🌱 What change is needed?
To achieve an environmentally and socially just world, over-consuming lifestyles, and the design that comes with it, needs to change. Design and innovation play a key role in this shift.
🌱 What is the potential for design?
Design has the potential of asking the difficult questions that are needed in order for us to create a just transition. Design and designers thereby hold a great power for creating a more environmentally and socially just future. In today’s world, an “activist” mindset is therefore perhaps also needed for designers.
🌱 Can designers champion change?
Designers and project managers can, and should, be the voices for change. Optimally, everyone involved in the design decisions throughout a project would become more aware of, and perhaps also be held more accountable for, the effects and even harms the choices they make may cause. Moreover, the environment and less privileged communities need a voice in the room. While they are currently underrepresented in the decision-making, they are over-represented in places where the most harm through these decisions is caused.
🌱 How can design create change?
Design has the potential to be used as a tool to shape consumer habits and desires. It is commonly thought that design is only created for a need that consumers already have. While this is a great approach in many cases, making life continuously easier and more effortless in the culture of over-consumption and the comfort of western lifestyles may not be justifiable anymore.
This post has been adapted from a newsletter written by Saskia Tykkyläinen and Christine Nikander for a collaboration between Palsa & Pulk and The E-Waste Column. The newsletter titled “What is the role of design in a just transition?” was originally published in both “The Just Transition Newsletter” and “The E-Waste Newsletter”.