Sustainable Design Education
By Jo Barnard, director of industrial design and innovation agency Morrama and associate lecturer at the Royal College of Art.
"In September 2022 a small group of designers and I set up a campaign called Design Declares. Our goal is to urge the design industry to come together, declare a climate and ecological emergency and take meaningful action to reimagine, rebuild and heal our world."
I can still remember my design education, I graduated from university in 2014, and I look back on it with frustration. At school I had two amazing product design teachers and it’s a testament to them that 100% of our A Level class went on to continue the subject in some form at university. At some point along the way, however, I feel there was an important piece of education that was missed out. I’ve ended up in a position where I am fuelling an industry reliant on production and consumption and, whilst the concept of user-centred design was drilled into me from GCSE age, I was never given the tools to make the right decisions for our planet.
I’m currently reading Victor Papanek’s book Design for the Real World. The opening line; “there are professions more harmful than industrial design, but only a few” summarises it up well. We have a responsibility as designers that we find very easy to ignore, for the most part, because we don’t know how to act on it.
How does one consider the environmental impact of each component of a product? How can we justify adding cost to products by switching from a low-cost polymer to a plant-based alternative? Is this even the right choice if it means the product isn’t as long-lasting? There are so many questions, each choice having a knock-on effect, and knowing where to start is the biggest barrier of all.
In September this year a small group of designers and I set up a campaign called Design Declares. Our goal is to urge the design industry to come together, declare a climate and ecological emergency and take meaningful action to reimagine, rebuild and heal our world. We have written 8 Acts of emergency that lay out meaningful steps that designers can take to better understand how they can make a difference through their practice.
Whilst the campaign is aimed at those in the profession, we are also keen for design departments in education institutions to make the commitment. If I were to summarise what that means for you, it’s that you commit to including the planet (alongside the user) in your education and design briefs to students. Let me give you an example, using some of the 8 Acts as waypoints.
Brief: To design a lamp (every design student gets asked this) with consideration for both the user experience and the impact on the planet.
Act 1 Sound the Alarm
Acknowledge that by creating a product you are taking materials from the planet, producing emissions that may harm the environment and requiring energy in use that might be reliant on fossil fuels. You will do what you can to reduce this impact as much as possible and make a meaningful product that serves a real purpose in the world.
This sounds super obvious, but it’s critical. Only now, 10 years after starting higher education, is this the first thing I think about when I start a project.
Act 2 Start the Journey
This is the education piece; the part that I felt was missing from my education. A decade on from University, I can see why my tutors failed. Sustainable and regenerative design is complex, it relies on a systemic design thinking approach and an acknowledgement that every decision has an impact on the planet in some way. Learning how to make the right decisions would take time even if the answers were black and white, which they are not. However, instilling, in young designers, a desire to seek out information, to further their understanding and to be agile enough to act on new data as it comes to light, is vital.
What materials could your lamp be made from? What makes one material better than another in terms of the climate and ecological impact?
What processes will you use to make your lamp? How could the energy or chemical use be reduced?
What energy or resources are required to use and maintain the lamp during its life?
What happens to the lamp at the end of life? How can its life be extended? How can materials be recaptured?
This Sustainable Design Handbook is a useful resource for sustainable design methodologies.
Act 3 Measure what you make
Getting accurate quantitative climate impact data for a product is incredibly difficult. The go-to method is a life cycle analysis, however these usually rely on complex software and much of the input information is only known once a product is being manufactured. By then it’s too late to do much about it.
The other option is qualitative measurement. We have a simple wheel chart that we use at Morrama to enable us to think about each lifecycle stage of a product and identify where the biggest impact is. It does not give us accurate figures, but it’s a starting point that helps us focus our efforts where we can make the greatest difference.
Act 4 Educate Accelerate
Encourage students to share their learnings on the relationship between design and environment with each other and express the importance of continuing this willingness to collaborate later in life. It’s all too easy when we get into the profession to see other designers, studios, or teams as rivals. But when it comes to protecting our planet, we need to work together.
