Do we really need to learn about the climate crisis? We’re just designers, after all.
In the design industry, the climate crisis seems like a spectator sport. How can reimagining our arms-length relationship with it help push us toward action?
Although designers acknowledge the climate crisis more than ever, the industry is still rife with resistance and indifference. Action is seen more as a noble cause than a survival technique.
While it might feel like the climate crisis is just one more thing on an already insurmountable pile of methods and frameworks to learn, scuttling the livability of humanity’s only known inhabitable planet feels slightly more important than learning to code (or these days, learning to prompt).
Still, we don’t act. Why?
Loci of resistance
Within design
Although we’re shifting toward an ostensibly more collaborative working model, the design industry still rests on exceptionalism and individualism. The need to differentiate and demonstrate expertise is overwhelmingly strong across the industry, from individual designers to international agencies. Because of this, studios gravitate toward high-profile, high-budget work that, as a byproduct, often enhances, enriches, and enlivens destructive industries.
Designers might not necessarily agree with the goals these corporations have—or they might just think of design as an apolitical, instrumental activity—but, either way, they want to be involved because, in some way, our portfolios express who we are as individuals.
There’s precedent for this in politics, too: “Many conservatives don’t oppose climate science because they are ignorant,” says Per Espen Stoknes. “Rather, it is a way of expressing who they are. This obstacle becomes the innermost barrier to climate communications: The messages crash against the wall of the self.”
Communal work is at the center of addressing the climate crisis. Does our resistance to getting involved stem from the dying era of the hero designer, where design solutions are granted from above instead of developed by the community that will use them? Does this communal messaging crash against the designer’s wall of the self when it becomes apparent our work is no longer an expression of who I am but of who we are, creating social dissonance that prevents us from doing what we know is correct simply because we feel we won’t fit in?
The urge to fit in is a strong one. I’ve had a similarly dissonant sensation while building this newsletter (and yet-to-be-released sub-projects). I constantly debate what it means for me as a designer if I do less design. Questions loop in my mind: If one calls themself a designer but doesn’t constantly add projects to their portfolio, are they still a designer? Do they, at some point, become a fraud?
Ultimately, what lets me rest is that the social dissonance of not fitting the stereotypical mold of a designer is less anxiety-inducing than the cognitive dissonance of knowing there are more sustainable ways to design but continuing full steam ahead with unsustainable but well-established practices.
That’s not to say I’m not forced at times to do business-as-usual design work. This is another, more immediate reason for our resistance: our profession and the lifestyle it grants us often block out competing worldviews. If that project helps us put food on the table, we’re generally not going to bite the hand that feeds; we’ll see Nike for the story they sell to athletes rather than their sweatshops.
Without design
However, another factor, maybe as significant as any, is how climate news is communicated, which leaves us disconnected.
For all the coverage the crisis gets, you’d think there would be more direct involvement, but our view hovers at 10,000 feet. We understand species are dying and ice caps are melting, but what does that mean for our day-to-day lives, especially as designers? “Typography can change the world just kidding” has never felt truer.
The climate crisis feels impossibly large and hard to change, let alone understand, making us and design feel useless. The inherent distance and ambiguity in this framing make us disassociate. So, the climate crisis remains an issue perpetually ‘over there’ and not quite urgent enough for us to care (for now, at least, depending on where you are).
In contrast, while the hole in the ozone layer (remember that?) was a huge problem, it had a clear and understandable solution: stop using aerosols. With comparatively little legislation and social change on our part, the issue was solved. In that case, lucky for us, the answer was within the confines of consumerism. The intersectional facets of the climate crisis (the ‘polycrisis’) are more diffuse and boundless.
Denial and avoidance often feel like better choices when there’s negative messaging and no clear solution to a problem. It may be that because of the messaging we receive outside of design, we perpetuate resistance within design. What if we reframed our relationship to the climate crisis?
Finding a new frame
Could the actual barrier to action be the crisis’ destructive and diffuse framing, not simply designers’ preoccupation with their portfolio, market differentiation, or concern over what it means to be a designer? Are we losing because of our laser focus on loss?
What we stand to lose is helpful, but only short-term. Of course, we need to avoid disaster, but then what? If there’s no long-term strategy for managing the climate ‘underbrush,’ humanity’s job is limited to damage control; rather than caretakers, we’re emergency responders limited to putting out fires.
Ironically, destruction-focused climate messaging grabs our attention but deters us from action. It has the same disabling effect as doomscrolling. It doesn’t help that news about the climate crisis—the biggest ecological event in the history of humanity—is presented alongside the latest gossip or corporate quarterly returns call, essentially creating hyperinflation in those topics’ significance. This is the same normalization that happens when we see tweets of genocide alongside exceedingly cool Olympic sharpshooters, a US presidential candidate saying we won’t need to vote again if he’s elected, and ChatGPT counting to 50 ‘like a human.’
Negative, individualized messaging—e.g., “86% of people don’t recycle”—deters us from action because it reinforces inaction as the social norm. If most people don’t recycle, what damage will my not recycling do? However, positive, socially focused messaging reaches places never imagined with negative messaging.
For example, who likes hearing that we need to use less? Pretty much no one. However, if that reduction is tied to a social identity, the action becomes intuitive. You get up early every morning because you’re a runner, not because you want to run. You design with less because you’re minimalist, not because you want to save bandwidth or materials. The identity and feeling part of a bigger cause makes something appealing, not necessarily the action itself.
Crises present us with opportunities for gain, not just for loss; they give us chances to understand what we stand for and uncover new allegiances. This framing unlocks climate action and imagination: it’s not just the destruction we can avoid globally but the worlds we can create locally.
With the present crisis, designers’ social status could change substantially—although it would no doubt degrade if we pigeonhole climate actions into the paradigm of the Hero Designer.
As temperatures move further into uncharted territory, more people are forced to migrate, and younger generations gain more purchasing and political power, designing through a climate lens will signal premium quality, thoughtfulness, and an eye toward the future. I firmly believe that within 10-15 years, a thorough structural understanding of the climate crisis will be more valuable—financially and socially—than the efficiency and innovation focus of the last hundred years.
Reciprocal change
This framing, that focusing on what we stand to gain changes what we find important, is nothing new. Although it’s rarely applied to the climate crisis, it’s evident in the way the design industry has changed since the turn of the millennium.
Thirty-five years ago, accessibility was barely a thing. Twenty-five years ago, neither was a collaborative model of design. Today, by focusing on the upside, we see digital interfaces improve when more people can use them, and products and services improve when created with and by the people who use them. When we focus on what we stand to lose, these advancements are instead seen as getting in the way of a ‘unified vision.’
The dialogue of a collaborative model creates space to develop what we consider essential. Relationships are inevitably valued in that back-and-forth, in contrast to the Hero Designer model, which eschews the ‘we’ for the ‘I.’
Likewise, dialogue and relationships are critical in climate action since it is through community, not individual triumphs, that we’ll make progress; ‘de-individualizing’ climate communications, organization, and solutions allows us to rebuild social bonds, provide support, and gain systemic understanding.
Returning to the original question of climate resistance in design, it’s vital to bring sustainable mindsets to design, not just design to sustainable mindsets. Sustainability doesn’t benefit from being another club, separate from all the others to which we belong, another framework to add to a list of expertise, or something corporations do as a bare minimum to gain social capital.
It’s interlinked with nearly every topic and activity imaginable and has to be an integrated conversation in the same way design has become. If we integrated it more into who we are as designers, it wouldn’t be another framework to learn; it would be the whole point of design.