When thinking about the impact that design has on the green transition, there is a tendency to focus on the highly tangible stuff of the material economy, whether it’s reducing plastic, improving recyclability or designing electric vehicles. And it is true that designers and design researchers are deeply preoccupied with how to decarbonise and depollute our everyday lives. But if we understand those issues as merely symptoms of more structural problems to do with convenience culture, consumerism and other economic modes, then we might ask ourselves where the greatest impact lies: in making those behaviours slightly less polluting, or in shifting society away from them altogether?
At Future Observatory, the national design research programme for the green transition, we increasingly think about impact in terms of three different levels: symptoms, systems and stories. In essence, the innovation required to cut carbon at the symptoms level must happen alongside a more systemic rethinking of business-as-usual models towards other frameworks that encourage a more balanced co-existence with the ecosystems upon which we depend.
The impact of Future Observatory
Through Future Observatory, the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) is investing £25 million into a partnership with the Design Museum that is funding design research across the UK that can help cut carbon emissions, reduce waste and regenerate landscapes. In its current funding period it will fund more than 100 projects, supporting a whole generation of design researchers. And the goal is impact. Across the portfolio, all of our research projects are in partnership with industry, local authorities or third sector organisations that focus the outcomes on real-world impact.
When it comes to those three levels of impact, it goes without saying that decarbonising the material economy is the most tangible. It affects the stuff of everyday life – the embodied energy of things – in ways most people might not even be aware of. The plastics industry, for example, produces four times more carbon emissions than air travel, the equivalent of six hundred coal mines. That’s aside from the chronic pollution issues linked to single-use plastics. And the NHS is the world’s biggest consumer of single-use plastics. That’s why one of Future Observatory’s flagship Green Transition Ecosystem (GTE) grants was awarded to the universities of Strathclyde and Dundee, which are investigating ways of greening the NHS in Scotland, including the reduction and recycling of plastic personal protective equipment.
Another GTE, based at the universities of Bath and Cardiff, is exploring how to scale up the retrofitting of interwar homes. Given that the built environment accounts for 38% of carbon emissions, mostly through the energy requirements of buildings, and given that the UK has the oldest and most poorly insulated homes in Europe, mass retrofit is a major priority for architecture and the construction industry.
These are only two issues in a portfolio that covers the spectrum of design, from fashion and products to architecture and digital services. Future Observatory and AHRC have already funded 42 early career researchers through our Design Exchange Partnerships programme, with themes ranging from net zero to coastal communities and biodiversity. These projects are producing new materials such as low-carbon bricks and sustainable textiles made of potato plant stems, but they are also looking at issues that are matters of serious public concern, such as sewage dumping in coastal waters, which could be addressed with wetland landscapes rather than brute pipes disgorging where people want to swim.
Driving systemic change
But in their bid to decarbonise everything, designers cannot simply offer up greener products or materials and expect the market to suddenly adopt them. This is why the next level of impact has to be systemic change. A recent Future Observatory report on low-carbon housing identified that shifting the construction industry away from carbon-heavy materials such as concrete, steel and brick to the much greener timber, stone and biomaterials is being held back by a range of issues, from supply chains and skills to regulations and insurance.
Some of those issues could be eased at the policy level. But rather than writing yet more policy reports, the most persuasive thing architects can do is to produce system demonstrators. These are the built artefacts that test alternative systems and convince housebuilders that greener buildings are possible, and potentially at no or only marginal extra cost. Future Observatory is hoping to support just such a system demonstrator in Manchester later this year.
Design also has a role in opening up space for imagination when it comes to reshaping the UK’s economy for a just and green transition. That transition is a whole-economy transformation. It is not something that can be left to the market or induced with appeals to behaviour change. It requires systemic change, investment and collaboration across sectors. Design can certainly support that kind of strategic thinking because its power lies in synthesis, the ability to bring diverse expertise together in the development and prototyping of new models. Future Observatory is developing a strategic design roadmap as a tool to help think through the challenges currently facing the UK, from homes and infrastructure, to care, food and land use.
Stories: opening up space for imagination
This brings us to the final and most elusive level of impact: stories. It can sometimes feel as though we have given up on any bold ideas about how we might want to live in the future. All we hear is artificial intelligence, ‘AI’. At the same time, ‘sustainable’ design feels trapped in a narrow framework defined by concepts such as ‘net zero’. It is in shaving mode: shaving off some carbon here, some plastic there and some waste over there. This is all crucial work, but if we struggle to achieve net zero, it is partly because carbon counting feels like accountancy, not a compelling vision of the future.
We recently launched Future Observatory Journal not just to publish new design research but as a way of pushing at the edges of design discourse to make space for new frameworks and new narratives. The first issue is dedicated to bioregioning, which redraws the boundaries of climate action by focusing on the needs and potentials of local landscapes and local knowledge. The revival of bioregioning as an idea, or as an alternative narrative, is born from the sense that as communities, we cannot save the world; we can only save places – or, rather, we can only save the world by saving places.
And that is only one aspect of a grander narrative. Design in the 21st century will have to shift from being a human-centric discipline to one that works with and for landscapes, ecosystems and other species. This shift requires us to reconceive humanity not as separate from nature but entangled with it. This is why we have launched a funding opportunity for research projects in more-than-human design, as an invitation to begin a new chapter.
As the design theorist Arturo Escobar writes in the first issue of the journal, the climate crisis is not just a carbon crisis but a crisis of storytelling, and we need to transition from one story of the world to another.
Top image: Researchers visiting Future Observatory Display at the Design Museum in November 2023. Credit: Matthew Kaltenborn
Justin McGuirk is Programme Director of the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) funded Future Observatory.