergeneration Solidarity and Survival
Presentation at the “Critical Pedagogies in the Neoliberal University: Expanding the Feminist Theme in the 21st century Art [and Design] School” session, #AAH2019 –Brighton, April 2019
I will use this paper to reflect on tensions between generations of feminists with a focus on strategies of denial and their toll on the goals of feminist movements. Feminists movements have historically worked (with varying degrees of success) to end the normalisation of denial of social injustices and symbolic, structural and/or actual violence. Feminist pedagogy must intensify challenges to various manifestations of denial responsible for reproducing patriarchy, oppressive social relations and ecocide.
This paper will address denial in the face of divisive issues such as the ‘me too’ movement; the precarity faced by younger generations; and the intersections of patriarchy and ecological crises. It is based on my personal experience as a daughter of a feminist academic in Canada, as a student at art school and my current role as lecturer in design education oriented towards social and environmental justice. Solidarity and even survival depends on our ability to make confrontations with disturbing information a catalyst for change. The lessons learned from feminist struggles inform the work of confronting oppressions, including those on issues of environment justice.
My experiences have led me to the conclusion that many, if not most, oppressive behaviours and attitudes are rooted in various types of denial and unconscious bias. Both are deep seated forces that prevent many of us (and especially those with more privilege) from seeing things that disturb our self-image. Feminist strategies such as transformative learning help us negotiate these difficult confrontations. These are needed now more than ever in higher education and beyond. Unfortunately, neoliberal modes of governance all but destroy opportunities for transformative learning.
Design embeds ideas in communication and artefacts in subtle and psychologically powerful ways. Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu coined the term symbolic violence to describe how powerful ideologies, priorities, values and even sensibilities are constructed and reproduced through cultural institutions, processes and practices. Through symbolic violence, individuals learn to consider unjust conditions as natural and even come to value customs and ideas that are oppressive. Symbolic violence normalises structural violence and enables real violence to take place, often preceding it and later justifying it. Feminist, class, race and indigenous scholars and activists describe how oppressions (how patriarchy, racism, colonialism, etc.) exist within institutions and structures, and also within cultural practices that embed ideologies into everyday life.
The theory of symbolic violence sheds light on how design can function to naturalise oppressions, and then obfuscate power relations around this process. Through symbolic violence, design can function as an enabler for the exploitation of certain groups of people and the environment they depend on to live. Design functions as symbolic violence when it is involved with the creation and reproduction of ideas and practices that result in structural and other types of violence. Breaking symbolic violence involves discovering how these processes work and building capacities to challenge and transform dysfunctional ideologies, structures and institutions.
Organizing questions
1. How do designers participate in symbolic violence?
2. How can designers reveal and undo symbolic violence?
Design can be understood as a practice that evolves as new cognitive and perceptual capacities enable a greater understanding of complexity, context and system dynamics. These emergent capacities create greater potential for social and technological innovation. This paper will argue that despite emergent skills, designers are not able to effectively address contemporary problems in a sustainable manner due to the systemic priorities of the design industry. This paper theorises ‘design’ as the professional practice of creating new products, buildings, services and communication as a broader practice than the work that is produced within the ‘design industry’. The design industry operates according to highly reductive feedback generated by capitalism that systemically ignores signals from the ecological and social systems. The exclusive focus on profit results in distortions of knowledge and reason undermining prospects for the design of long-term prosperity within the context of the current political/economic regime.
On Sunday night University of Colorado’s Inside the Greenhouse group hosted an ‘Climate Wise Women’ event. Constance Okollet and Ngozi Onuzo (from Uganda and Nigeria) talked about the impact of climate change in their lives. Constance Okollet described a flood that washed most of her village away, a drought that followed and the ongoing difficulties with Continue reading →
ABSTRACT: The United Nations’ green economy programme radically re-imagines the commons as a space where ecosystems services will be quantified, marketised and traded. This paper will examine issues with this version of the green economy for environmental communicators. It will review the etymology of the concept, examine contested ideas on what a green economy would entail and situate these proposals in relation to different economic approaches to the environment. It will suggest strategies for communicating the contested nature of the proposals and exposing obfuscations. This paper will argue that in stark opposition to green economics with its focus on participation and democratic processes, the UN’s GEP will close deliberations on the commons by privatizing ‘ecosystem services’ – thereby taking environmental decision-making out of a political sphere and into the marketplace.
