Designing for a Just Transition

🌱 What role do consumers play?

Consumers are often flooded with messaging that encourages them to avoid fast fashion and single-use plastic or to recycle more. Beyond individual choices, it is also important that companies and designers make good choices.

🌱 What role do companies play?

To build a just transition, companies must fundamentally reassess their business models. To be sustainable and future-proof, companies need “to strategically position themselves in step with both human and environmental needs”.[i] The process of publicly “sharing visions for new, evolved business models that push for lasting value over immediate convenience” can help to create space for “the sustainable, planet-centric economy of the future”.[ii]

🌱 What role does circularity play?

In recent years, the trend of circularity has picked up pace and increasingly more circular considerations and innovations are now being applied across sectors. While this is a good first step, going forward, we should collectively shift our perspective from human-centered design to planet-centered design.

🌱 What considerations are key in the design process?

In any design process that is planet-centered, the first and biggest consideration is whether the design is possible to make and whether it is sustainable from the planet's perspective. It is, notably, only secondary to consider the human-perspective – and the production-perspective becomes tertiary. While this might sound radical, if we are really serious about tackling the environmental and social challenges of our time soon, this is the mindset shift we and our businesses will need to make.

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 “How can designers step in to create a more sustainable future?” was originally published in both “The Just Transition Newsletter” and “The E-Waste Newsletter”.

[i] https://www.frog.co/designmind/envisioning-and-designing-a-planet-centric-future

[ii] https://www.frog.co/designmind/envisioning-and-designing-a-planet-centric-future