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22 Sep 2009

Greengaged...

Posted by: Ed Gillespie

Greengaged...

 

Yesterday was an exhausting but exhilarating day at Greengaged, the eco-conscience for the London Design Festival at which I was guest curator for the kick-off session: ‘Design for Life: Barriers to behaviour change’. We started the day bright-eyed and bushy-tailed with a breakfast panel addressing the sticky question: ‘Is it design’s job to save the world?’ (There are loads of great Flickr images of the day here)

Professor John Wood suggested we needed to change the language of sustainability if we were to achieve paradigm shift, using the creation of the word ‘genocide’ as an illustrative example of how the right terminology can create salience around an idea that people were denying…and then challenging us to think of a word for ‘killing species’ (‘Speciescide’ doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue!) to change attitudes to human-induced extinction events.

Alastair Fuad-Luke then responded with a kick-back to the question, asking ‘Whose world? Ours? The developing world? Our lifestyles? Just us?’ and suggested that we are all abdicating responsibility and we all have to be more accountable, designers and clients alike, to tackle the problems we face.

For Martin Hoenle it was all about material and resource efficiency, and seeking to exploit the considerable carbon, energy and material savings we can quickly and easily achieve through better design, a point reinforced by Sophie Thomas and her toothbrush, 80% of the impacts of which are actually defined at the design stage.

The only ‘non-designer’ on the panel, Roman Krznaric, outlined how an ‘empathy deficit’, the failure to empathise with other people geographically across space and on an inter-generational basis, through time, is at the heart of our failure to act. A point eloquently addressed in another Futerra blog about ‘The life you can save’.

The five points raised around LANGUAGE, HIERARCHY OF RESPONSIBILITY, RESOURCE EFFICIENCY, CONSEQUENCES OF BAD DESIGN and CONNECTIONS were then used to frame the other sessions of the day.

The morning session explored the ‘Nice to have’s’ of fashion and travel. Jamie Burdett from Worn Again shared the fact that their work had been as much about re-designing business as creating a new product and likened the challenge of their ‘upcycled’ range to trying to redesign a car whilst in it and speeding down the motorway…something I thought I’d quite like to see Jeremy Clarkson attempt to do! ‘It’s not about the polar bears!’ mused Jamie, but rather about ‘proto-typing new and arguably better ways of living’. Hear, hear!

Kerry from Junky Styling then talked about the importance of empathic connections with fashion products, rued the rebranding of ‘secondhand’ clothing as ‘vintage’ and the need for recycled fashion to be as stylish and desirable, if not more so, than the mainstream.

This point was also reinforced by Eliza and Sheena of the Uniform Project, our special guests from New York (we didn't fly 'em over specially I promise). They are seeking to change the perception of fashion, celebrate and encourage personal creativity, challenging the ‘Who are you wearing?’ attitude of fashionistas with an ‘I’m wearing me!’ response. It’s all about reclaiming ownership of fashion apparently and I likened their brilliant project to a Trojan Clothes Horse infiltrating the industry.

Fiona Bennie of Forum for the Future then talked about their work on ‘Fashion Futures’, looking at the embodied impacts, working conditions and ‘fashion miles’ of the global industry and the need for a systems design-led approach to change. She also mentioned their “Paradise Found’ and ‘Overland Heaven’ programmes looking at sustainable tourist destinations and ways of travelling – a notion backed up by green travel writer Richard Hammond who insisted green travel is ‘Not about tipis’ but ‘desirable alternatives'.

The discussion that followed these opinions was incredibly fruitful, finding the common ground of joy and pleasure that effectively designed interventions for sustainable fashion and travel must convey, the links between personal ownership be it over your own look or your own travel itinerary and the need to invert perceptions…’Why do we have ‘vegetables’ and then ‘organic vegetables' labelled in the supermarket?’ asked Eliza ‘When what you should have is ‘Vegetables’ and then ‘Vegetables sprayed with crap!’

We concluded on a need for ‘positive slowness’ finding time to reflect, travel and be creative, making do and mending, practising Feral Trade or Guerilla Travel and reinventing the notion of ‘luxury’ not as wilfully, excessively indulgent but as experiencing life at a more considered pace…like a long languorous candle-lit love session preceeded by a massage rather than a quick knee-trembler up against the wall round the back of a nightclub!

In the afternoon session we focused on the ‘Essentials – Food & Home’. Ben Knowles from Sustainweb outlining the complexity of design choices in regard to food sustainability, explaining that it wasn’t as simple as replacing diesel trucks with electric vehicles to lower emissions, but actually more important to re-engineer the whole food chain.

Duncan Law from Transition Town Brixton pushed the idea that we had to involve everybody in change, that change is inevitable and we must begin energy descent, reskilling and increased resilience now. Again, salience was important, helping people to ‘imagine a good outcome, a vision of a positive, attainable future’ where ‘the city will look a bit more like the country and the country a bit more like the city’. Duncan challenged us to remember that London is 12% farmland and 49% open space and that using a CPULs type of approach we might be able to meet up to 30% of our food needs within the city. He also provoked discussion around ‘appropriate solutions’ indicating that from an energy saving perspective that there’s little point in super-insulating a property if the embodied carbon of that insulation is many times the projected energy savings!! Complexity, as always a dilemma requiring considerable, detailed thought.

Toby Hammond of Better Generation and Greta Corke of DIY Kyoto then demonstrated their ‘gizmos’ the Power Predictor and the Wattson, showing how they can demystify energy generation and use, make energy tangible and empower people to take action.

Finally anthropologist Victor Buchli tasked us with the challenge of ‘people-making’…reinventing people for a different world, citing the experiences of Cuba and the former Soviet Union and emphasising the difficulties of reconciling individual needs, desires and aspirations with those of the community.

The ensuing debate about triggers for behaviour change was lively to say the least, examining the ‘tyranny of choice’, the need to get people talking (Duncan gave the Brixton Pound as a great example – ‘It’s not about a local currency…it’s about getting people talking about why you would ever have or need a local currency!’) and the role of design in making the connections we really need to change the world.

Perhaps as an indication of how much reskilling really needs to happen, one young student described his design innovation ‘From Scratch’, basically a box of food with cooking instructions….seemingly a somewhat overblown version of what older folk like me might describe as a ’shopping list and recipe’!! As the old quote goes ‘There is nothing more arrogantly amusing than a young man who has discovered an old idea and who thinks it is his own’.

We finished the evening with the first ever mixed gender Swish, boys and girls swopping to swap clothes (from the racks only I hasten to add) as fashion related deliberations continued around the Talkaoke Table and confessions were unloaded in the Earthly Sins Confessional Booth.

Huge cheers to everyone who came along and participated, audience and panellists alike, for helping to make it a constructively challenging and creative day.

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