Re-Imaging the Commons as ‘The Green Economy’
The United Nations Environment Programme’s (UNEP) (2011) flagship document titled “Towards a green economy: Pathways to sustainable development and poverty eradication” and accompanying UNEP reports at the Rio+20 in June 2012 launched the green economy project. The reports use strong environmental language as a means of presenting their version of green economy as a far-reaching programme of reform to address environmental problems on a global scale. While the rhetoric suggests that the UN is serious about addressing the biodiversity crisis, green economists and a wide variety of social movements are less convinced by the proposed policy mechanisms. Civil society responded at Rio+20 with a plethora of critical responses: condemning what they claimed amounted to the corporate capture of the United Nations (Joint Civil Society Statement, 2012); condemning the UN’s “Natural Capital Declaration” (Banktrack, 2012); condemning 20 years of Greenwash (Bruno, 2012); and indeed, condemning the entire green economy project (Nadal, 2012; Brand, 2012a; Patel & Crook, 2012). The Indigenous People’s Global Conference on Rio+20 and Mother Earth (2012) issued a strongly worded “Kari-Oca 2 Declaration” (2012) describing the UNEP’s green economy as “a continuation of colonialism” (p. 1) firmly rejecting market-based solutions, REDD, and intellectual property rights over genetic resources and traditional knowledge. In the wake of the polarized positions at Rio+20, the conference ended with both civil society and the United Nations unimpressed with the outcomes. The New York Times claimed Rio+20 “ended here as it began, under a shroud of withering criticism” (Romero & Broder, 2012); The Guardian’s headline read: “Rio+20 outcome a focal point for frustration among campaigners” (Ford, 2012); and London’s Financial Times announced “Rio+20 lacks ambition, says UN chief” (Clark, 2012). The conference failed to achieve binding targets, but more significantly the conference launched the UNEP’s green economy programme, which aims to redesign the processes through which the global commons will be managed. Clearly the green economy is a fiercely contested idea and the UNEP’s version is strongly opposed by a wide variety social movements concerned with both ecological conservation and environmental justice.
In naming its programme the green economy, the UNEP implies a reframing of the entire economy along green lines. The language even suggests a connection to a particular school of economic thought concerned with the environment, that of green economics. However, the programme itself is largely concerned with attempting to protect the environment by establishing policies that will quantify and trade “ecosystem services”. This will be done in ways that reflect specific policy prescriptions of different schools of economic thinking on the environment, namely environmental economics and ecological economics. Since green economics is a field with radically different policy prescriptions to what is proposed, the naming of the new project creates severe confusion with contested definitions of the “green economy”. In this paper, the UNEP’s green economy programme will be referred to as “UN’s GEP” to avoid confusion with what green economists have been describing as “green economics” for over a decade.
I travelled to the DRS//CUMULUS Oslo 2013 – 2nd International Conference for Design Education Researchers with some trepidation. While I have high expectations of the content produced by the Design Research Society (DRS) and was already intrigued by some of the papers and keynotes, my concerns emerged from what I am witnessing in design education in the UK. I was travelling to Oslo supported by a crowd funding campaign rather than the institution where I had been working when I wrote my paper. As an advocate of sustainability literacy and an early career researcher witnessing (and feeling) the impact of the austerity agenda in higher education in the UK, I wondered if the conference would rise to the challenge of confronting the most serious issues in design education.
Designing the City considers how innovative design and architecture can tackle the need for more sustainable and ecologically efficient cities. Our speakers Jody Boehnert from Eco-Labs and Michael Pawlyn from Exploration Architecture, will discuss their different approaches to embedding ecological principals into education and using nature’s models within architecture through bio-mimicry. Chair: Gavin Elliott Chair of BDP Manchester
Recently I did an interview with Blue & Green Tomorrow and talked about how the notion of free markets misrepresent our political and economic system. Here I am republishing part of this interview here (with their questions in blue text):
Yesterday, we published the first part of an interview with EcoLabs founder Joanna Boehnert. In response to a Blue & Green Tomorrow article about free markets (Free markets need to be free), Boehnert said on Twitter that it “[failed] entirely to deal with the problem that free markets systemically devalue the ecological wellbeing“. We asked her if she thinks the free market is therefore unsalvageable, and this was her response.
