Design for Planet - Sprints

The realities of the climate emergency often feel too distant or too large to address - we feel the urgency only in the abstract, at the edges of our working lives. We know the climate is changing and we know that the design of places, products and services is a big part of that change, but we also know that design is vital to how we adapt and change for the better.

Design and the effects of the climate emergency have long been on converging paths, but how those paths meet and what happens when they do is something we set out to explore through the design sprints at the Design for Planet festival 2022.

We started by asking: “What kind of world will we be designing for in the decades ahead, with what new constraints and opportunities? How could a design brief help us explore these, and who will need to be a part of the design teams that answer them?”

In our sprint sessions we brought designers, innovators, businesses, students, communities, and policymakers together to explore urgent challenges centred on the homes and neighbourhoods in which we live; the town centres where we work, shop, and come together; and the regions that define the UK.

We created a deck of cards with four suits – Risk / Focus / Context / Outcome – that when dealt to the teams, generated a random design brief made up of a real climate risk, a major sector to focus on, a familiar place in the UK to contextualise it, and a category of design to concentrate on as an outcome. We worked with Damon Hart-Davis who built the online brief generator that shuffled the deck and dealt the cards.

This randomness meant we could engage participants in a fresh way, but also let us emphasise that climate impacts will be unpredictable and non-linear – and that the design challenges we face as a result of them are complex and will require new coalitions of people and design disciplines to help us adapt to them.

Our cards took real climate risks from a Climate Change Committee report that shows the likeliest health, infrastructure, biodiversity, and social justice implications of the climate emergency. They pose design challenges across energy, food, transport, and community and are deliberately rooted in places that feel real – from dense innercity neighbourhoods to changing coastal communities, left behind towns and remote villages. They ask for outcomes at different scales – from policies to places, infrastructure, products, and services.

Throughout we were careful to pitch for preferable futures, as defined by the Futures Cone, in order to create North Stars of realistic but aspirational ways of living: a sandpit to explore climate action that was progressive but within the bounds of the feasible.

Randomly generated briefs, focused discussion, and rapid ideation led to our sprint teams zooming in on one idea to visualise and share back to the wider group. To do this we were supported by a group of brilliant illustrators from Northumbria University who distilled each of the discussions and ideas we had into impactful visuals. We’ve highlighted three of these that show system-sketches on food, energy and transport.

These Design for Planet sprints gave us the opportunity to bring designers, innovators, businesses, students, communities and policymakers together to show what climateoriented, systemic design solutions might look and feel like.

Coalitions of different stakeholders, as part of systems thinking and mission-led design show us a powerful new future of sustainable design practice. A new baseline of inclusive design that can connect us all – from the third and public sectors, via communities, to businesses and brands – as we all commit to tackling the climate emergency.

Hugo Jamson Programme Lead the Design Council

Hugo is Programme Lead at the Design Council working across Social and Business Innovation. He is an Industrial Designer and Anthropologist with over 15 years working at design studios and consultancies across Europe – connecting the conceptual, the strategic and the commercial.

He has explored this across industries from transport to consumer electronics, creating design experiences that blend people, place and product. He has worked on modular aircraft systems for Airbus; customer experience-led service and physical design for HS2; flexible and equitable autonomous vehicles for technology brands; and eCargo bikes for start-ups who are transforming supply chains, and our cities, towards a more human scale.

Transport

Green Landing

Shaping community around shared mobility.

A social space and mobility hub that lets us find and share the usual and more unusual modes of transport depending on when- we need them and what we need them for. Large, small, fast, slow, recreational or functional - From scooter to e-bike to cargo bike, and from EV to RV.

Green Landing is a place to share, store, repair and charge vehicles, rather than own them built around repurposed street space and shops. It is mobility as a service with a rich local community wrapped around it.

Drawing of people playing a game with council, gov and local die

Food

Village Green 2.0

A distributed village hall and re-imagined village green

A re-imagining of the village green and village hall that repurposes underused outdoor spaces and buildings as a new kind of sustainable, community owned, and managed village infrastructure based on food.

Village Green 2.0 is a blend of smallholding, community centre, market, composting facility, and refectory or restaurant that brings a community together to grow, cook, sell, and share food and sustainably manage the land around them.

Green drawing of a community space and people interacting

Energy

Neighbourhood Power

Community energy

Neighbourhood Power reflects the emerging concept of locally generated renewable energy that is harnessed, managed, and shared by the community.

In villages and urban communities alike solar PVs and wind turbines – on and around our homes – form part of a physical, digital, and social infrastructure that lets us reimagine our neighbourhoods as 21st century, community-driven power stations.

Drawing of a hand holding a post card from a beach resort