I am not against all markets absolutely. What I am absolutely against is misinformation, so it is important to note here that there is actually no such thing as a free market. Every market in the world has ways of working that was designed into the market, i.e. parameters that are predetermined. So-called free markets suit the interests of those who have the political power to design the terms of the market. What we have is a political and economic system that is neoliberal and capitalist. The idea of free markets is an obfuscation. Continue reading →
When Mckenzie Wark appeared on Novara, Resonance FM on May 28th 2013 he argued that a critical theory that does not confront environmental problems as one of its central problems was not worth discussing (I am paraphrasing – what he actually said was is more complicated and is transcribed below). Oddly, in this interview Wark managed to simultaneously acknowledge the validity of the environmental crisis as a theoretical problem – while also denying its implications in practice. For me this was a significant moment for Novara since it was certainly the best attempt they have yet made (that I am aware of) to engage with the ecological problem. Unfortunately, while Wark has many good ideas, his convoluted take on ecological theory is a classic example of extravagant lengths intellectuals (and especially the environmentally disengaged radical left) devise to continue to dismiss the most fundamental challenges posed by the ecological crisis and this culture’s legacy of ignoring ecological relations and perspectives. I will quote the most problematic parts of what Mckenzie Wark had to say starting with the following:
I would not call it an ecological crisis because that would presume that there ever was an ecology… and there sort of isn’t. It’s… what we know of the natural world includes its instability…and our species being is one that has acquired the capacity to kind of rupture environments on a kind of global scale. So I would be a little hesitant to use the word ‘ecological’….
Yes, it is true that what we know of ecology includes some instability – but far more important is the fact that there is relative stability within planetary boundary conditions. In a similar way to how our bodies can only function within a relatively narrow range of temperatures (maintained by homeostatic mechanisms), the earth will only be habitable for humans within planetary boundaries (including factors beyond climate change such as the nitrogen cycle and biodiversity loss). Once ecological Continue reading →
The paper ‘Ecological Literacy in Design Education: A Foundation for Sustainable Design’ has been accepted for the Design Research Society //CUMULUS 2013 2nd International Conference for Design Education Researchers in May 2013. This paper is available for here for free but it will only be published and presented at the conference proceedings if I am able to find sponsors. THANK YOU to everyone who helped raise the money for this presentation! The crowdfunding campaign worked and I will present this paper in Oslo next month.
Ecological Literacy in Design Education: A Foundation for Sustainable Design
Abstract: Responsible design in an era of scarcity and risk associated with environmental problems must be ecologically informed. Ecological literacy is necessary in order to both understand the nature of environmental problems and to respond effectively by designing sustainable ways of living. Embedding ecological literacy into design education is happening at the most progressive institutions – and yet for many others, sustainability education is still virtually absent from the curriculum. Progress is slow despite the fact that natural scientists warn that risks will escalate if we do not take dramatic action. Ecological literacy is a severe challenge as it disrupts educational cultures and challenges basic assumptions about what constitutes good design. While sustainability can seem profoundly difficult, ecological learning is the basis for sustainable design and thus it is a basic imperative in design education. Design education needs to expand its scope of inquiry to include a range of disciplines in order to address complex environmental problems. This paper will present an introduction to ecological literacy for design education, describe six ecological principles including associated concepts in systems design, and explain why critical thinking is necessary to make the work of transforming structurally unsustainable systems possible.
The slideshow of the presentation can be accessed here.
BIG THANKS to everyone who made it happen by supporting the crowdfunding compaign. On Twitter you are: @Ian_Willey @blindspotting @hugh_knowles @karinjaschke @sDesignLabs @paul_chandlerUK @sorafferty and @jenboehnert. Some of you are not on Twitter (as far as I can tell) and you are Richard Owen Frost, Prof. Gregory Stock, Jonathan Crinion, Joel Davis, Ali Hodgson, Chris Kitchen and a few Anonymous contributors.
In the UK social institutions maintain their legitimacy with claims that they are responding the environmental crisis with initiatives capable of transforming our economy into something that could exist in perpetuity. The single most important factor in the continued failure of the vast majority of initiatives is the dismal lack of ecological awareness demonstrated by those who put these projects into practice. A technologically advanced civilization that is not ecologically informed simply has no long-term prospects; it will not even understand the ways in which it is destroying itself. Businesses are keen to project the image that they are working towards a circular economy and dramatically lowering both pollution and quantitaties of natural resources needed in the industrial cycle. Are these flashy claims an honest representation of progress, or simply a new front for business as usual?
Re-thinking Progress: The Circular Economy by made2bemadeagain – The Ellen MacArthur Foundation
Presentation at the “Critical Pedagogies in the Neoliberal University: Expanding the Feminist Theme in the 21st century Art [and Design] School” session, #AAH2019 –Brighton, April 2019
EcoLabs 